Chapter 3: Song
The faint, percussive click of pool balls was the only orderly sound in the chaotic hum of the student union game room. Svet lined up her shot, the green felt vast and intimidating under the harsh fluorescent lights. Her friends were a noisy constellation around other tables—Kira arguing over foosball, Jake feeding quarters into a buzzing arcade game with violent enthusiasm.
Edwin leaned against a scarred pillar, a silent silhouette in his charcoal grey hoodie. His voice was still a wreck, a low, rough scrape that did things to her concentration she was trying very hard to ignore. He’d nodded a greeting earlier, his eyes a little less clouded than the day before, but the sound of his damaged vocals had sent a direct, unwelcome pulse of heat straight to her core. Way sexier than you probably intend. Her own words echoed back, taunting her.
She took the shot. The cue ball kissed the stripe, sending it spinning lazily toward a corner pocket. It lipped the edge and stayed out.
“Your form’s all arm,” his ruined voice murmured from behind her left shoulder. He was closer than she’d realized. “No follow-through from your center.”
She straightened, turning. He was right there, holding two bottles of water. He offered one. “I thought you were a golf girl. Same principle.”
“Golf is a solitary cry for help dressed in polite apparel,” she said, taking the bottle. Her fingers brushed his. “This is warfare.” She gestured vaguely at the table. “And I’m losing.”
“You’re distracted.” He took the cue from her, his movements economical. He chalked the tip, his focus absolute. The line of his shoulders under the soft fabric, the deliberate flex of his wrist. She watched, mesmerized. He sank three solids in a clean, mechanical succession before missing a difficult bank shot by a millimeter.
“Show-off,” she breathed.
He handed the cue back, a ghost of a smile on his lips. “Just demonstrating follow-through.”
The air between them felt thick, charged. She was hyper-aware of every glance he stole when he thought she was looking at the table, every accidental shift that brought him within inches. It was a current that had always been there, but now it had a voltage. It hummed.
Later, crammed into her BMW with Kira and Jake, the mood shifted to something louder and more liquid. “He’s playing the new one tonight, right?” Kira asked from the back, already cracking a seltzer. “The mysterious layered masterpiece?”
“That’s the rumor,” Svet said, her eyes on the road, on Edwin’s profile in the passenger seat. He was looking out the window, but she could see the tension in his jaw. He was nervous.
The bar was a living entity of sound and shadow. Their usual booth was taken, so they colonized a high-top near the front. Marcus spotted them immediately, a flash of white teeth from behind the polished wood. “The cavalry arrives!” he called, already sliding a tray of shot glasses toward them. “On the house for the performer’s entourage.”
Edwin gave a tight nod of acknowledgement, then slipped away toward the small stage to check his gear.
Marcus’s attention settled on Svet. “You surviving the midweek marathon?”
“Barely,” she laughed, taking the shot—tequila, with a suspiciously perfect lime wedge. It burned a clean path down her throat. “We’re running on caffeine and poor decisions.”
“The best fuel,” Marcus winked, his gaze appreciative and unchallenged. He was easy, flirty. Uncomplicated. For a fleeting second, she considered the simplicity of it.
Then Edwin stepped to the microphone.
The room’s chatter dipped. He didn’t speak, just adjusted the height, the movement causing his shirt to pull taut across his back. He strummed a single, testing chord. The raspy, breathy cough he gave into the mic shouldn’t have been erotic. It objectively was.
He started to play.
This was the new one. It began not with the complex, layered guitar work he was known for, but with a simple, melancholic piano melody piped through his synthesizer. A foundation. Then his voice came in, ravaged and whisper-soft, threading through the notes. It wasn’t singing; it was confession. The words were about cracks of light in closed rooms, about silent languages spoken in glances across crowded spaces.
Svet stopped breathing. The Leonard Cohen book sat on her nightstand. This was that. For her.
As the song built, he switched to guitar, layering rhythm over melody, building a sonic tapestry that was both intricate and yearning. His eyes were closed, his body swaying slightly with the effort. The rawness of his voice wasn't a flaw; it was the point. It was the fracture letting everything true spill out.
She was aware of her friends cheering, of Marcus polishing a glass and watching the crowd’s reaction with a professional eye. But they were silhouettes, noise at the edges. Her whole world had tunneled to the man on stage, pouring out a secret in front of everyone, a secret only she could fully decipher.
Her third shot, taken during a raucous cover song, unspooled something inside her. The careful restraint of the day, the polite distance, began to dissolve in the warm, bass-thick air. Every time he came back to the table for water, she felt him. The heat off his skin, the scent of sweat and clean cotton. Her gaze kept catching on the line of his throat, the damp hair at his temples, the way his jeans sat on his hips.
During a break, he stood beside her, his arm grazing hers. He was talking to Jake about a broken snare drum, his damaged voice a low vibration she felt in her own ribs. She wasn’t listening to the words. She was watching his lips shape them, wondering how they’d feel against the sensitive skin under her own jaw, against her mouth. The impulse to lean in, to press her lips to the pulse point racing in his neck, was so visceral it made her fingers tremble around her glass.
Her eyes drifted down, following the line of his shirt, and stuck. The worn denim, the suggestion of form beneath. A flush spread across her chest. She wrenched her gaze away, taking a gulping drink of water that tasted like nothing.
He felt her stare. He always did. His sentence trailed off. He glanced at her, a question in his eyes.
She just shook her head, a tiny, desperate motion. Nothing. Everything.
The night blurred at the edges. She laughed too loudly at Kira’s jokes, danced badly near the table, all while maintaining a fierce, internal vigilance over the space between her body and his. It was a war of millimeters. A brush of a hand as she passed him a napkin. The press of his knee against hers beneath the small table, a contact that lasted three heartbeats before he shifted away.
He played his last set. The final song was quieter, just voice and a single, clean guitar line. A lullaby for the drunk and the lovesick. When the last note faded, the applause felt distant.
In the car again, with Edwin silent in the passenger seat and their friends sleepy in the back, the tension coiled tighter. It was a living thing in the confined space. Every red light was an agony. She could feel the weight of the unsaid, the unsung, the untouched, pressing down on her.
At his apartment building, he got out. He leaned back in through the open passenger door, his eyes finding hers in the dashboard glow. “Thanks for the ride.” The words were shredded velvet.
“Any time,” she said, and her own voice sounded strange, tight.
He held her look for a moment longer, a silent exchange that held the echo of the song, the pool cue, the bookstore, the mushroom aisle. Then he closed the door.
As she drove away, Kira mumbled, “You two are gonna give me a cavity, I swear to God.”
Svet didn’t answer. Her skin felt too small. Her mouth was dry. The ghost of where his knee had pressed against hers burned. All she could think about was the crackle of his voice in the dark, and the terrifying, thrilling possibility of what it would mean to finally, finally, follow through.