Page 94 of Before You Fell

My fingernails scrape the tile. I open my mouth but my voice is gone.

Phoenix’s voice slips into my head. An old song. One of ours. Not the polished studio version. The first version. My house, when we were teenagers and still stupid enough to think that wanting something badly meant the world had to give a shit.

Phoenix sat on my bedroom floor with his back against my bed, one knee bent, hair falling into his eyes as he sang the lines I had written in blue pen on a page of my notebook.

His voice cracked as he sang. He looked at me afterward with embarrassment, pride, and something so fucking beautiful that I forgot how to breathe.

Then he grabbed the notebook from my lap, flipped to the back page, and wrote it there as if it were a promise.

I’d be shit without you, Wills.

My eyes sting. Or perhaps it is the light. I want to tell him he was wrong. That he became everything without me. The voice. The face. The man the whole world wants to touch.

I want to tell him I hate him for that. I also want to tell him I love him, no matter what he did, and I always have.

Someone knocks. Or did they pound. I can’t tell anymore.

The door opens and someone is shouting for help.

I should be relieved. Help is coming. Someone sees me. Someone knows I’m on the ground. But the dark is already in my mouth, behind my eyes, under my skin, taking me somewhere I can’t fight my way back from.

And as everything goes black, the last thought comes in sharp enough to cut through it all, is that maybe I became shit without him.

Chapter Sixteen

Phoenix

I’m sitting behind a long black table, microphones lined up in front of me, while the room buzzes with reporters pretending they give a shit about music instead of headlines. They sit there with their little recorders, their sharpened smiles, and their hungry eyes, all waiting for one of us to fuck up.

Lucky for them, I’ve always been good at making a mess.

I sit in the middle of the table with a bottle of water in front of me and sunglasses on because my eyes are bloodshot enough to file a police report. There is not enough caffeine, or divine intervention, in this fucking city to make me look alive, so I go with expensive black lenses and the kind of arrogance people mistake for intention.

Jax sits on my right, his knee bouncing under the table, fingers tapping restlessly against the wood. Jett is next to him, quiet as always, watching the room with that calm, unreadable shit that makes people think he has his life together. Cruz is on my left, slouched back in his chair, looking bored.

Last night still sits in my blood. Whiskey, weed, and the ugly little black hole I kept trying to smoke out of my chest. I drank the whole bottle, then I smoked until the city outside my windows blurred into a single long smear of light and my thoughts finally shut the fuck up for five merciful seconds.

It didn’t last because nothing good ever fucking lasts.

Damon stands in front of me, glaring since I walked in.

“You need to take those off,” he mutters, pointing at my sunglasses.

“No. You need to take that stick out of your ass.”

His mouth tightens. “I said take them off.”

“And I said fuck off.”

He moves to the side wall and I push my sunglasses up on my nose with my middle finger.

I admit it’s childish but Damon brings out the worst in me. And I have never been a man who hides his talents.

The prick watches me as if he could force professionalism into my body by sheer fucking will. He can get in line.

The auditorium falls quiet as the press begins asking questions.

The first journalist leans toward her recorder. “Phoenix, the new album has already sparked a lot of conversation because of the shift in sound on some of the later tracks. Was that intentional going into this era?”