I reached for his guitar and tried to pull it gently away, but he moved out of my grasp. “It was that heady mix of contrasts that got me hooked on him.”
I got the sense that telling me all of this was a compulsion he couldn’t resist.
“I’d tell him that I loved him, and he’d humor me, never rejecting me outright, but never giving me a clear answer. Some days, when we were working on this album, we’d spend most of the day in bed. He’d be loving, almost tender. He’d make me think we were finally together, only to ignore or scream at me the next day. He knew how to play me like an instrument.”
Tears streamed down my cheeks as I watched him try to remain composed.
“When I found out he was dead, my heart broke. It’s still broken. He was the first man I ever loved, and maybe he’ll be the only one I ever will love. But a part of me was also glad.”
“Abel, I’m so sorry. It sounds like he was awful to you,” I said, sniffling. This time, when I tried to lift the guitar away, he let me. I put it to one side and kneeled by his feet, placing my hands on his knees, ready to accept the pain he was sharing.
Abel’s hand found my cheek. “I never thought I’d write another song after he died. I didn’t write anything new until that night we met here. Who would have thought you’d be the one to show me I could still be do it,” he said in a low voice.
His index finger trailed the ridge of my nose. “Maybe, I should have known. You and your unbelievable talent appeared out of nowhere and swept all of them away. I think I knew it before they did. I saw you, and I could tell that you would make them fall in love with music all over again, and I hated the whole thing. Hated how you’d make them want to keep going. I tried to be contrarian, to resist, to deny…”
He slid down from the couch to the floor before me, his legs bracketing my frame. My hands slid from his knees to rest on his thighs, and our faces were less than half a foot apart. The air was charged.
“But I can’t deny it now,” Abel breathed. “We just wrote a song together.”
The intensity of his attention on me was almost too much. His eyes, his goddamn eyes, were so magnetic that I didn’t think I’d ever be able to look at anything else again without feeling like something was missing. He searched my face for something and if I knew what it was, I would give it to him a thousand times over.
“You don’t even understand the power you have over us all,” he said.
We were inching closer, my heart hammering louder and louder in my ears.
“I don’t have anything,” I whispered. “I’m a nobody.”
“You’re becoming somebody to us.” Lips parting, he slid his gaze to my mouth.
The door behind us flung open, and I scrambled away, scared out of my mind by the sudden sound.
Kyle, the sound engineer stood in the doorway with his arm wrapped around a young woman. His eyes widened as he took in the tableau before him. “Shit! I’m sorry. I was sure the place would be empty now.”
“It’s okay,” I rushed to assure him, but my words came out ragged. “We were just…wrapping up.”
The woman by him stood there with her mouth agape. “Oh my God. Are you Abel Donovan?”
Abel’s face went from startled to annoyed to his normal unreadable expression in the span of a few seconds. “Yes,” he admitted reluctantly.
“I’m such a huge fan,” the woman squealed, and I took in the band T-shirt and leather pants she wore. The shirt wasn’t Bleeding Moonlight’s but it was another metal band. “Can I get an autograph? And a picture?”
The woman dug for something in her purse, and I hurried to put my guitar back in its case. As I turned to leave, Abel and I shared a look. His mask was back on. Whatever warmth I’d seen in his eyes only moments earlier was gone.
Tonight, things between us had changed. I just wasn’t sure if it was for better or for worse.
ABEL
Be nice to the fans. Be nice to the fans.
The chant had been playing on loop in my head for the past ten minutes as Kyle’s date insisted on getting about a million pictures with me before asking me to sign on the upper curve of her right tit.
Have fun staring at my name while you’re fucking her tonight, Kyle.
The sound engineer seemed almost as pissed about this development as me, his blatant attempt at impressing the redhead had gone horribly wrong. I supposed she was impressed, just not with him.
Finally, there was a break in her long monologue about how much she loved our last album, and I used the opportunity to tell her I needed to head home.
Kyle insisted on walking me out.
