Chapter 7: Memories
The hotel room smelled like cheap roses from the plug-in air freshener and the faint, metallic tang of the city drifting through the cracked window. Neon light from the sign across the street—a peeling martini glass—pulsed red and blue against the ceiling, a slow, arrhythmic heartbeat. Lily lay on her back, the cool sheet tangled around her ankles, staring at that bleeding light. Adam’s weight was a solid, warm line beside her, his breathing already settling into the deep, even rhythm of near-sleep.
Her skin still hummed. The physical echo of him, of them, was a pleasant ache in her muscles. But her mind, treacherously, was somewhere else. It was stuck in the smoking area, on the weight of the black cloth in her hands, the chill of the glass over Kurt’s signature. A foundation stone, he’d called it. It felt more like a planet, its gravity pulling every other thought into orbit.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Adam mumbled into the pillow, his voice slurry with exhaustion. He turned his head, one eye opening a slit. The neon lit the curve of his shoulder, the familiar landscape of ink she’d traced with her tongue not twenty minutes before. “It’s, like, three AM. Brain off.”
“Can’t,” she said. The word was too sharp. She softened it. “It’s that thing. The frame. It’s… it’s in the closet, and I can still feel it.”
Adam shifted onto his side, propping his head up on his hand. He looked softer like this, stripped of the stage sweat and the performative intensity. Just a tired, handsome guy in a messed-up hotel bed. “It’s a sick gift. Ghostmane’s a real one for that. But it’s just a thing, Lil. A dead guy’s autograph. It doesn’t change anything.”
That was the problem. It changed everything. It made the help she’d given Ghostmane feel transactional, which it hadn’t been. It made her current life feel both incredibly lucky and somehow staged. And it had drawn a line in the sand, with Andy and his vultures on one side, watching her cross it.
“It’s not just that,” she said, sitting up. The sheet fell to her waist. The room air was cool on her skin. She reached for the half-empty bottle of whiskey on the nightstand, took a swallow that burned a clean path down her throat. “It was the look on his face. Andy’s. It wasn’t jealousy. It was… assessment. Like he was figuring out the tensile strength of the glass.”
Adam sighed, a short, frustrated sound. “Fuck Andy. Fuck his assessment. You let him live in your head, he’s winning. You’ve got the signed masterpiece, you’ve got the new track with Oli blowing up, you’ve got me here, not being a possessive dickhead.” He reached out, ran a calloused thumb over the tattoo on her ribcage—a winding, thorny stem that meant something only to them. “This is the win. Right here. This is the thing he doesn’t get to have.”
He was right. He was so pragmatically, infuriatingly right. Andy’s understanding of love was about possession, about orbits curving violently into his own. Adam’s was about proximity, about choosing to be in the same space, consciously, every day. It was supposed to feel safer. Most of the time, it did.
But sometimes the past wasn’t a ghost; it was a chemical residue. It was in the smell of a certain brand of cigarette, the opening riff of a specific song, the particular way neon cut across a hotel ceiling.
Adam’s hand drifted lower, his intent shifting. His touch was familiar, wanted. She felt her body respond, a simple animal electricity, even as her thoughts spiraled. She leaned into him, letting the kiss pull her under, trying to drown the noise in sensation. His mouth was hot, tasting of whiskey and sleep. He rolled over her, his body blocking the pulsing light, and for a few minutes, it worked. There was just heat, and pressure, and the grateful silence of a mind overwhelmed by nerve endings.
But as the rhythm built, a fragment of sound snuck into the space between her ears. Not from the room. From a room years gone. A cheap hotel room in Omaha, the air thick with the smell of tour bus diesel and spilled gin. A scratchy, worn-out recording playing from a phone speaker, because the streaming service had cut out.
