Page 129 of Before You Fell

It still rings.

Persistent little fucker.

I consider answering just to tell whoever it is to choke on their own necktie. I consider throwing the phone against the wall.

Instead, I snatch it off the table, swipe my thumb across the screen, and put it to my ear.

“What the fuck do you want?”

Silence.

My grip tightens around the phone.

Come on, asshole. Say whatever corporate little threat crawled up your throat so I can shove it back down there and get back to ruining my liver in peace.

Then Willow’s voice comes through. “Phoenix.”

Everything in me stops. Her voice hits me square in the chest, and my eyes close on instinct, as if shutting out the room could help me keep her voice inside.

Willow. My Willow. Not mine. I know that. I’m fucking aware of it. But the thought still comes anyway, stubborn as every other part of me that never learned when to let her go.

“Wills.”

My voice comes out rough, scraped down to something ugly. I clear my throat because apparently hearing her say my name has turned me into a man who cannot even operate his own fucking mouth.

“Fuck. I didn’t know it was you.”

“I gathered that.”

I lean forward and set the guitar aside carefully because my hands don’t feel steady enough to hold anything with strings and history right now.

“How are you?”

“I’m okay,” she says. “Not amazing. Not magically healed.” A pause. “But, I think I’m getting there.”

I press the heel of my hand against my eye, trying to hold myself together with one palm and a bad attitude. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

I want to ask her everything. If she’s been sleeping, eating, if she still wakes up scared. Does she think about me? If she still writes my name in the parts of herself she doesn’t say out loud.

“It’s hard,” she says after a moment. “Some days, I hate it. Some days, I hate that it helps.” Another pause. “How’s the tour?”

I glance around the suite. Whiskey. Blunt. Guitar. And too much money and not enough fucking air.

“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s not the same without you.”

“Are the shows going well?”

“The crowds are loud. Cruz is still trying to fuck his way through every city. Jax keeps pretending he isn’t doing the same thing. Jett is one bad night away from killing us all in our sleep.”

A soft laugh comes through the phone and the sound lands somewhere under my ribs. I would ask for another one if it wouldn’t embarrass me right now.

Her silence shifts.

I drag my thumb along the edge of the phone. “I keep looking over at the side of the stage, expecting you to be there looking pissed because I changed a line you already fixed.”

“I was usually pissed.”