Chapter 16: Feedback Loop
The air in Hollow Echo Studio was different. It was heavy, stale, and tasted of old cigarette smoke embedded in drywall, decades of spilled beer, and the faint, acrid tang of electronic dust. It smelled like forgotten demos and dashed hopes. To Nevaieh, it smelled like home.
Ana followed her through a unmarked, rusted door off a back alley in a neighborhood that had been up-and-coming for twenty years. The interior was a time capsule: wood-paneled walls, stained carpet the color of dried blood, a threadbare sofa sprouting yellow foam. In the center of the main room stood a labyrinth of equipment—amps, a drum kit coated in a fine gray powder, microphone stands lying like felled trees. But Nevaieh moved through the chaos with the certainty of a pilgrim.
“Home sweet shithole,” Nevaieh said, her voice echoing in the cavernous space. She dropped her guitar case with a thud that sent a ghost of dust shimmering in the lone track light.
“It’s got character,” Ana said, running a finger along the edge of a mixing board. It came away black.
“It’s got a rat named Carl who pays half the rent,” Nevaieh replied, a real smile touching her lips for the first time since they’d left the penthouse. The tension from the morning—the abrupt exit, the charged return—still hung between them, a live wire neither had yet cut. But here, surrounded by her artifacts, Nevaieh seemed to soften at the edges.
She powered up an amplifier. A low hum joined the room’s silence, a heartbeat. She plugged in a vintage Telecaster, its sunburst finish scarred and beautiful. Without tuning, her fingers found the fretboard and a riff spilled out, raw and snarling, chewing up the quiet. It was the musical equivalent of her gaze: direct, uncompromising, a little dangerous.
Ana leaned against the sofa, watching. This was a different kind of nakedness. Nevaieh closed her eyes, head dipping toward the guitar’s body as she played. The music was complex, shifting from a driving rhythm to a melodic, sorrowful line that seemed to wind around the room like smoke.
After a few minutes, Nevaieh stopped abruptly, the last note feeding back into a whine she silenced with a twist of a knob. “Your turn,” she said, nodding towards a second guitar on a stand.
“I told you, I just write words. I don’t play.”
“You hummed a melody in the shower that one time. The one after the…” Nevaieh trailed off, her eyes flicking to Ana’s. The unspoken reference to the pool, to the first time, hovered. “It stuck in my head. Hum it again.”
It was a challenge. Ana pushed off the sofa, took the guitar. It was heavier than she expected. She fumbled, trying to remember how Nevaieh held it. She felt foolish.
Nevaieh came up behind her, her body not touching Ana’s but surrounding her. Her hands covered Ana’s, repositioning her fingers on the neck. Her calloused fingertips were rough against Ana’s knuckles. “Here,” she murmured, her breath warm against Ana’s ear. “One string at a time. Just feel it.”
She guided Ana’s right hand, showing her a simple picking pattern. The notes were hesitant, plunky. But they were notes. Ana concentrated, trying to replicate the melody in her head. It was clumsy. Childish.
Nevaieh didn’t laugh. She listened, her chin nearly resting on Ana’s shoulder. “Okay,” she said when Ana stopped, frustrated. “Now keep that. Just keep that going.” She picked up her own guitar and began to weave around Ana’s simple pattern, harmonizing, building a structure around her fragile foundation. What had been clumsy alone became intentional together. The melody from the shower unfurled, given flesh and spine by Nevaieh’s skill.
“See?” Nevaieh said, her voice low with a concentration that felt like intimacy. “You play.”
They worked for an hour, the dynamic shifting. Ana would offer a phrase, a cluster of words. Nevaieh would translate them into a chord progression, a rhythmic hook. Ana would counter with a change, a different emotional tone. It was a conversation more honest than any they’d had with clothes on.
“That line,” Nevaieh said, pausing. “‘The echo in the hollow heart.’ It’s good. But it wants to be a scream, not a whisper.” She cranked the gain on her amp and played the corresponding riff distorted, aggressive, a wall of sound.
Goosebumps rose on Ana’s arms. “Yes. Like that.”
Nevaieh grinned, a wild, bright thing. “Come on.”
She led Ana not to the main room, but to a smaller, airtight door. The live room. It was bare except for a single microphone stand and thick, sound-absorbing foam covering every surface. The silence inside was absolute, a vacuum.