She eyes me like a pisces when I am weak…
Kurt’s voice, not as a distant idol on a framed print, but as a ragged, immediate presence in a dark room. Andy’s lips had been at her neck, his hands rougher, more demanding than Adam’s, fueled by a different kind of hunger. It hadn’t been love. Even then, in the thick of it, she’d known it wasn’t love. It was conquest and combustion, a mutual devouring set to a soundtrack they both thought they understood. He’d chosen Heart-Shaped Box on purpose, she knew. For the title, for the sick, romantic irony of it. A box for her heart, which he was currently hammering open. The memory was visceral: the prickly hotel blanket against her back, the way his silver rings were cold against her skin, the sour gin taste of his kiss, and over it all, that fucking song, Kurt howling about his tumor. Andy had whispered the lyrics into her hair like they were secrets, like he’d written them for her, like he was the only one who could possibly understand the damage they both worshipped.
The memory wasn’t a thought. It was a full-sensory flashback, slamming into the present with the force of a truck. Her body, which had been arching into Adam’s, went rigid.
He felt it immediately. He stopped, pulling back just enough to see her face in the fractured light. “Hey. You okay?”
She couldn’t speak. She just shook her head, a minute tremor. The ghost of Andy’s weight was superimposed over Adam’s. The ghost of that song drowned out the sound of their breathing.
“Lily.” Adam’s voice was flat. The heat was gone from it. He moved off her, sitting up on the edge of the bed. The neon painted the tense lines of his back. “Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere,” she managed, her voice thin. “Sorry. Just… spaced out.”
“You didn’t space out. You left.” He didn’t turn around. “Was it him? Just now. Were you thinking about him?”
The accusation hung in the air, ugly and true. But not in the way he meant. He thought it was longing. It wasn’t. It was contamination.
“No,” she said, and it was the truth. “I wasn’t thinking. I was remembering. There’s a difference.”
He finally looked over his shoulder, his profile sharp. “And that’s better?”
“It’s worse,” she whispered.
He stood up, a swift, angry motion, and grabbed his boxers from the floor. The casual intimacy of the moment was shattered, replaced by a charged, brittle silence. He walked to the window, staring out at the blinking martini glass. “You gotta let that shit go, Lily. Or it’s gonna rot you from the inside. You got a guy giving you history-book presents, you’re playing the big festivals, you’re writing the best music of your life. And you’re still back in some fucking Nebraska motel with that vampire.”
“Don’t call him that,” she said automatically, the old defense rising. It was a reflex, and a mistake.
Adam whipped around. “Why? Because it’s mean? He’s a predator. He was then, he is now. He’s watching you, Lil. He’s not pining. He’s calculating. And you carrying his ghost in your head is giving him all the ammo he needs.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “That gift tonight. It was beautiful. It should’ve been a full stop. A new chapter. But you brought it in here, and you let him in with it.”
The unfairness of it, the accuracy of it, choked her. She pulled the sheet up around her, suddenly cold. “It’s not that simple. You don’t understand the… the history. The complications.”
“I understand that you have a choice,” he fired back, his voice low and intense. “You can be Lily Hartley, who gets fucking Nirvana originals from friends she helped out. Or you can be Andy Biersack’s ex-girlfriend, who still gets fucked by his memory in my bed. You can’t be both.”
The crude phrasing was meant to shock, to cut. It did. It landed like a slap. She flinched.
He saw it, and some of the anger left his face, replaced by a weary frustration. “Look… I’m not the enemy here. I’m on your side. But I can’t fight a shadow. And I won’t compete with a memory. Especially a shitty one.”
He grabbed his shirt and pulled it on. “I’m gonna go get some air. Maybe a shitty coffee from the lobby. This room feels… small.”
He didn’t slam the door. He closed it with a soft, definitive click that was somehow louder than any slam could have been.
Alone, the silence rushed in, thick and accusing. Lily wrapped her arms around her knees, burying her face. The echo of Heart-Shaped Box was finally gone, chased out by the brutal reality of the present. Adam was right. That was the most galling part. Andy wasn’t just a bad memory; he was an active toxin, and she was letting him seep into the one good thing she’d built for herself.
