Page 18 of Before You Fell

“My notebook isn’t a factory.”

“No,” he says, “It’s a goddamn goldmine.”

Phoenix is looking at me again over the brunette’s shoulder.

My chest does that stupid thing it always does when he looks at me.

I hate that a single glance from him can still excavate her—that stupid thirteen-year-old girl who handed him her notebook with shaking hands and watched his face light up like she’d handed him something sacred instead of just a song she wrote in forty minutes because she couldn’t stop thinking about his hands.

I hate that I miss a ghost who keeps breathing in front of me, walking around in low-slung jeans with someone else’s lipstick on his throat, looking at me like I’m the one who left.

Damon’s still talking. I catch the tail end of it. “—that’s why we need you.”

I glance back at him.

I am so tired. Tired in places sleep can’t reach and caffeine can’t bully back to life.

Damon steps into my eyeline. “Three demos by the end of the week.”

“Sure,” I say. “Let me just pencil in a breakdown after lunch.”

“Three demos,” he says again, as if I’m the problem.

“I heard you.”

“Good.”

He walks away.

Music thumps low from the corner. A champagne cork goes off somewhere behind me like a small, celebratory gunshot. Someone’s already yelling about an afterparty. Someone else is already too drunk to find it. Cruz has both women laughing now, his smile doing that thing that makes every smart girl forget every warning their mother gave them.

I see Marcus enter the room. Roadie. Tall. Broad shoulders. Black tour shirt. Warm brown eyes. Headset hanging around his neck. He has the calm, steady presence of a man who knows how to lift heavy things without needing applause for it.

A rare fucking species in this room.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.”

“Are you okay?”

I almost laugh because nobody backstage ever asks that.

“Depends how honest you want me to be.”

His smile is small and real. “I can handle honest.”

“I’m fine,” I say anyway.

“Liar.”

My eyebrows go up.

He nods toward the hallway. “You want to get some air? It’s quieter out there. Less—” His gaze flicks across the room, taking in Cruz and his women, Jax’s chaos, Damon’s shark smile, and Phoenix’s throne of bad decisions. “—all of this.”

Cold air. Concrete. Fluorescent lights that don’t flatter anyone and don’t care. A closed door between me and the smell of Phoenix’s poor decisions. Five minutes of being Willow Hart instead of Phoenix Stone’s emotional support songbook. Five minutes with someone who looks at me and is not trying to find his reflection in my gaze.

I want to say yes because I’m tired of being the thing men take from. Maybe for once, I just want to stand outside with someone who doesn’t have my childhood, my songs and my whole stupid heart already crumpled in his fist.