Big brothers, in a way, to kids who’d never had that sort of thing naturally.

  Matt and I... We were in the youngest group of kids, and we’d both been small for our ages. The older kids had picked us early on as easy targets, and we’d been too young to know how to defend ourselves. We’d teamed up as the underdogs and started watching each other’s backs, and eventually Noah and Hudson had found us and taken on the roles as our protectors. Matt, a naturally happy kid, had leaned into it like he’d finally found the family he’d been missing.

  I was not a naturally happy kid. I’d already realized how dark I was on the inside, and that nothing was going to change that. I’d stuck with Noah and Hudson but hadn’t really trusted that they would do any better than anyone else ever had. I’d thought they’d desert me just like my mom had.

  They hadn’t. And somewhere along the way I’d learned to lean into them, too.

  But Matt? He would always be the kid that had my back when no one else did. Even if he was way too good to hang out with someone like me.

  “I’ll call you what I want,” Matt said, pulling me back into the conversation. His eyes darted to the exit and narrowed. “And what I want is to know what you’re doing. What the fuck is up with you the past week? You’ve disappeared on all of us and the level of scruff on your face is truly alarming.”

  He brushed a fingertip over my 5 o’clock shadow, smirking, and I jerked back.

  “I’m not in the mood.”

  The smirk dropped off his face and his eyes got even narrower. “I don’t give a fuck. I’m your best friend and band mate, Rivers. I want to know what’s going on with you.”

  What was going on with me. Right. I was fighting against falling for a girl I knew I couldn’t have and watching my band play with her every night. I could see her path laid out in front of her, from this small bar to the stadium tour, and knew that she had the brightest future possible. Unless I fucked it all up. Unless I let her fall for me and took her down into my darkness.

  Got her canceled by Taylor.

  Hell, got my whole band canceled by Taylor.

  Not that I was going to tell Matt any of that. Sure, he was my best friend. That had never meant he got to have access to all the inner workings of my brain.

  Though there was one thing I couldn’t hide from him.

  “You know what the problem is. Think about it.”

  Matt made a face. “You saw the itinerary. You knew we were coming to Missouri. Now you’re going to fuck everything up just because we’re here?”

  I felt like a puppet whose strings had just been cut at the bald-faced mention of the place. Like I was a balloon that had just had a pin pushed into it. I wanted to sag against him, close my eyes, shut it out, but I knew that wouldn’t stop the voices in my head. The ones that said that being back in this state was going to bring all the bad in me to the forefront.

  “That doesn’t mean I was ready. And you know exactly what I mean by that.”

  “You guys okay?” another voice asked from my right.

  I did close my eyes then, because the very person I didn’t want seeing me right now—the person I’d been trying to avoid—had evidently found me after all.

  She put a hand on my arm before I could turn to face her and I cringed away, no doubt looking like I was disgusted by the fact that she’d just touched me. I glanced up just in time to see the hurt flitting across her face, the flash of tears at the edges of her eyes, and then she was gone, swinging around and running in the other direction like I’d just bitten her.

  God, I basically had. She’d asked me if I was okay and I’d reacted like she was poison.

  “You’re going to lose her,” Matt said softly, his face turned after her as well.

  I snorted. “Haven’t you heard? That’s not real. She was never actually mine in the first place.”

  I knew it wasn’t true. I’d seen her that first night and known immediately that she could be mine if I wanted her. I’d talked her into stealing a car with me, telling her that we’d return it. I’d made out with her in a hallway when she was wearing nothing more than a big t-shirt. Held her against me as she slept and breathed her in like some idiot from one of those movies girls were always watching.

  I’d let myself open up to her.

  And then I’d closed off again. Because it was better for her if she didn’t see the real me, and it was better for me if I didn’t get used to having someone like her around. So yeah, I was going to keep telling myself that she was never mine to lose in the first place.

  She disappeared around a bend in the hallway with a flash of dark red hair, leaving nothing to show she’d even been there, and I let out the breath I’d been holding.

  Then I turned back toward Matt and prepared to tell him exactly where he could stick all his concern about Missouri. Because he was right: There was a problem. And I already knew how I was going to solve it.

  Regardless of how anyone else felt about it.

  RIVERS

  I woke up the next morning like I was going to war, my hands in fists and my blood rushing with adrenaline. I sat up quickly and nearly jumped out of bed, positive that there was somewhere I had to be or something I had to do—or run from. Once I glanced around the room, though, trying to figure out where the danger was, I started to calm down.

  This was a hotel room. I recognized the ugly couch in the corner as the one I’d almost crashed on last night, and the equally ugly quilt scrunched up around my feet right now. The window in the corner letting in too much sunlight. The glimpse of the standard hotel bathroom through the other door. White counter. White floor. Stand-up shower.

  No bathtub.

  Not that I cared about that sort of thing. I definitely didn’t take baths when I felt stressed and in need of some water therapy.

