Page 40 of Always Been His

I move into the bridge with a low rasp instead of the intended falsetto.

I can love you from afar. I can love you in the stars. I can be the Venus to your Mars.

He turns on his heels, cutting through the back of the crowd toward the side gate, his shoulders set, his head down.

The next line catches in my throat. I push it out anyway.

I’m coming home to a lover boy. I’m coming home, I’m coming home.

The gate clicks shut behind him.

I rush through the rest of the set trying not to run offstage after him at every note. I close on a short note that’s supposed to be long. This is probably the worst performance of my career, but I don’t care. I bow. I blow Dom a kiss. I hand the guitar back to the band.

The second the lights drop, I’m moving.

I catch Iris’s eye from the floor, lift two fingers at her, and tip my chin at the side gate. She mouths “go.” She doesn’t ask even when my face is doing whatever my face is doing right now.

I push through the side gate into the thick Maine air.

He is twenty feet down the alley with his back to the brick and a cigarette between two fingers, smoke curling up past the sharp cut of his jaw, his head tipped back against the wall, his throat exposed to the streetlight.

He hears the gate but doesn’t turn to look at me.

My body is shaking. “Since when do you smoke?” I bite, my boots clicking sharply on the pavement as I close the distance between us.

“Go back inside, Sienna.” His voice is gravel.

“Since when, Grayson?” I ask again as a crack forms in the center of my chest. “And why in the middle of my set?”

“I started a couple of years ago.” He takes a long pull, the tip flaring against the dark. “Go back inside. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to talk to you.”

“You have to talk to me.” The words burst out of me before I can stop them, my arms folding tight across my chest, my chin lifting. “If you’re going to break my heart, you can at least talk to me.”

His head comes off the brick.

He turns it slowly, the cigarette still between his fingers. His eyes find mine in the dark, and the cold blue of them almost makes me want to flee.

“What did you just say to me?” he rasps.

“You heard me.” I take a step closer. My pulse is in my throat. “You walked out on my song. In front of people. I’ve been writing songs about you for six years, and the first time I sang one to your face, in Boston, you left me. And now you’ve done it again! You’re a coward.”

“Sienna.” His voice has gone low. Dangerous. “Walk away.”

“No.”

He throws the cigarette and closes the twenty feet between us in four strides. The alley shrinks around him, and he stops six inches from me with his hands shoved deep in his pockets like he is keeping them off me on purpose. The dense air is gone, the back of my neck is hot, and I have to tip my chin up to meet his eyes.

“Karma’s a bitch, Sienna,” he growls.

Karma? Is he serious? What could I have possibly done to him to deserve this feeling?

I almost laugh in his face. Karma. He wants to talk to me about karma. I’m the one who has been lying awake in his guest room for three weeks listening to his floorboards. I’m the one who has been writing songs about him and begging for him to love me back in every track. I’m the one who was left alone in Boston. I don’t owe him anything. He stopped answering my texts. He has hardly spoken to me since I got here. He is the heartbreaker.

“What do you need to leave me alone?” he bites, his voice rough. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you,” I breathe.

He sucks his teeth, pulling away from me. “Bullshit.”