“I won’t be going forward, although I’ll admit I have been one for the past four weeks. I let myself get sucked into a pipe dream, as Liam so aptly called it, and now I’m paying the price. Mol, they nearly convinced me to agree to their insane request. Can you believe what an idiot I’ve been? I really thought I could be Bleeding Moonlight’s new guitarist. As if that kind of stuff could ever happen to someone like me.” My voice was breaking.
“You’re not an idiot for believing in yourself, for Christ’s sake,” Molly exclaimed. “You’re an idiot for not giving it a proper shot. Although Abel’s little episode was downright dickish, you can’t just walk away without talking to them again. They still desperately want you to join them, and I think it’s the best goddamn idea I’ve ever heard.”
“I could never agree to play with them.” I hoped my tone conveyed the finality of that statement.
“Liar. This is everything you’ve ever wanted. Everything you’ve been afraid of. The best things in life are hard. They don’t come served on a silver platter. We fight for them with blood, sweat, and tears, and that effort is what makes them mean so much. We can fight for what we want, Ade. Don’t you want to set me that example for me as an older sister?”
Tears were streaming down my face, and I sucked in a hoarse breath, no longer caring to hide my emotions from her.
“Oh, love…” Molly sniffed. “I’m crying too, if that makes you feel any better.”
I bawled into the phone, heavy sobs racking through me, and my sister joined me in solidarity. How had she turned out so well? I didn’t think I could love her any more than I did right then.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled once I managed to calm down. “All of it just means so much. It means so much that I don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole. I wish I could excise the last month from my brain and go back to not knowing what I could have. Now that I’ve gotten so close to it, the loss is fucking crushing.”
“You haven’t lost anything yet. Talk to them,” she pleaded.
I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready, but I didn’t want to worry her any more. If she got even more concerned about me, I wouldn’t put it past her to take Mason’s car and drive back here so she could drag me to go see Bleeding Moonlight.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
She started to protest.
“I promise, Mol. I just need some more time.”
Her loud sigh rattled through the phone on my end. “Fine. No more ignoring my calls and messages, okay? I’ll be checking in with you every day.”
“Okay, deal.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I hung up and splayed out on the couch. I had no idea what I was going to do.
EZRA
“We need to give her space,” I said for what must have been the tenth time in the past twenty-four hours.
That’s exactly how long it had been since Adeline stormed out of the studio and Abel brought down the future we were trying to build. Turned out it was a house of cards, and one rogue joker was enough to send it crumbling.
“Where the fuck is he?” Cole bit out, dialing Abel’s phone once again. We sat in my living room. None of us had caught more than an hour of sleep through the night.
Abel had left after Cole punched him, and we’d let him, thinking it was a good idea for everyone to cool off. We hadn’t anticipated him disappearing, his phone off, and his house empty.
“The longer we wait, the further she’ll drift in the wrong direction,” Silas argued.
“That’s why we talked to Molly. I trust she’ll be able to smooth things out a bit,” Cole said.
“We need to talk to Abel and figure out what the hell is going on.” For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what had set Abel off like that, given his earlier agreement to our plan.
“If we can’t reach him in the next hour, I’m calling the police,” I added. “We’ve waited long enough.”
As if hearing me, the front door opened, revealing a ragged-looking Abel on its threshold. His nose was taped up, and shades of purple were visible from under the bandages.
Cole jumped up, his expression a mix of anger and relief. “Where the hell have you been?”
Abel walked in and shut the door behind him. I didn’t know if his silence was a good or bad thing. He collapsed on the couch, lying on his back and rubbing at his eyes.