  Either way, hotel room. Not the room I’d been dreaming about.

  I didn’t know what had brought on the dream. Maybe a smell or the feel of scratchy, cheap hotel sheets. Maybe the section of the country we were in.

  A sudden dinging started and I nearly ducked for cover right then, shocked into even more anxiety by the sound.

  “Right,” I breathed, staring toward the window. That was what had given me the dream. We’d pulled into this town late last night and I hadn’t had a chance to do anything more than grab the key to my room and head up to start drinking. But when I got up and slid my fingers through the blinds on the window, I saw a train station right across the street.

  Honestly I was surprised it had taken until this morning for me to be awoken. Maybe this was a small enough town that they didn’t have many trains come through here. Or maybe it was one of those places where the trains didn’t generally blow their horns to warn pedestrians that they were coming through. I’d seen that before; small towns where the trains only passed through and didn’t stop. Bare-faced signs that said trains were coming and to keep the hell off the tracks.

  The town where I’d spent time living next to a train station had had one of those signs.

  I’d thrown rocks at it when I was locked out of the house and didn’t have any place to go. I’d also thrown rocks at it when the house was open and I didn’t want to go into it because I knew what I’d find there: a man who liked to hit the kids who stayed with them and a woman who liked to look the other way because it kept her from getting hit. I didn’t know how the hell those people had been approved as foster parents, but over time I’d come to think it was probably that the people who oversaw the system itself hadn’t had the time or capacity to care about such things. Their job was to make sure kids cycled out of the group home for a certain number of months every year. Lived in a real house. Got the taste of a family life.

  The problem was, kids who cycled into some houses didn’t get anything like a normal family life. They got the people who were playing foster parent only for the check it brought in and didn’t give a single fuck about the kids themselves. Worse, they were people who actively wanted kids they could beat up on or abuse. Or use as servants.

  Or sell to their friends for purposes I’d never experienced personally but had heard about.

  Our drummer Noah had been through that. And he’d told me about it precisely once, one night when we’d had way too much to drink and had started talking about the worst families we’d ever seen. He’d been handed over to a single mom who seemed to have a good history—she’d had multiple kids and they always came back to the group home healthy—but he’d learned pretty quick that her record wasn’t as clean as it looked. It was just that the kids she’d hosted had been too scared and damaged to tell the people who ran the place what went on in her house. They’d been starved and beaten, and when they complained about it they found out that things could actually get even worse. She had neighbors who paid to have access to kids.

  It didn’t matter how old they were.

  I hadn’t known Noah at the time but he said he’d come back wanting to kill the world. And he’d never lost that chip on his shoulder. He was the angriest person I’d ever met and he didn’t bother to hide it unless our favorite roadie, Molly, was around to calm him down. She’d grown up with us—on the girls’ side of the home, of course—and had somehow wormed her way into Noah’s heart early. He’d never truly let her go.

  His story, though…

  The train rushed by the window, breaking through my thoughts, and I shook my head. I didn’t want to be thinking about these things. I didn’t want to remember anything about the places where I’d grown up.

  The problem was, my brain seemed to know that I was within miles of Missouri. And my subconscious was intent on reminding me that this was where it had all started.

  I spread two pads of paper out on the table in front of me, moved the two guitars I’d brought over with me closer, and then reached out and unscrewed the bottle of whiskey I ordered from Room Service.

  Yes it was only noon and therefore a little bit early for a bottle of whiskey. But I’d always done my best writing with a little bit of alcohol, and today I needed good writing. I’d been miserable for a week. We had a free day and I had no commitments. As far as I could see, it was the perfect time to sit in my hotel room and get some writing done. This had always been my happy place and I could definitely use a little bit of happy right now.

  Writing was my escape, and the best use for my emotions. No matter what I was feeling, if I could get it down into words on a piece of paper, it cleared it out of my head and made the voices easier to handle. It didn’t always quiet them completely, but it made them a little less obnoxious. A little less hurtful.

  That also sounded good right now, actually, because my subconscious was doing its level best to kill me and I needed to shut it the fuck up before it succeeded.

  I poured a glass of whiskey and exhaled, trying to clear my head and get into the right space for writing. The words were all there—as were the notes—but I had to get into a specific place for it all to come together. Block out all the noise, focus inward, forget about whatever was going on outside this hotel room…

  A loud knock sounded at the door, jarring me right out of the headspace I’d been so carefully cultivating, and I glared at the thing like it had just insulted my mother.

  Wait, strike that. It had just insulted my band. Or my friends. Or Lila.

  “What?” I shouted. Had I put the Do Not Disturb placard on the doorknob? I thought I had, but now I couldn’t remember. If I had, why the fuck was anyone knocking? I’d clearly labeled the door as belonging to someone who did not want to be disturbed.

  “Rivers!” a voice shouted back. “I know you’re in there. Open up!”