She looked across the room. Her leather jacket was slumped over the armchair. From the inside pocket, the corner of the black cloth peeked out. She hadn’t wanted to leave the frame in the festival locker; it felt blasphemous. So she’d carried it back here, this precious, heavy weight.
So she’d carried it back here, this precious, heavy weight. Now it felt like an anchor chain wrapped around her ribs. The argument with Adam played on a loop, each word a precise, surgical cut. You can’t be both. But she was both. That was the exquisite, exhausting truth of it. The girl who cried listening to In Utero and the woman who’d learned to carve sigils into her own skin were the same person, just viewed through different, warped lenses of time.
Andy’s lens was the most distorting. It magnified every flaw, every desperate need, and called it art. Called it destiny. Adam’s lens clarified, simplified. It wanted to heal the cracks, not trace their beautiful, broken patterns. Sitting in the silent ruin of their hotel room, she felt the cracks widening. A profound, hollowing loneliness seeped in, colder than the city air through the window. It wasn’t about Adam being wrong. It was about the terrifying realization that he might be right, and that being right didn’t fill the void.
The void had a name, and a face, and a memory of silver rings cold against warm skin.
She stood up, the sheet falling away. The air raised goosebumps on her bare skin. She walked to the armchair, movements slow and deliberate, like someone in a dream. Her fingers touched the black cloth. She didn’t unwrap it. She pressed her palm flat against the glass, feeling the solid, unyielding presence of the history beneath. This was the foundation stone. And right now, her foundation was sand.
A weak, shameful thought, clear and quiet, cut through the noise: He would understand. Not Adam. Adam understood her, or wanted to. Andy understood this. The specific, sick nostalgia. The way a song could be a haunted house you kept choosing to walk through. The way a gift could be a weapon and a tribute simultaneously. He’d look at this frame and he wouldn’t see a new chapter. He’d see a key to an old, locked room. And part of her, the rotten, furious part, wanted to turn that key with him.
It was a surrender. She knew it as she pulled on her jeans, the denim stiff and cold. It was a capitulation to the very narrative he was writing for her. She shoved her feet into her boots, not bothering to lace them. She grabbed her leather jacket, shrugging it on over her bare skin, the lining cool and slick. She picked up the wrapped frame, then her small crossbody bag with her wallet, her room key, her phone.
She paused at the door, her hand on the cold metal handle. She listened for footsteps in the hall, for the elevator chime that might signal Adam’s return. There was only the muffled, distant thump of bass from some other room, someone else’s night refusing to end. This was the moment to stop. To put the frame down, to get back in the bed, to wait for the coffee and the awkward, necessary talk.
Instead, she saw his face in the smoking area again. That look of assessment. He was waiting for a crack. She was about to hand him the entire fault line.
She opened the door and stepped into the hallway.
The corridor was a tunnel of garish floral carpet and blindingly bright sconces. It was empty, sterile, humming with the silence of centralized air conditioning. The click of her boot heels against the floor was obscenely loud. She felt exposed, a stark, black-clad figure in the antiseptic glow, clutching a shrouded rectangle to her chest like a mourner. She walked toward the elevators, each step a hammer fall on her own resolve.
The elevator doors slid open with a soft, sighing sound. It was empty. She got in, pressed the button for the fourteenth floor. She had no idea if he was even in the hotel. She had no idea what room. But this world operated on gossip and proximity; the headliners and bigger acts were usually clustered on the higher floors, away from the fan chaos. The festival had a pecking order as rigid as any occult circle. Andy would be at the top.
The ascent made her stomach lurch. Her reflection in the polished brass doors was a ghost—pale face, dark hollows for eyes, the black-wrapped frame a void against her jacket. What are you doing? The question had no answer beyond a visceral, magnetic pull. It was the pull of a finished argument, of a memory that wouldn’t let go, of a need to prove to herself that the ghost had no power by walking straight into its haunt.
