Page 53 of Wild

"What happened after that night?" She steers the conversation back toward the original question, sensing that Noah has had enough sadness for one sitting talking about his childhood, and she has too, remembering her own.

"We got really close. Mia was already singing back then—not famous, obviously," he smiles, tilting his head upward as if his friend were right above them, "but she already had this raw, powerful voice with a lot of potential. Danny suggested we start our own band with her as the lead singer, him on guitar, and me on drums."

"You play drums?" Erin says, surprised.

"I used to. I haven't played since Danny…" He stops, and his expression goes dark. "We played together in my parents' garage for almost a year and a half. We'd get together almost every afternoon and stay up until the middle of the night, because none of us had anyone setting rules. But Danny was hooked. He'd grown up with access to every kind of drug and was almost always high. We tried to get him to stop, but we didn't have the resources, and he was in too deep to even try."

"It's incredibly hard when there are no resources to help someone get out, and if they're not ready to try, it's literally impossible, Noah."

"I know. But back then Mia and I were just frustrated. One night, after we'd been playing all afternoon, he went home the way he always did—except the next day he didn't come to the garage. Or the day after that. Nobody bothered to tell us, because nobody in his house knew he had friends."

"What happened to him?"

"He had an accident. He was so high he went off the road on a curve and went down an embankment. He lay there for at least three hours before he died."

Noah's eyes have gone glassy, but he runs his fingers under his eyelids and lets out a shaky breath.

"I'm so sorry, Noah," Erin says.

He looks at her and gives her a sad smile.

"Mia and I used to get high with him sometimes. Not at his level, but we were using almost every day too. After what happened to him, we promised each other we'd never touch anything hard again—so now we each smoke a joint after every show. It's a sacred rule we never break, not just because we don't want what happened to him to happen to us, but for his memory—and because he never got the chance to have someone to lean on when he needed it. Mia and I got closer after that. She's my family now, and I'm hers."

"And your parents? And her mom?"

Noah shrugs, unbothered.

"Once I got my first job, she and I moved in together in some dump crawling with cockroaches," he says, amused. "Nobody came looking for either of us. Mia got a job too, we saved up, moved to New York to try to get someone to hear her sing, and the rest is all this."

"Thank you for telling me, Noah." Erin reaches out and places her hand on his pale arm, right over Danny's name.

He smiles and picks up his cup to drink, making a face when he realizes it's gone cold.

Chapter 20

Erin stands in front of Mia's door with one hand flat against the wood and the other braced on the wall. On her way up from the restaurant, she ran through a thousand versions of what she'd say when she walked in, because—much as she'd like to—she can't forget what happened earlier or pretend it didn't. It happened, and they need to talk about it. The problem is that if she was already confused before, she's completely lost now. Everything tangles together in a mind too numb to sort through it all: what they did, what she felt, the reasons it shouldn't have happened, the consequences she imagines it will have, what she thinks she knows Mia wants from her—and on top of all that, the external factors, the age gap, the gulf between their lives. Every time she entertains the possibility of giving this a chance, if that's even what Mia wants, so many reasons against it crowd in that, for the first time in her life, she doesn't know what to do. And for someone as structured as Erin, that's deeply destabilizing. It shuts down her logic, and she can't afford that right now.

She decides to knock twice before someone walks down the hall and finds her standing there like she's lost. She hears no footsteps on the other side, no voice telling her to come in, and when almost a minute has passed she considers using the key card the hotel always gives her at check-in—but just as she's reaching into her pocket, the door opens and the singer appears on the other side.

Erin takes a step back on pure instinct, overwhelmed, because she is absolutely not ready for this. Her mind hasn't had time toprocess what happened between them, and now there's a knot in her throat and a throbbing between her legs that she knows she can't let herself act on.

"Hey," Mia's voice is soft, almost timid.

Erin nods and walks inside when Mia steps aside to let her pass. The click of the door closing behind her stops her cold, a knot of anxiety in her stomach eating her alive from the inside.

"How are you feeling? Is the pain gone?" she asks, emptying her lungs in one slow breath, trying to focus on anything other than the way Mia is watching her with those wide blue eyes.

"Yeah." The singer touches the back of her neck and shifts her weight from foot to foot, nervous.

They've stalled in the entryway. Erin doesn't dare take another step, and Mia doesn't know whether to ask her to come sit on the couch or open the door again and let her run, because that seems to be what the doctor needs right now.

"Good. I'll check your vitals now and come back to see you after—"

"Don't do that," Mia cuts her off.

Erin feels every muscle in her body tighten beyond her control. Of course she doesn't want to do this—she wants to sit down and talk like the adult she is, but she doesn't know how to do that right now, and she doesn't know how to tell Mia it can't happen again without sounding harsh. Because that is what she wants, isn't it?

"Do what?" she asks, holding steady under the beam of those two blue eyes burning into her skin.