Page 75 of Scorpio Season

She flinches as a hand touches her lower back.

“Hey,” Luca says behind her. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah.” Florence throws her a smile over her shoulder. “I’m fine.”

Luca doesn’t look convinced. Quietly, she asks, “Did your father call again?”

Christ. With everything that’s happening, Florence forgot about him for a moment. “No. It was just my mum.”

From the way Luca’s eyes remain on her, she can tell that there’s more she wants to ask. But now they’ve almost reached the stairs leading up to the stage and Florence is distracted putting in her in-ears, muffling all outside noise.

We are primarily interested in you.

The lights seem brighter than usual as they walk on. Florence feels strange and off-kilter as she steps behind the microphone, her own pulse loud in her ears.

Primarily interested in you. Something special. Primarily interested in you.

The sound of Luca counting them in pierces through the fog that has draped over her. The ground feels less shaky with the kick drum humming through the soles of her boots, Luca’s playing like a heartbeat Florence can always trust to remain steady.

Closing her eyes, she shuts out the echoes of Linda Norton’s voice and lets the music drown out her thoughts. One more show, and then she’ll be home for a week. She can figure out what to do then.

29

Tell her, Luca repeats to herself as they make their way down to the lobby. You have to tell her.

Every part of this feels so familiar by now. She and Florence find themselves a spot by the windows, curling up on a beaten-up sofa lit only by a small lamp a few feet away. They’re out of sight from the reception desk, alone in a pocket of quiet. By now the lobbies of the hostels where they’ve stayed all kind of blur together in a vague haze of drowsy receptionists and humming vending machines and the tinny, copyright-free music that seems to always be drifting from the speakers.

Florence is sitting cross-legged on the sofa, facing Luca, their knees just barely touching. She’s quieter than usual, her eyes distant as her fingers worry at the frayed hem of her jumper.

“Last show before the break, huh?” Luca says.

Florence gives a sallow half smile. “Yeah.”

Luca’s own knee is jiggling incessantly. She feels jittery, kind of like she used to when she was just starting her medication, before the side effects went away.

“Are you excited to go back to London?” she tries.

“Not really. You?”

“Not really,” Luca says. After a moment, she adds, “I like being on tour. I feel like it works better for my brain than being at home.”

Just the thought of being back in her flat and having to set an alarm to go to work at the café every morning makes her bones itch. It’s not the only reason she’s not excited though.

Before she can talk herself out of it, she adds, “And I’m going to miss this.”

She doesn’t have to explain what this means for Florence to understand. She looks down at her hands. At this point, she’s in danger of unraveling the whole jumper if she carries on fiddling with it. “Yeah. Me too.”

This is where Luca is supposed to say what she’s been practicing in her head. She takes a shaky breath, her mouth dry as she gears up to speak.

The thing is: Most of the time, Luca doesn’t trust herself. It’s the reason why she spent her school years in a friend group with people she had nothing in common with, why she stayed in her first relationship even though it mostly made her feel bad about herself, why she didn’t drop out of uni until she had a stomachache every time she thought about her exams. She doesn’t think she would’ve messaged Izzy if Jemma hadn’t been there to hold her hand. She would’ve kept working at the café, stuck it out like she has everything else. Enduring a mediocre situation has always felt less scary than making a decision and finding out it was the wrong one. It never occurred to her that her making a decision could lead to something better. But now she’s here, and she knows what she wants, and she knows that if she doesn’t do something about it, she’ll spend the rest of her life regretting it.

Gathering all her courage, she asks, “Are we going to keep seeing each other? When we’re in London?”

“Of course,” Florence says. “We’re in a band. We’ll see each other all the time.”

“No, I mean—” She swallows compulsively. “Will we see each other? Just us?”

Florence shifts. The tiny movement pulls her knee away from Luca’s. “Luca, I . . . I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”