The fourteenth floor was quieter, the carpet thicker. The air smelled of more expensive cleaning products, lemony and sharp. She stood there, stranded. This was absurd. She could text him. That would be the sane thing. A “you up?” loaded with a decade of subtext. But texting was a conversation. She didn’t want conversation. She wanted collision. Or maybe she just wanted to see the look on his face when she appeared, uninvited, at his door. To turn the tables, just for a second.
A door down the hall to her left opened, and a roadie she vaguely recognized emerged, carrying an empty equipment case. He did a double-take. “Lily? You’re on the wrong floor, dude. Party’s downstairs. 808.”
“Looking for someone,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady.
“Who?” He grinned, leaning against his doorframe. “Need help?”
She almost said no. But pride was a luxury she’d left back in room 711 with Adam. “Biersack. Which room?”
The roadie’s grin didn’t falter, but his eyes flickered with keen, instantaneous gossip. “Oh. Sure. End of the hall. 1420. The suite.” He winked, a gesture that felt dirty. “Have fun.”
She didn’t thank him. She just turned and walked, feeling his eyes on her back until she heard his door click shut. 1420. The number glowed in brassy digits on a dark wood door. It was larger than the others, set apart. She stopped before it. The weight of the frame in her arms was immense. Her heart was a frantic, hammering thing against her ribs. This was it. The point of no return.
She knocked. Three sharp raps.
Silence. Then the sound of footsteps, slow and approaching. A lock disengaged. The door opened.
He stood there, silhouetted against the warm, low light of a suite behind him. He was in sweatpants and a loose, faded Black Veil Brides tank top, his hair damp, as if he’d just showered. He held a glass of amber liquid in one hand. He didn’t look surprised. He looked like he’d been waiting. His blue eyes traveled from her face, down to the bundle in her arms, and back up. They were fathomless, absorbing everything.
“Lily,” he said. His voice was neutral, stripped of its usual theatrical affect. It was just a voice. “You’re holding your foundation stone.”
She hadn’t expected that to be the first thing he said. It disarmed her completely. All the sarcastic, defensive lines she’d rehearsed in the elevator vanished. She just stood there, a shivering, stupid statue.
“I…” she started, but no sound came out.
He stepped back, opening the door wider. A silent invitation. The light from the room spilled out, painting a golden path on the ugly corridor carpet. It smelled like him—sandalwood soap, clove cigarettes, the faint, sweet undertone of bourbon. It was the smell of a specific, compacted history.
She crossed the threshold.
The suite was spacious, blandly luxurious. A seating area with a large sofa, a low table littered with room service plates, lyric notebooks, and a familiar, ornate black lacquer box. The one from storage. Seeing it here, in this context, sent a fresh jolt through her. Past the seating area, French doors were open to a bedroom, a king-sized bed neatly made. The entire south wall was windows, showcasing a sprawling, glittering view of the sleeping city and the distant, dark fields where the festival now lay dormant.
He closed the door behind her. The sound was final. The corridor’ sterile hum was gone, replaced by a quiet so dense she could hear the ice melt in his glass.
“You fought with Cole,” Andy stated, moving past her to set his drink on the table. He didn’t ask. He knew.
She found her voice, though it was thin and frayed. “What makes you say that?”
He gestured vaguely at her. “You’re here. At four in the morning. Holding the single most emotionally loaded object in your personal cosmology. You’re not wearing a shirt under that jacket. And you look…” He tilted his head, his gaze clinical. “…hollowed out. That’s not the look of a celebratory booty call. That’s the look of someone who just lost an argument about their own soul.”
His accuracy was terrifying. It made her want to either scream or crumble. She chose a brittle defiance. “I didn’t lose. We just… stopped talking.”
