"you know we have a gig next week? will you be there?" no hint of anything other than basic friendliness. liam's hair was a wild mess, the sun bouncing off the soft waves that framed his temples, his body warm and strong, like a large lion, as he folded himself onto the bench to sit next to me.

distracted and flustered, i stammered out, "um, sure. maybe. as long as i don't take a raffle ticket."

his laugh boomed across the grass in front of us, scaring off a small flock of pigeons.

what had happened four and a half years ago was somewhere between tenderness and pity on his part, and i knew that. i didn't want to know it-but i knew it. i could fantasize, and i could remember, i could let memory stretch me back to the first sexual experience of my life, and i could put on the brakes pretty quickly when the emotions kicked in. those...sam owned those. i wanted the combination of what i felt for sam and the burning hot sex i'd had with liam.

if only, right?

if only.

sam

what the fuck was liam doing here? and it turned out amy had seen me and joe? this was getting weirder and weirder. liam was hitting on amy. there was a familiarity there-i knew they lived next door to each other growing up-but, there was something more. i caught a glimpse of her pink cheeks, the way she ran her fingers through her hair in that flirty gesture that so many girls had. did she really just lick her lips? and liam with that cocky grin.

plus there was that damn kiss on stage.

he had bagged so many girls over the years. groupies loved him-not that we had that many, but...there were a few. he'd pretty much fucked anybody with a vagina except darla, and i wouldn't put it past him to have tried. the funny part was, he only slept around after charlotte dumped him. before that, he was totally, one-hundred percent a goner for her.

he'd gone silent at the end of our senior year of high school, said nothing about what was going on with her. she was in college and something had happened, but liam was like a steel drum welded shut-buoyant and airtight. the speed with which he'd found his way into so many other girls' pants had been really, really admirable. most of us couldn't believe that he could get a girl in bed so quickly. at one point, we'd even timed it-his record was forty-seven minutes. if you were into that sort of thing, it was pretty fucking impressive.

what the hell was he doing talking to amy?

i overheard their banter; it was flirty without being serious. there was something in his tone that said this was not someone he was after. she seemed to recognize it too; there was a guardedness to her. amy could be like a little puppy, eager and a little too excitable when she wanted people to approve of her, and there wasn't any of that here. then again, i was projecting qualities onto her that she'd had four and a half years ago.

now, all i felt was a massive mushroom cloud of jealousy and an undercurrent of rage because if he touched her right now....

what i needed was to go back home and drum my way out of everything. so, i did, careful to avoid being spotted by the two of them.

the walk back to trevor and joe's place was short and uncrowded. i got into the apartment and then i grabbed a few drum pads, some headphones, some sticks. a full set of drums wasn't gonna cut it in an apartment building with hundreds of people so the only way i could practice was to go down into the basement, which was surprisingly clean and dry for an ancient building, and i'd set up my drum pads. they were these little circles designed to practice songs without making too much noise.

i organized them according to a standard drum set and then i put my headphones on and set up my playlist. if thinking about amy made my mind turn into a whirling confusion of emotions i had no right to harbor after four and a half years of what i did to her, then drumming could sort out all the pieces and put them in their rightful places. i may not have any right whatsoever to possess some of the emotions that i had for amy, but i could at least put them where they belonged.

as i started with a low, quiet beat and then built up to the next level, my shoulders relaxed, the lump that had formed, built of anger and muscle, of betrayal of my own agitation clearing as well. as the song progressed, the tempo carried me out of my mind, away from linear thought and i became my hand muscles, my forearms, my thighs, and yes, my cock. everything turned on, everything narrowed into the beat, the change, the measures, the chorus, the solo...whatever the music demanded of me, i gave it. i gave it back two-hundred percent.

it was a relationship, it was a love, it was an affair. i could make love to the drums with my hands in a way that got out the hunger, that got out the pain, that made me slide away from being sam, fucked up sam, and turned me into a rock god. feet flying, legs moving, arms pumping, neck anticipating where it needed to be next, my eyes floating from space to space, my arms knowing exactly what to do in the right moment, seconds before they needed to do their magic-it was like communing with another body.

amy's face popped up behind my closed eyelids. the touch of her lips, how close we'd been, and how stupid i'd become so quickly. how can everything good, and everything righteous, and everything abysmal and horrible, happen to you in the same hour? one hour. you get one hour of your life to experience it all and to make a decision that blows it all to smithereens.