  I ground my teeth. Right. I probably had put that placard on there, but Matt Lawson was both too stubborn and too stupid to pay attention to things like that. He’d probably seen it and then intentionally ignored it. Because as far as he was concerned, everyone should always be happy to see him. Even when they wanted to be alone.

  “Go away, Matt!” I shouted back. “I’m writing!”

  “No you’re not! If you were, you wouldn’t have answered me!”

  Dammit. He was right, but I hated that he knew me that well.

  I stood up and stomped toward the door, half angry and half amused because it was mostly impossible to actually stay angry at a guy who was always so happy. And so oblivious. I threw open the door doing my best to scowl, though, because if nothing else, Matt needed to learn to pay attention to signs that said people didn’t want to be disturbed.

  “What?” I snapped.

  Then I saw who was standing behind him.

  Matt gave me a sly and entirely too-proud-of-himself smile. “Oh, nothing. Just figured you’d be in here moping around and thinking about writing. And I remembered that you always do your best writing with a partner.”

  He stepped aside to reveal Lila Potter looking awfully country in a jean skirt and cowboy boots, her top white and flowy. She cocked one perfect eyebrow at me and then looked past me into the room. Moments later she was actually brushing past me and strolling in like she’d been invited. She sat down, poured herself a glass of whiskey, and grabbed one of the guitars.

  When she glanced up again, she looked like she had every right to be there.

  “So,” she said. “What are we writing?”

  LILA

  “I think…” I said, jotting something down, then scratching it out and jotting down something else. “I think if we use something like this, it works better.”

  Rivers strummed out the line of notes he’d just created and hummed, then sang the words I’d written. They weren’t a lot different from what we’d had before but I’d changed them to a different order and it felt more right.

  “You’re right,” he murmured. “They sit in the music better that way. But what if…” He reached out and scratched out one word, replacing it with something else, then played the line again. When he turned his smile on me it was beautiful. Almost cherubic. “That’s it,” he murmured. “That’s it right there.”

  I returned a gentle smile of my own. “You’re right. Now we just have to get the bridge done.”

  “And we’ll have a whole song,” he finished, glancing down at the paper.

  I looked down as well, and frowned at what we’d written. It was another love song, there was no doubt about that, but it was sort of disguised with anger and hurt and heartbreak. Lots of darkness with some love shining through. The hope of love, I corrected myself. The story of a boy and a girl who had known each other for ages and had lived through the worst pain possible but had come out the other side and managed to find each other again.

  A couple that had separated and thought they’d lost each other. Cut off contact. Found other ways to live. Pretended to forget the other existed. Only to come back together in the end like they’d somehow planned it that way, although neither had thought it was possible. It was a story of young love and mistakes, miscommunications and betrayals, and the loss that came about when you didn’t appreciate what you had. It was a story of growing because you were forced to and learning how to stand on your own two feet when the person who had been your foundation was suddenly gone.

  And that part broke my heart. Mostly because I could see how much it was breaking Rivers.

  In the end, though, the lyrics had the couple finding each other again. Scuffed up and bruised from having been forced into the world on their own and not quite the same people they had been when they’d known each other before, but undeniably drawn together like magnets. Two people that life couldn’t keep apart.

  Two people who had fought to find their ways back to each other, because they knew in their hearts that was where they belonged.

  It was a redemption story made song, and I thought it was probably the most dramatic thing I’d ever written. Not that it had been all me; it had Rivers’ fingerprints all over it. And I wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to him to give him so much depth. Who had he been before he broke into the music business? What had helped to build him into the person he was?

  Who had hurt him so much that he didn’t know how to believe in his own value?

  Or was I just imagining that part of him?

  “Give me a story from your childhood,” I said suddenly, letting my thoughts become words without bothering to think about it. “Something no one else knows.”

  His mouth quirked, but the smile didn’t touch his eyes. “Something no one else knows? So that would mean something only I know?”

  I returned the small smile. “I guess that would fit the definition, yeah. Though I’m not stuck on those parameters.”

  He thought about it for a moment, his face going completely blank and then even darker. Whatever he was remembering, he didn’t like it much, and for a moment I thought maybe this had been a bad idea. But then he found something he did like and gave me a quick flash of a smile.

  “I learned how to play guitar by studying books,” he said. “I didn’t have anyone to give me lessons but I was convinced that I needed to know it. So I went to the library every day, found books on music instruction, and practiced.”

  Okay, that hadn’t been what I was expecting. “Did you have a guitar?”

  “No way. No one to buy me one.”

  Right, I wasn’t going to ask. “So how did you practice?”

  “I drew a picture of a guitar, strings and everything, and cut it out. Then I held it in front of me and practiced on it. There wasn’t any sound, but I learned the movements and the positions for my fingers. Then I’d go to the guitar store and pretend I was actually planning to buy a guitar.”