Page 179 of Before You Fell

Phoenix

Willow writes with one foot tucked under her, my T-shirt hanging off one shoulder, and with her hair falling forward every time she bends over the notebook on the coffee table.

I’m supposed to be playing the guitar.

Well… Technically, I am playing. The guitar rests in my lap, my fingers strumming the same four chords because my hands know what to do even when the rest of me has lost the fucking plot.

It’s late. Late enough that the city outside has gone soft at the edges.

Her tall lamp throws gold over the floor, the curve of her cheek, and the pen in her hand as she crosses out one line, then another, then returns to the first because Willow has always hated surrendering to the thing that was right from the start.

She bites the end of the pen causing me to miss a chord.

Her eyes flick up. “That sounded terrible.”

“Your face is distracting.”

“My face is doing nothing.”

“Exactly. Very selfish of it.”

Her mouth twitches, but she looks back down before she lets me have the full smile.

Willow doesn’t give herself away easily, and that should make me less obsessed, but apparently I have built my entire personality around wanting things that can ruin me.

She writes another line.

I watch her hand move.

That hand has written songs the whole world screamed back at me and held mine when we were kids. That hand also pushed me away in a hospital room when I deserved it and reached for me weeks later when I did not. That hand was limp in mine once, cold enough to make every prayer I ever had, never believed in, crawl out of me bleeding.

My fingers stop on the strings.

Willow lifts her head. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Her brows pinch. “Don’t give me “nothing” in that voice.”

“What voice?”

“The one that sounds like you are trying to swallow something.”

I try to smirk but it comes out wrong. “Sexy image.”

“Phoenix.”

There it is. My name in her mouth and too close to every part of me I’ve been pretending isn’t already on its knees in front of her.

I glance back at the guitar. “Read the chorus again.”

She observes me for another moment before doing so.

Her voice is quiet at first, a little rough from the day we have spent pulling the song apart until it bled the right color.

She reads the first line, following with the next, and somewhere between the third and fourth lines, her voice changes.

The song opens in the room as I start playing along with her voice—her words fitting my chords so perfectly it hurts.