Nevaieh closed the heavy door behind them. The outside world vanished. All that existed was the two of them and the charged quiet. She put the headphones connected to the control room over Ana’s ears. A click sounded in her skull, and then the song flooded in—their song, the one they’d just birthed, raw and immediate in the mix.
The beat was visceral. The bass line Nevaieh had laid down throbbed like a second pulse. Ana’s own voice, from a previous scratch vocal, echoed, layered, haunting.
Nevaieh watched her face, reading her reaction. “You feel it?” Her voice was muffled by the headphones but Ana saw her lips form the words.
Ana nodded, her body already moving to the internal rhythm. Nevaieh stepped into her space. She took Ana’s hand and placed it on her own throat so Ana could feel the vibration as she hummed the hook along with the track. The sensory overload was immense: the music crushing in through her ears, the hum vibrating up her arm, Nevaieh’s eyes, dark and fever-bright, locked on hers.
Nevaieh’s hands went to Ana’s hips, anchoring her. Then they slid up, under her shirt, rough palms skating over the sensitive skin of her ribs. Ana gasped, the sound loud in her own head but lost to the headphones and the foam walls. Nevaieh leaned in, her lips brushing the shell of Ana’s ear, dislodging the headphone slightly. Her voice was a graveled scrape, just for her.
“You wanna hear how loud you can scream?”
Before Ana could process the question, Nevaieh spun her around, pressing her front against the cool, textured foam of the wall. The sudden shift made Ana dizzy. The music pounded on. Nevaieh’s body lined up against her back, hard and unyielding. One hand splayed across Ana’s stomach, holding her in place. The other dragged down, calluses catching on the fabric of her jeans before cupping her through them, a firm, undeniable pressure.
Ana cried out, the sound swallowed by the headphones and the room. She could only feel it in her throat. Nevaieh’s mouth found the side of her neck, teeth scraping the tendon. Her hand pressed harder, working her through the denim, a ruthless, rhythmic friction that synced perfectly with the kick drum hammering in Ana’s ears.
It was too much and not enough. The music, the confinement, the roughness of Nevaieh’s touch. Ana pushed back against her, a wordless demand. Nevaieh understood. She unfastened Ana’s jeans with practiced efficiency, dragging them down her hips just enough. Her fingers dipped inside, finding her soaked, and Ana’s knees almost buckled. The headphones slipped, one ear now filled with the roaring track, the other filled with the sound of Nevaieh’s ragged breathing and the slick, obscene sound of her own arousal.
Nevaieh’s fingers didn’t tease. They pressed inside, curling, stroking that spot that made Ana see white at the edges of her vision. Her other hand came around, palm rough against Ana’s lower abdomen, holding her steady as she began to move her fingers, a deep, relentless pace. Ana’s forehead pressed against the foam wall. She was panting, her cries breaking into short, sharp sobs that were lost to the soundproofing and the music blasting directly into her skull.
The climax built like a tsunami, deep and inevitable. It wasn’t the sharp, stolen pleasure of the morning. This was a quake, starting in her core and radiating out, shattering her composure. She screamed, the force of it tearing through her chest, a raw, unfiltered sound that, for all she knew, was utterly silent to the world outside this room. She shook with it, held upright only by Nevaieh’s arm across her stomach and the wall against her face.
As the waves receded, Nevaieh slowly withdrew her hand. She gently adjusted the headphones back over Ana’s ears, the music now a crashing, triumphant cascade. She turned Ana around, her back against the foam. Ana was boneless, wrecked, her jeans around her thighs.
Nevaieh looked at her—flushed, trembling, exposed—and something in her own expression fractured. It wasn’t triumph. It was something closer to awe, edged with fear. She leaned in, her forehead resting against Ana’s, their breath mingling. In the cavern of the headphones, the song reached its crescendo and faded into a final, resonating chord.
In the sudden, ringing silence of the track’s end, Nevaieh’s voice was the only thing in Ana’s universe.
“I heard you,” she whispered, the words a confession. “Every single note.”
The silence after the music felt louder than the song. Ana’s breath hitched, her body humming with aftershocks and the raw echo of her own voice trapped in her bones. Nevaieh kept her forehead pressed to Ana’s, her thumbs tracing Ana’s jawline, a tactile whisper in the quiet dark.
Then, a sharp, digital buzz shattered the sealed room.
