Bonnie stood up again, restless, and walked to the window.The street outside was waking up—someone’s dog barking, a car door slamming, the distant rumble of a city bus.Normal life.The kind she’d always told herself she didn’t want.
She thought about calling Meg back.About asking for Vic’s number again, this time not for a gig but for...what?A conversation?Another night?She didn’t even know.
Instead, she picked up her phone and opened a new voice memo.Hit Record.Spoke the scraps she’d written, her voice low and rough with the morning.
“Thunder in the pocket...steady when I break...”
Pause.
“He doesn’t ask me to stay...but he makes me want to...”
Longer pause.
“Grace in the chaos...power in the fall...he plays like he knows I’m terrified of it all...”
She stopped the recording and set the phone down.
The truth sat heavy in her chest.
Shewasterrified.
Terrified of how right it had felt to have him behind her onstage.Terrified of how easy it had been to let him into her bed and her body and—God help her—maybe even a corner of her heart.Terrified that if she let him stay the morning after, he’d see all the cracks she worked so hard to hide and decide she wasn’t worth the effort.
She’d kicked him out because it was safer.Because the alternative—waking up next to him, making coffee together, letting him see her without the armor—felt like handing someone a loaded gun and asking them not to pull the trigger.
Bonnie walked back to the desk and picked up the pen one more time.She didn’t cross anything out this time.She just wrote, letting the words spill out however they came.
I spent my life learning how to stand alone
Guitar on my back, heart locked up at home
But last night you sat down and the whole damn room changed
You played like you meant it, like the music was sacred, like I wasn’t deranged
She laughed softly at the last line—self-mocking, honest.
You matched every fire, every risk that I took
Left me shaking and raw with the way that you looked
At me like I mattered, like I wasn’t too much
Like maybe, just maybe, I could let down my guard for once
Bonnie set the pen down and stared at the page.Her eyes stung.
She didn’t know if she could do this.Didn’t know if she was brave enough to let someone in after spending so long keeping them out.But the music—the way it had felt with him behind the kit—had cracked something open inside her.Something she couldn’t just slam shut again.
She picked up her guitar again.Strummed the progression once more, slower this time.Let her voice settle into the lower, huskier register she saved for the songs that scared her.
“Thunder in the pocket...steady when I break...”
She sang the whole scrap she’d written, letting the chords carry her.
When she finished, the house was quiet again.But it didn’t feel empty the way it usually did after a one-night stand.It felt...full.Charged.Like the ghost of last night’s groove was still humming in the walls.
Bonnie closed the notebook and set it on top of the pile.She didn’t delete the voice memo.She left it there, raw and unfinished, like everything else she was feeling.
