Page 8 of Mending Hearts
I should feel lighter. I do, a little. The familiar banter helps. The inside jokes. The fact that these guys know me beyond the stage persona.
Drew drops into the armchair Miles vacated and props his boots on the coffee table like he’s trying to ruin Miles’s pristine aesthetic on purpose. “Okay,” he says. “Tour’s done. We survived. Nobody got arrested.”
“Yet,” Seth says.
Drew points at him. “Don’t ruin my narrative.”
Eli looks at me, eyes narrowing slightly. “You good, Rafe?”
I lift my mug. “Hydrated and resentful.”
Eli laughs, but his gaze stays steady. For all his loudness, he’s always been the one who sees too much.
“I’m fine,” I add, because I don’t want to do this right now. Not with all of them. Not before an interview. Not before we have to smile for cameras and pretend everything is perfect.
“Cool,” Eli says, accepting it for now. He glances around. “So, what’s the plan? We go, we do the thing, we play the song, we leave?”
“Basically,” Miles says, returning to the room. “Seth and Vinny are driving us.”
Vinny groans. “I hate that this is my life.”
Seth claps him on the shoulder. “You love it.”
“No,” Vinny says flatly. “I tolerate it.”
Drew rubs his hands together. “All right, what’s the show called again?”
Miles answers without hesitation. “The Late Lounge.”
Of course Miles knows. He knows everything. The man probably has our call times tattooed on his soul.
Drew whistles. “Okay, but that host is cool. He won’t do the gross personal stuff.”
“Yeah,” Eli agrees. “He’s not one of those ‘tell me your deepest trauma for laughs’ guys.”
“Thank God,” I mutter, because tonight’s set is “Velocity.”
And that song… that song is a bruise I keep pressing. It was one of our first real hits. One of the songs that put us on the mapin a way that didn’t feel temporary. People chant it back at me in stadiums like it belongs to them.
They don’t know it was born from a single moment that still lives in my chest like a prayer and a wound. Ollie Marshall, in a hallway full of light, looking at me like I was someone worth seeing.
The first time I fell.
Vinny’s alarm goes off, and he jumps like he’s been shot. “Time to go,” he says.
We all start moving, grabbing coats, checking pockets, doing the ritual we’ve done a hundred times. Miles pauses near me as I stand, voice low enough that only I hear. “Just get through it,” he says.
I nod once.
Get through it.
That’s the plan.
We file out toward the cars, the late-afternoon sun bleeding gold across the street, and for a second, I let myself imagine the quiet of San Francisco. The way the air there tastes different. The way my house feels like it belongs to me.
Soon.
Just… not yet.
