Page 79 of Steady Stroke
Going back to the house for a change of clothes felt like the most selfish thing on the planet, despite being kind of necessary. Lincoln didn’t want to leave Emmett when he was clearly still distressed by the arrest and arraignment news. He also didn’t want to wear rumpled shorts and a smelly T-shirt to the hearing tomorrow morning. Being apart for less than an hour was an acceptable compromise.
He also brought the QChord with him, because Emmett needed a distraction. They all did, and music was the perfect way to focus on something else.
After a filling lunch of spaghetti and garlic bread, he settled Emmett on the couch with his laptop, and Lincoln brought out his synthesizer. “Let’s try to arrange something we’ve never played before.”
Emmett frowned. “Like what?”
He tilted his head at the laptop. “You pick. Find something.”
“Okay. Contemporary or classic?”
“I said you pick.”
The harshness of Emmett’s grunt was belied by his twitching lips. His fingers clicked across the keyboardwhile he did his warm-up scales. After a minute or two of searching, he hit a key and sat back. The very distinct chords of “Collide” by Howie Day played on the laptop’s speakers.
Nostalgia swept through Lincoln like a warm breeze. XYZ had played this song at their first public show in a small, cramped club in Philadelphia that paid in appetizers and free drinks. None of them had been twenty-one at the time, so they’d drowned their livers in Coke and Mountain Dew. He’d eaten enough mozzarella sticks to keep him on the throne for over an hour the next day, but it had been worth it.
As he listened to lyrics he knew by heart, he started to really hear them. And even though Emmett wasn’t singing, he heard them in Emmett’s clear tenor. Singing lyrics that applied so much to their lives in that moment.“Even the best fall down sometimes.”
Didn’t he know it.
“You and I collide.”
He met Emmett’s gaze and held it while the song wound down, repeating the last couple of lines over and over. Their lives had certainly collided for a reason and given them both something precious. Something Lincoln would do anything to keep.
“Perfect choice.” Lincoln cleared his throat, surprised at how husky he was.
“It was my way of saying thank you for earlier. For being there while I had my meltdown.”
“I’m glad I was here. I’m glad that I am here.” He strummed across the plate, his fingers creating beautiful little guitar-string notes. “For a long time after the car accident, I wished I’d just died and saved everyone the trouble of taking care of me. More than once I stood at the top of the stairs and thought,Maybe the fall will kill me.But as much as I hated howI was living, dying scared me more. Dying meant it was over, you know? No chance of things getting better.
“And now that I know what I’d have missed, I’m so glad I never let the dark thoughts win. I don’t believe in God, but I do think I believe in fate. Just a little bit.”
Emmett’s soft smile was worth the way saying those words had flayed him open, exposing that he’d contemplated suicide. Emmett curled his hand around Lincoln’s wrist and squeezed. “I believe in God, Allah. But I don’t think He intervenes in our lives the way I was taught. Not anymore. We have free will to make our own choices. His judgment comes at the end of our lives, not during. The judgment we endure during our lives comes from man alone.”
Truth.
“A man set the fire that killed my parents,” Emmett continued. “And a man will pay the price for his actions, in this world, and then in the next. I can affect what happens to him in this world. The next world is up to him.”
Lincoln’s chest swelled with pride. They’d had a variation on this conversation before, but Emmett had never spoken with such conviction before. He truly believed what he was saying. God hadn’t punished Emmett with the fire any more than he’d punished Lincoln with the car crash. Men had set those events in motion. Lincoln had to live with the fact that he’d probably never know who’d caused his accident, but that was okay. He could rejoice knowing that Chandler Gunn would pay for the pain he’d caused Emmett.
Everything else was details.
Emmett laughed, a beautiful sound that reinforced his words. “Ready to play?”
“Absolutely.”
They played “Collide” over and over, living inside the song and the bubble of peace they created when they made musictogether. A bubble Lincoln desperately wanted to carry with them to Baltimore tomorrow. He wanted to protect Emmett from the pain of reliving his worst nightmare. He wanted to be Emmett’s safe place after the hearing was over.
He wanted to be with Emmett in everything, because as he sang a soft backup to the chorus, Lincoln knew that he was falling in love.
EIGHTEEN
Aunt Beatrice droppedthem off at Lincoln’s house Tuesday afternoon, deciding by some silent mutual agreement that Emmett needed alone time with his boyfriend—which worked out perfectly, because Roxy had texted earlier that she was working a double and wouldn’t be home until eleven.
Emmett flopped onto the sofa, limbs askew, still kind of confused about the entire arraignment process. Movies had given him false expectations of giant courthouses, crowds of paparazzi, flashbulbs, and people with handmade signs. He’d seen exactly one reporter before going inside.
He hadn’t been sure what he’d feel when he saw Chandler Gunn led into the courtroom by the deputy. Anger had been there in spades, but Emmett no longer saw the cocksure football player who pinned him to lockers and threatened to shove baseball bats up his ass. He saw a guy who forced his swagger, whose eyes weren’t as confident as his posture.