“Same thing.” He leaned against the back of the sofa, crossing his arms. The tattoos on his biceps shifted. “The gift freaked him out. It made him feel insecure. He tried to logic it away, to make it small. ‘Just a thing.’ And that made you feel alone. Because it’s not just a thing. It’s a testament. And he doesn’t speak the language.”
Every word was a scalpel, expertly dissecting the last hour. She felt utterly transparent, and instead of feeling violated, she felt a shocking, unwanted sense of relief. Of being seen, in all her messy, contradictory truth. It was the most dangerous feeling he could have evoked.
“Why are you here, Lily?” he asked softly. The question wasn’t hostile. It was genuinely curious.
“I don’t know.” It was the truest thing she’d said all night.
He nodded, as if that was a perfect, acceptable answer. His eyes went to the frame. “You can put it down. It’s safe here.”
The implication—that it wasn’t safe where she’d come from—wound its way into her. Slowly, carefully, she walked to the long, low credenza under the windows. She placed the wrapped frame down, centering it on the polished wood. She let her fingers linger on the cloth for a moment before turning back to him.
“He said I had to choose,” she said, the words tumbling out. “Between being Lily Hartley and being your ex-girlfriend.”
Andy’s expression didn’t change. “And you told him it’s a false binary. That your identity isn’t a series of doors you close behind you. It’s a palimpsest. Everything is written over what came before. Especially the important things.”
She stared at him. He was quoting, almost verbatim, something she’d said to him years ago, in a different hotel room, after a different fight. He’d remembered it. He’d held onto it. The intimacy of that memory, weaponized now as understanding, was devastating.
“He doesn’t get it,” she whispered.
“Of course he doesn’t,” Andy said, pushing off the sofa. He walked to the mini-bar, pulled out another glass. “He’s a fundamentally simple creature. Action, reaction. Good, bad. Past, present. It’s why you’re with him. It feels clean.” He poured two fingers of bourbon, neat, and brought it to her. “But you and I, Lily… we’re not clean. We’re alchemical. We turn lead into gold and gold into poison, and we can never quite separate the two. We speak in symbols and scars. He speaks in statements of fact. It was always going to be a translation error.”
She took the glass, her fingers brushing his. The contact was electric, a live wire of memory. She took a sip, the fire of it grounding her. “You’re making it sound romantic. It wasn’t. It was toxic.”
“Toxicity is just potency directed at the wrong target,” he said, returning to lean against the sofa. He watched her over the rim of his own glass. “Our problem was never the passion. It was the aim. We turned it on each other, instead of through each other.”
The room felt smaller, the air charged with old electricity. The black lacquer box on the table seemed to pulse with a faint, dark energy. She remembered the feel of it in her hands in the storage unit, the promise and threat it contained.
“Why is that here?” she asked, nodding toward it.
“Because the equinox is coming,” he said simply. “And some conversations require the right… props.”
“I’m not doing a working with you, Andy.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to remember.” He put his glass down and walked to the box. He didn’t open it. He just rested a hand on its lid. “You came here because something in you remembers, too. Not just the bad. The other stuff. The fusion. The feeling of being known, down in the marrow, in a way that doesn’t require explanation. Cole gives you peace. But did you ever, for one second with me, feel peaceful?”
“No,” she said immediately. “I felt frantic. I felt consumed.”
“You felt alive,” he corrected, his voice intensifying. “You felt the voltage of being truly, dangerously awake. You can lie to him. You can lie to yourself. But don’t lie to me. I was there. I remember the girl who screamed lyrics back in my face like they were spells, who matched me drink for drink, fuck for fuck, idea for idea. That girl isn’t gone. She’s under layers of self-preservation and sensible choices. And she’s suffocating.”
His words weren’t a lure. They were an exhumation. They were digging up a corpse she’d tried to bury, and insisting it still had a heartbeat. She felt tears prick hot at the corners of her eyes, a mixture of fury and a dreadful, creeping recognition.
“Stop it,” she said, but there was no force behind it.
