Page 16 of Flames and Flowers
And in the studio, I had no more of it than anyone else. Xander, Summer, the studio staff; Danica seemed to love us all in equal and abundant measure.
How had I not noticed that before?
She even cuddled Xander on the studio couch, right in front of me, when he was complaining about something. Then she brought him a slice of cake from her aunt’s bakery. She made a special trip to the studio to bring one single slice of cake, for Xander, because he was grumpy that day.
Ash was right about his wife. She loved with her whole heart.
It broke mine.
But even the pain felt better than the nothingness Ash had asked me to feel.Cool?I couldn’t cool it if they dumped ice water over me.
Every time Ash walked into the studio and met my eyes, fire lit up in me all over again like a struck match. And every time Danica walked in and smiled at me like I’d just made her day, I fucking melted.
I couldn’t stay angry with either of them.
So then I got angry at my bandmates, for saying we couldn’t be together in the first place, even though they didn’t know we actually wanted to be. Or at least, I wanted us to be.
I got angry at past lovers I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years; at everyone who’d ever hurt me. As if it was their fault for making me soft and susceptible to this kind of pain in the first place.
I got angry at my parents for so many things, it was like a tired, old, broken record with a needle skipping over it; fractured music and static echoing over the years, in an otherwise dark and empty void. A place no one had ever bothered to return to, to rip the cord from the wall, to show mercy; to kill the faint noise, the song that went around and around in my head when I was wounded and alone at night.
I got angry at myself, too.
But even that anger, as ugly as it was, didn’t last long. I’d never really been an angry guy. So, soon after I’d joined the band in the studio and we’d gotten into a rhythm, all the angry cover and even the pain started to crumble, and I recognized the fear beneath it all for what it really was. What it had been for many years.
The fear that I wasn’t good enough.
That I didn’t measure up.
That I didn’t deserve their love.
The rejection sliced into that soft place inside, deep, and saidSee? I told you so.
It was the voice of my father, and I fucking hated that I still heard it when I was hurt.
And that broken music kept playing in my head, around and around, on its sad, merciless loop.
That fucking song.
It was a specific song, and it had a name. It was “Real Real Gone” by Van Morrison. I knew it note for note. I’d heard it probably thousands of times as a teenager. Whenever my dad got drinking and put it on in the living room, in the dark… even Mom knew not to go near him when he played that song.
I would never know what that song meant to him, what it had done to him, why it haunted him; why he chose that song out of all the songs in the universe to play on repeat, for hours at a time, while he lay flat on his back, drunk, on the floor. But now it haunted me.
Warped, slowed down, out of tune and skipping, the needle scratching over the record and back to the beginning again.
But I knew why I was doing this to myself. Why I was trying to be angry because I wanted to sell myself a story that Ash and Danica rejected me, that they judged me and found me lacking. And it wasn’t because Ash asked me to cool it.
It was because he dared to look me in the eye and challenge me on something that I considered a secret—because I wanted it to be a secret. I wanted it to be no one’s fucking business but mine.
But life didn’t really work that way, did it.
He’d called me out on it, when I wasn’t ready to be called out.
And that thing between us that Ash had asked us to cool because he sensed that I wasn’t ready to be called out? It was alive and pulsing in me. The connection between us, all those months apart, didn’t sever or wilt. It just grew stronger.
I couldn’t possibly have been the only one who felt it.
Yeah, Danica loved with her whole heart. She loved a lot of people. But she didn’t look at other people the way she looked at me.
