Page 39 of Before You Fell

Especially not Willow.

So I do what I do best.

My mouth curves into the smirk I have used to escape every feeling worth fearing. It’s cruel enough to pass as confidence.

“Then you got bossy and ruined it.”

Willow laughs. It’s quick. A neat little exit she offers both of us because she knows me and knowing me has always meant learning to step around the wreckage.

But I see the hurt flash through her eyes before she lowers her gaze. It’s small enough for anyone else to miss and sharp enough to cut straight through the high. She hides it beneath a laugh and that careless tilt of her mouth, because Willow Hart has always known how to take whatever I do to her and make the bleeding look like boredom.

Relief eases the pressure beneath my ribs.

And that’s the ugliest fucking thing.

Chapter Seven

Willow

Iwake with a headache pressing behind my eyes and Phoenix Stone’s voice buried somewhere under my ribs.

Yeah. Once.

Two words should not still be alive within me.

They should not have followed me home from that hotel suite, crawled through the dark, and settled into the quietest part of my chest. And for fuck’s sake, they shouldn’t be the first thing I hear when I open my eyes to pale morning light spilling through my curtains.

But it has been two days.

Two whole days of acting normal while my mind keeps dragging me back to that couch. To that lazy sprawl of his body. To the way he looked at me and handed me one small truth before crushing it under that filthy little smirk.

Then you got bossy and ruined it.

I laughed because that’s what I do when Phoenix hands me something sharp and expects me to admire its shine. I laughed because not laughing would have meant sitting there with the cut open for everyone to see.

I tell myself it was just Phoenix talking shit because he was high. The smoke was thick, the music was loud, and his pupils were blown so wide that people say stupid shit all the time. That should make it easier.

It should make the whole thing stupid enough to throw away. Another messy after-party moment. An almost-sentence from a man who has built an entire personality on never being pinned down. A drug-softened slip. A joke with bad timing.

Somehow, it makes it worse. If the drugs made him honest, then he meant it. For one stupid second, he gave me something real before snatching it back before I could even close my fingers around it.

And if he didn’t mean it, he reached into the softest, ugliest part of me by accident and laughed, unaware that he’d drawn blood.

I press the heel of my hand against my forehead and stare at the ceiling.

My room smells of clean laundry I haven’t bothered to put away, and of the faint vanilla candle Mom bought me because she still believes a woman can be rescued by soft lighting and good intentions.

My notebook lies open at the end of the bed. Half a verse bleeds across the page in ugly, uneven handwriting.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand.

I already know it is Damon before I even glance at it. The man has the emotional timing of a debt collector and the patience of a loaded gun.

Damon: Need revisions to the second verse before lunch.

I stare at the message, still half under my covers, still tasting sleep and the ugly aftertaste of Phoenix in my head.

The second verse of the song I gave Damon three days ago.