Page 186 of Before You Fell

He crosses to me and pulls me into a hug. His arms close around me with more care than they used to. I let myself hug him back because I’ve missed him and the guys more than I let myself admit.

“It’s good to see you,” he says near my ear.

“You too.”

He lets me go, and his gaze flicks past my shoulder toward Phoenix. “Your guard dog is glaring.”

Jax is next. He comes in fast, restless energy and broad shoulders, pausing himself up half a step before a collision. His arms wrap around me, softer than Jax has ever been about anything, and I hate it a little. I hate that they’re all treating me like something that might crack if they hold on too hard.

“Fuck, Wills,” he says. “It’s good to have you back.”

“It’s good to be back,” I say.

When I pull back from Jax, Jett is already there, arms open as if he’s been waiting his turn.

“Missed you,” he says.

“I missed you too.”

Phoenix steps up beside me, close enough that his arm brushes mine. He doesn’t reach for my hand this time, but I feel him there anyway.

“Okay,” he says. “I called you in because we’ve got three weeks before the UK tour kicks off and I want to change the set.”

Cruz drops onto the arm of the couch. “Change it how?”

“Add a song.” Phoenix glances at me. “Willow and I have been working on something for the past week and it’s ready. I want it in the set.”

“Alright,” Jett says. “Let’s hear it.”

Phoenix moves to pick up a guitar from the stand in the corner. He pulls up a stool, settles the guitar across his lap, and finds the opening chord. He runs through the structure first, no words, just the shape of it, letting the guys listen. Jax’s fingers start tapping against his thigh.

When Phoenix starts to sing, the room doesn’t move. Cruz closes his eyes and listens. Jax stops tapping and goes completely still, which anyone who knows Jax understands is significant. Jett has picked up a guitar from somewhere and is holding it across his lap, not playing yet, simply feeling out the song’s shape before he commits.

Phoenix takes it all the way to the end. He lets the final chord breathe before lifting his hand from the strings.

The room stays quiet for a moment.

“Okay,” Cruz says, letting out a slow breath. “Yeah. That’s going in the set.”

After that, it’s work. Jax sits behind his kit and starts working out the rhythm, loose at first, testing where the weight should fall. He overshoots it twice, pulls it back, and lands somewhere that makes Phoenix nod once.

Jett and Cruz fall into it together naturally, the way they always have, playing off each other without needing to talk about it first. Jett lays something down and Cruz builds on it. Jax slides underneath both of them and suddenly the song has a spine. They go back and forth, trying things, scrapping them, and trying again.

There is none of the tension I remember from the last time I sat in this room, watching them work. No short fuses. No loaded silences. Just four people who are good at what they do and are actually enjoying it.

After a while, when it starts to sound less like a rehearsal and more like something real, Phoenix crosses the room to me. He leans down and presses a kiss to my lips, completely unbothered by the three other people in the room.

“Perfect,” he says.

I notice Cruz first, his eyes lifting from his guitar. Then Jax, who misses a beat, recovers and says nothing. Jett looks over and smiles.

They have never seen Phoenix like this with me before. Not open, unbothered, and unconcerned with how he looks. The Phoenix they knew before didn’t do soft in front of an audience. He didn’t lean down to kiss a girl in the middle of a rehearsal as if the rest of the room didn’t exist.

Nobody says anything smart about it or makes it a thing. But I can see it in the way Cruz and Jax’s mouths twitch before they get control of it. They’ve seen it. The change in him. The edges that used to cut everything and everyone around him have worn down into something that still has shape but no longer draws blood the way it used to.

An hour turns into two.

The song gets taken apart, bruised, stripped down, built again. They pull threads out of it and restitch them somewhere else. They slow a section down until it aches, then speed it back up because the ache was too obvious. Phoenix stops them four times on the same transition until it sits exactly the way he hears it in his head, and nobody complains, because this is how it works, how it used to always work.