“Why? You came to my room, Lily. At four in the morning. You brought your holy relic. You want me to think you came for a friendly chat about your boyfriend’s limitations?” He took a step toward her. He didn’t touch her. The space between them vibrated. “You came because a part of you is tired of translating. You came because a part of you knows that this…” He gestured between them, then at the room, the box, the city beyond the glass. “…this messy, complicated, dark language? It’s your native tongue.”
A tear escaped, tracking a hot line down her cheek. She didn’t wipe it away. “It’s a language that hurts people.”
“It’s a language that tells the truth,” he countered. “And the truth often hurts. It hurt me when you left. It’s hurting him right now. It’s hurting you, standing here. But it’s real. What you have with him… is it real? Or is it just a sanctuary from the storm? A place to hide from what you really are?”
She was shaking now, a fine, full-body tremor. The glass in her hand quivered. He saw it. His demeanor shifted, the intensity softening into something more predatory, more gentle. He closed the final step between them. He was so close she could see the faint stubble shadowing his jaw, the intricate lines of the ink on his collarbone. He smelled like heat and memory.
“You don’t have to decide anything tonight,” he said, his voice dropping to a murmur. “You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to explain. You can just… be. In a place where you don’t have to perform or simplify or heal. You can just exist, in all your glorious, fractured complexity.”
His hand came up, slowly, giving her every chance to pull away. His fingertips, cool from the glass, touched the wet track of her tear. The contact was devastatingly tender. It was a touch from a lost time, a ghost touch that felt more solid than anything in the past year.
Her breath hitched. Every instinct for self-preservation screamed to turn, to run, to go back to the room with the arguing and the simple, flawed love. But that room was empty. And this one, for all its haunting familiarity, was full of a terrible, understanding quiet.
“Stay,” he breathed, the word not a command, but an offering. A blank space.
She was so tired. Tired of fighting the ghost, tired of building walls the memory just seeped through. The weakness was total. It was a collapse of will, a surrender to the gravitational pull she’d been fighting since the smoking area.
She gave the smallest, barest nod.
A slow, knowing smile touched his lips, not triumphant, but profoundly satisfied. He took her glass from her trembling hand and set it next to his. “The bedroom’s through there,” he said, nodding toward the open French doors. “I’ll be out here. On the couch. You can have the bed. No expectations, Lily. Just… rest. In a room that knows you.”
It was the perfect thing to say. The gallant, twisted courtesy of it disarmed her completely. He was giving her an out, a narrative where she was just seeking refuge, not reunification. She could cling to that.
Without another word, she turned and walked toward the bedroom. Her legs felt like water. She passed through the doors, into the dim, spacious room dominated by the large, tidy bed. She slipped off her boots, her jacket, letting them fall to the floor. She didn’t look back at him.
She slid between the cool, high-thread-count sheets. They smelled of hotel laundry, with the faintest, lingering trace of his sandalwood soap on the pillow. She curled onto her side, facing the windows, the city’s lights a blur through the fresh, silent tears.
In the other room, she heard the soft creak of the sofa as he sat down. Then, the low, unmistakable scratch of a needle hitting vinyl. A moment of silence, then the opening, distorted guitar notes filled the suite, quiet but clear.
Heart-Shaped Box.
He was playing it quietly, just for himself. Or just for the ghost in his room. It wasn’t an assault. It was an affirmation. A confirmation of everything he’d said. He spoke the language. He was speaking it now.
She lay perfectly still, listening to the song that was the skeleton key to her worst and most potent memories. The tears fell silently, soaking into the hotel pillow. Outside, the city glittered, indifferent. In room 1420, the past wasn’t a ghost anymore. It was in the next room, breathing. It was on the record player, spinning. And it was in the bed with her, a familiar, aching hollow she had, in a moment of unforgivable weakness, chosen to refill.
She didn’t sleep. She lay awake until the gray light of dawn began to bleed the color from the city’s lights, until the last track on the side had played and the suite fell into a deep, waiting silence.