Page 127 of Before You Fell

“Yes, I’m aware,” I say, pushing to my feet. “And mine has a lip ring.”

Goldie huffs out a laugh.

I tuck the notebook to my chest and take one step toward the door.

“Willow,” Goldie says.

I turn my head and peer over my shoulder at her.

“Don’t give him the easy version of yourself just because you miss him.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Phoenix

The hotel room is too quiet for a man who gets paid obscene amounts of money to make noise.

It’s late afternoon in a city I know only by the view from the window, the minibar’s quality, and the women camped outside the hotel, hoping to catch my eye with lipstick, tight dresses, and terrible fucking judgment.

There is no show tonight which should feel like a break. But it doesn’t.

Instead, it seems like someone locked me in a room with my own thoughts.

The guys are heading out later to an exclusive club Damon keeps calling “good optics,” because apparently being photographed beside billionaires and champagne bottles bigger than toddlers is part of being a rockstar now.

I’m not fucking going. They can enjoy the overpriced fuck parade without me.

Jax has texted me twice already trying to convince me.

Jax: You coming?

Jax: Don’t be a boring prick.

Damon tried one last time.

Damon: Label expects you to maintain a visible presence across select social environments.

Visible presence. Corporate has a beautiful way of making everything sound respectable. These people could call a cocaine binge a team-building exercise if they found a sponsor willing to fund it.

A month ago, I’d already be dressed. Half-cut before we even left the hotel.

By midnight, I’d probably have someone on my lap and another woman wondering if she was next.

Now, after nearly losing the one person who has ever truly mattered to me, every invitation is like someone asking me to step back into my old life.

And after watching Willow lying in that hospital bed, I think that life no longer fits me.

Instead, I’m sitting on the floor of my hotel suite, my back against the couch, my guitar across my lap. A bottle of whiskey sits on the coffee table in front of me, and beside it, a blunt burns down in the ashtray.

I pluck at the strings without playing anything real. Half a melody. A chord progression that goes nowhere. Two notes that almost become something before I kill them by overthinking. Even though I’ve played this guitar for so long that my fingers know it intimately, the music still doesn’t sound right. It has my sound, Willow’s absence, and no fucking spine.

I still have not heard from her.

Graham gave me another update two days ago after I called him again and tried not to sound like a man begging for scraps from the father of the girl he nearly broke.

He told me that she was doing well.

Doing well.