Page 72 of Before You Fell

Phoenix: Fuck. Willow. Please.

No delivered underneath. No proof they’ve reached her. Not even the cruel little comfort of knowing she is choosing to ignore me.

I stare at them until my eyes burn, as if I can glare hard enough to make it give me a sign that she has seen them.

But there is no sign. No answer. No angry paragraph telling me to go fuck myself.

Only silence.

I call her again around two in the morning because, apparently, I have become a desperate asshole with no self-respect and a humiliation kink.

It doesn’t ring the way it should. There is half a second of silence, before the call dies before it can even crawl its way to voicemail.

Then I call again, because I am an idiot, and because some sick, arrogant part of me still thinks persistence counts as power if I dress it up as control.

I almost throw the phone across the room, but that would be stupid because I would have to drag my pathetic ass over there, pick it up, and check whether she has answered.

Christ.

By three, I’m outside her apartment, knocking on her door hard enough to bruise my knuckles.

“Willow.”

I knock again, harder this time, because apparently shame has left the building, taking my last scrap of dignity with it.

“Wills, open the fucking door.”

Her neighbor opens instead, an old man in a robe with murder in his eyes, who tells me people are trying to sleep.

I tell him congratulations.

He tells me to leave before he calls security.

I leave because Willow is not here, and if I stay any longer, I might start doing pathetic shit like begging at a closed door, as if it gives a damn who I am.

By the time morning crawls in, I’m wired and half out of my mind. I head to the studio because some stupid part of me expects her to be there.

I walk in and my eyes go straight to the couch where Willow always sits, with one leg tucked under her, coffee in one hand and a notebook open on her lap.

The couch is empty. No coffee. No notebook.

I toss my jacket over a chair and grab the guitar from the stand, needing something solid in my hands before I feel the absence of her all over this room.

My fingers close around the neck, but the strings seem wrong under my fingers. Everything is off by half an inch. The air. The lights. The silence.

I hate that every empty space has her shape.

The door opens behind me and Cruz enters first.

He stops when he sees me and his face goes blank.

That has been happening since I fucked Willow that night at the club and let the whole band watch her come back alone, with hurt all over her face, and my fingerprints still on her skin.

Cruz used to throw insults at me for sport. Lazy ones. Dirty ones. The kind of shit we tossed around because silence meant something was wrong.

Now he gives me only silence.

Jett comes in after him, quiet as ever, coffee in hand, his gaze already taking in the room and landing on every ugly thing I have dragged in. Jax follows, drumsticks in his back pocket, jaw tight, eyes hard on me in a way I don’t like.