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Letting myself out of the car, I meet eyes with Patrick as he shakes his head, stands from his stool and moves to open the door for me.
“Granger’s going to be pissed again.”
“Fuck him,” I laugh, not stopping long enough for Patrick to respond.
He’s not wrong, though.
As soon as I lift my head to look around the first floor, I see Granger waiting at the bar, his dark stare fixed on me, a deep scowl on his lips.
It’s a common expression when it comes to me, the lines of it deepening the shadows of his cheeks so that his cheekbones run like sharp blades beneath his eyes.
A tremor courses through me, but the wrong damn kind. Still, I plaster on my usual lie. The smile. The cute, childish pout. All the indications he needs to think he maintains some semblance of power.
“Get upstairs and get in uniform. Don’t waste my time with your bullshit excuses.”
Relieved by his quick dismissal, I run upstairs, make quick work of getting ready, and find myself in my usual cage within minutes.
It’s an escape for me here. A place where I can lose myself to the music that consumes me. I can close my eyes and pretend that I’m anywhere else.
That I’m somebody else.
That I’m free and simply part of the beat that drives me.
All my fantasies come alive in this place, and I can stay right here for hours.
I’m not struggling to make ends meet or constantly running from a life my mother never told me about. It was always some scary shadow that chased after us, Kane and I always suspecting mental illness over anything real and tangible.
Music is my solace.
The driving beat.
The highs and lows.
The harmonies and discordance that grip the mind in an ever-elusive expectation of what comes next.
I don’t have to think in this place.
Just be…
Granger can’t affect me from where he stands guard. The people littering the club don’t bother me. Nothing gets to me, and I’m happily dancing, the beat never stopping, my body keeping perfect time as all the stress of my life bleeds out of me.
I’m not Amèlie Hart:girl on the run, a hustler and poor. I’m not spending every last second of my day pretending to be what I’m not.
I simply exist.
There’s only one influence I’ve ever discovered that can somehow yank me straight from this freedom and back to the world.
Something I can’t describe.
Someone I know, but not because of any true details.
It’s his energy that pulls me in.
So strong and familiar.
His darkness matching mine.
That man hides as much as I do, but he refuses to see it. I can see it, though. Only because we’re two of a kind.