It pulsed from Ana’s jeans, pooled around her ankles on the floor. The screen lit up, casting a garish blue glow on the foam. The name “TIA” flashed, a mundane intrusion into this altered world. Ana flinched, a full-body jerk of irritation.
“Ignore it,” Nevaieh murmured, her lips brushing Ana’s temple.
It stopped. Then started again, insistently. Ana’s sigh was a ragged thing. “It won’t stop. She’s like a mosquito with a grudge.” She peeled herself from Nevaieh, from the warmth of the wall, and bent to snatch the phone. Her movements were stiff, the spell thoroughly broken.
She answered, turning slightly away. “Tia, not now—”
The voice on the other end was a torrent, high-pitched and frantic, words tumbling over each other without pause. Ana’s face tightened. She tried to interject. “Look, I’m in the middle of—”
Tia’s voice rose, a shrill steamroll of drama about a missed bill, a landlord, a perceived slight from two weeks ago. It was a one-way deluge. Ana’s knuckles went white around the phone. Her free hand pressed against her forehead, fingertips digging into her temple.
“Tia, for fuck’s sake, let me talk—” Ana’s voice was low, strained.
It was useless. The torrent continued. A hot, familiar anger, thick and sour, rose in Ana’s throat. It was the same anger that coiled in her gut every time this happened, the helpless fury of not being heard. She didn’t have the energy for it, not here, not now, not with the ghost of Nevaieh’s hands still on her skin.
Without another word, she pulled the phone from her ear and stabbed the red “end call” button. The sudden silence felt violent. She stood there for a long moment, her back to Nevaieh, breathing hard as if she’d just run a sprint.
She composed her face before turning around, aiming for a light eye-roll, a casual ‘what can you do’ shrug. “Sorry. Family.” The word tasted like ash. She couldn’t meet Nevaieh’s eyes, focusing instead on pulling her jeans back up, her fingers clumsy on the button.
Nevaieh said nothing. She had leaned back against the opposite foam wall, arms crossed. Her earlier softness was gone, replaced by a watchful stillness. Her eyes, hawk-sharp, tracked the tremor in Ana’s hands, the rigid line of her shoulders.
“It’s fine,” Ana muttered, more to herself. She ran a hand through her hair. “She’s just… a lot. Doesn’t know when to stop.” She forced a thin smile. “Where were we?”
Nevaieh pushed off the wall. She closed the small distance between them, but didn’t touch her. Her gaze was a physical weight, scanning Ana’s face. “We were here,” she said, her voice quiet. “You’re not.”
“I am.” Ana’s protest sounded weak, even to her.
“No.” Nevaieh reached out, not to grab, but to slowly, deliberately, take Ana’s phone from her limp hand. She placed it on a nearby speaker, screen-down. “Your mom’s not around to tell her to back off, so she dumps it all on you. And you just have to stand there and take it.”
Ana stared at her, a cold shock slicing through the residual anger. She’d never mentioned her mother being gone. Not the circumstances, not the weight of it. The number “305” on her skin, her mother’s love letter etched permanently on her back—they were silent monuments.
Nevaieh saw her shock. She shrugged one shoulder, a faint, pained acknowledgement. “The letter on your back. It’s dated five years ago. The way you touch the numbers on your wrist sometimes. It’s not a zip code.” She paused. “And nobody gets that mad at a phone call unless it’s a wound getting poked.”
Ana’s breath left her in a rush. The careful wall she’d built between that old grief and this new, fragile thing with Nevaieh crumbled under a simple, observed truth. She looked away, her vision blurring.
“You don’t have to perform for me, Anaijiah.” Nevaieh’s voice was softer now. “Not okay-ness. Not ‘I’m fine.’” She finally touched her, a single finger tilting Ana’s chin up until their eyes met. “Was she your sister? Tia.”
“Cousin.” The word was a cracked whisper. “But yeah. Basically.” She leaned into Nevaieh’s touch, the simple steadiness of it. “I just… I couldn’t get a word in. It just makes me so mad.”
“I know.” Nevaieh pulled her in, not with the hungry desperation from before, but with a firm, encompassing solidity. Ana’s face pressed into the soft cotton of her shirt, smelling of studio dust and her skin. “You wanna break something?” Nevaieh asked into her hair, her tone serious.
A watery laugh escaped Ana. “Maybe.”
“Good.” Nevaieh held her tighter. “We’ve got a whole drum kit out there. I’ll show you how.”