Adam sucked in a breath and held it, waiting for more words to come. He needed to write them down before he forgot them. The lyrics were rough, but he could use them in a song. Part of him—that part that wrote the songs that made Sole Regret what it was—had missed this darkness, the morbid place where his creativity dwelled. But most of him missed the light in his lif
e. Madison had been gone only hours, and already he was in full mourning. Full darkness. How dark would it get before he fractured completely? He could already feel the cracks forming in his soul. It was only a matter of time before it shattered.
Adam sat up and gently pulled his hand from Nikki’s. She blinked up at him.
“Will you wait here for a minute?” he asked. He needed something to write on and had nothing with him.
“I guess.”
“You want a beer while I’m up?”
“Are you going to throw the bottle against the side of the bus after I finish it?”
He lifted an eyebrow at her. “If I feel like it.”
She grinned. “Yeah, I’d like a beer. Unless you have something stronger.”
Adam shook his head. Something stronger always led him to trouble. And he would avoid that trouble for as long as he was able.
“A beer is fine.” Nikki tilted her face to the sky. Sunlight kissed her smooth cheek and danced in the blue of her sad eyes. Watching her, Adam was struck by another spark of creative inspiration. He really needed a pencil and paper. Maybe he should start carrying a notebook around in his pocket again. He hadn’t done so for a long while. Hadn’t needed to. Because when his life had gotten light, his creativity had fallen silent.
On the bus he grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge before he dug one of his sketchbooks and several charcoal pencils out from under his bunk mattress. He tucked the pad under his arm and headed back to the picnic table behind the bus, replaying the lyrics in his head and searching for more.
Nikki hadn’t moved from the spot he’d left her, but she wasn’t staring up at the clouds. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, her lips pursed together, brow knotted as if she were in pain.
“Are you okay?” he asked as he settled on the surface of the picnic table beside her.
Her hand shot out and scrambled to find his. Only when she had it clutched firmly in her own did her body relax and her breathing begin to slow.
“I don’t like to be alone,” she said in a whisper. “When I’m alone, bad things happen.”
“Is that why you’re so clingy with Melanie?”
Her eyes snapped open, and she glared at him. “I’m not clingy.”
He huffed in amused disbelief. “If you say so.”
Her hold loosened slowly until she released his hand. He flipped open his sketch pad and wrote when I’m alone, bad things happen on one page. Something about that sentence struck a chord with him. He then flipped to a clean sheet and, along the left margin, he wrote the words that had come to him earlier.
“What are you doing?” Nikki asked.
“Writing something.”
“Yeah, I sort of figured that out. What are you writing?”
“Song lyrics.”
She lifted her head off the table and craned her neck to try to see what he was hurriedly scrawling across the page. He pulled the notebook up against his chest and lifted an eyebrow at her.
“Do I need to ask you to leave? This is top secret.”
She released a heavy sigh and flopped back on the table. “You know I’m a huge Sole Regret fan, right? You can’t really expect me to not sneak a peek.”
A shadow crossed one of her eyes. Reminded him of a skull. Lyrics abandoned, he began to sketch her face, half in its realistic, lovely perfection, the other half exposed to the bone, and her flesh picked clean by the two buzzards he drew flapping their wings on the stark ground beside her as they fought over the heart they’d torn free from the now empty hole in her chest.
“Are you drawing something?” Nikki asked after several long moments of silence.
“Yeah.”
Before he could stop her, she grabbed the edge of the sketch pad and tipped it toward her. Her breath caught.
“It’s me,” she said.
He wasn’t sure how upset she’d be to see herself drawn that way, half her flesh gone. Her chest an empty chasm.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
Beautiful? Not exactly the reaction he’d expected.
“Where did you learn to draw like that?” She pulled herself up to sit beside him, her fingers tracing the penciled lines of her face and then the bones of her skull. Her touch was light enough that she didn’t smudge the charcoal. He wasn’t sure why her interest in the drawing made his heart thud against his ribs. Her fingertips hesitated over the pair of birds wrenching her heart in two directions.
“My parents . . .” she whispered and then looked up at him for validation.
He nodded and stroked a hand over the back of her head. Her brown hair was like silk beneath his fingertips. “It isn’t bad enough that they rip your heart out, but it’s as if they’re fighting over who gets to hurt you more.”
“Yes, exactly like that.” Nikki considered him for a moment, her gaze searching his face and then meeting his eyes. “You’re different when you’re with someone one on one.”
He lifted a brow at her.
“Good different,” she said hurriedly. “I always thought you were so cool and pretty much an asshole, but you’re really kind. And deep.” She furrowed her brow at him. “And . . .”
“Scary.”
She laughed. “No, not scary. Dark, but not scary. The realism of that chest wound you drew . . . Pretty gory. And those lyrics?” She grinned. “They are a little scary.”
Adam hugged the sketch pad to his chest again. He’d forgotten that he’d written them along the margin.
“You weren’t supposed to see those.”
“Sorry. I told you I was a fan. I couldn’t help it. They’re truly amazing. Have you written any other lyrics?”
He snorted. “Just every song Sole Regret has ever released.”
“No shit? Maybe you are scary,” she said. “In a good way, of course.”
“Lie back so I can finish my drawing,” he said.
She leaned back and settled on the surface of the table again.
“I always assumed that as the singer, Shade wrote your lyrics,” she said. “You have no idea how many times I’ve lied awake listening to him sing those words to me. Screaming them in my ear. Imagining he’d written them for me because they touched me so deeply and kept my hope alive. I was so infatuated with him and the songs he sang just for me. And all along it was you who wrote the songs.” She glanced at him and grinned. “So I should have been trying to get into your pants all this time instead of Shade’s.”
He shook his head at her. “I already said I’m not interested in sex.”
“But we can be friends?” she said, and the innocent lilt to her voice made his heart clench.
“Yeah, we can be friends.”
She reached for his knee and gave it a squeeze.
“Just friends,” he added, eyeing her hand pointedly.
The offending hand slid from his knee, and she moved it to rest on the top of her head as she continued to gaze up at the sky. Apparently, being just friends meant that she should talk his ear off while he continued to add details to his sketch. As he drew the lines of her slender arm, she told him about how she met Melanie when they were children. And as he added the details of her fingernails and the creases and texture of her delicate hands, she told him how she’d gone to college with Melanie, skipping over the horrors of her adolescent family life because it had been devoid of Melanie. And as he tried imagining her bare breasts—yeah, it was a tough job—so he could do a decent job of drawing them around the gaping wound in her chest, she told him how Melanie always saved her from herself. Nikki had a thing for Gabe’s new flame. Even though it wasn’t any of Adam’s business, he should probably clue the guy in or someone was bound to get hurt. And in his experience, it tended to be the guy half of the relationship that was left with his heart shredded and who ended up drowning his sorrows in a bottle of beer or drawing Madison’s perfect tits on another woman’s body.
I have issues, he thought as he drew an elaborate butterfly resting on the side of Nikki’s head—the
beautiful side of her, not the skeletal side. The butterfly’s wings were poised in mid-downstroke, giving the illusion of movement. The only things he like drawing as much as tits were animals. He hadn’t skimped on the