what would these same hands be like running along the soft inner curve of her thigh? what beat would my fingers find, running up her ribcage to the soft swell of her breast? how could these forearms lift her above me, nude and skin glistening in the moonlight that shines through the windows at the perfect moment that we commune?

as i buried myself in the stronger songs in our set, every muscle was rigid, every tendon was primed, every note i played was for her.

chapter three

amy

a week later

new show. new location. same old amy. once liam invited me to the gig, i couldn't get it out of my mind.

as i sat there at my little table in the back, hiding and trying not to be noticed, i realized that joe wasn't there. some new guy was setting up the bass. this was a nicer place than most of the joints liam had described them playing in, on and off over the years. there had even been a higher cover charge, which had taken me by surprise-ten bucks is ten bucks when you're a student, but i paid it, gladly, if it gave me a chance to just sit back and watch.

i brought my tablet with me and i sat in the back, reading through maya banks' latest in her trilogy, and wondering about all of these relationships that lived in books i read. sam was onstage, quiet, purposeful as usual and he said something to the new guy,who just nodded. new guy looked like a scruffy version of joe ross-without the perfection. they were both dark haired, dark eyed, and sort of italian looking. other than that, the similarities ended. i didn't want to go up and ask where joe was. maybe that was what was going on in the park the other day between him and sam. had joe left the band? that would be a shocker.

"hey, whatcha readin'?" said the most annoying voice ever.

i looked up with a jolt. darla. darla the groupie who slept with all the guys.

"books," i said, biting back a nasty response of have you heard of them? she wasn't stupid, i could tell. a little coarse and rough around the edges but cambridge, and boston, would refine her-it always did. i'd seen plenty of girls like her come through my college, and they had come in ready to take on the city and then the city took them on.

new england is different from other parts of the country-there's a coldness to people, a reserve that just seems normal if you're raised here, but when you spread your wings a little and travel around, you realize that everyone else thinks we're just a bunch of uptight massholes. darla had that wild, loose, overly friendly manner that would make an old yankee cringe and stare her down.

so i did.

"i know you're reading books, silly," she said, her voice going a bit hard. "i meant what book are you reading?"

without waiting for the answer, darla leaned over and read the title page. "maya banks? who's that?"

"she writes romance novels."

"like her highlander's heinie?"

what? i thought. "no, i don't read that kind of romance novel."

"what kind do you read?"

"it's more fifty shades."

"you're into bondage." darla nudged me with her elbow and said it in that robotic text-to-speech voice

something inside me tightened and snapped. "no, i'm into reading. that's what i'm going to do for a living."

"you're going to be a reader?"

"i'm going to be a librarian."

darla's eyes softened and there was some kind of a new respect in her face that caught me off guard. "my uncle was a librarian," she said quietly. "good on you."

"thanks," i said, the conversation taking a turn i hadn't expected. you're still angry with her, i told myself. i didn't want to like her. why did she have to be so likable?

"but i don't think that they kept that fifty shades shit in our library. least not in peters, ohio. maybe one of the bigger cities would let you check that out but where i'm from, some preacher would come up with some boycott and the next thing you know there'd be no library and there'd be a, you know, dunkin' donuts there now."

she rambled and i tuned her out. it was remarkably like conversing with my mom. my eyes shot over to sam.

darla's eagle eyes followed mine. "you got a thing for him, don't you?" she said.

that made my blood run cold. "who i have a thing for or don't have a thing for is none of your business."

"it is when it's with the band," she said.

i snorted. "why, because they're all yours?"

she pulled her neck back, frowning. "no, they're not all mine," she said.

the emphasis on the word 'all' made me shoot to my feet. i was shaking and i had never in my life been this close to reaching out and slapping someone. instead of making a fool of myself, i turned around and marched off to the bathroom.

sam

amy was here again.

something was different about her. it was hard to catch a solid look at her with the lighting in here but her face was tilted as she talked to darla, an angry, smoldering look in her eyes. her body language said that she couldn't stand even one more second of talking to joe and trevor's woman. darla didn't seem to get it, just plowing through and talking to amy in spite of all of the obvious signals.

then again, that was darla-she was the same way with the rest of us. at first, it was infuriating and then, after a while, it grew on you. nothing was going to grow on amy, though. she was pissed and i wondered why. what had darla done to her?

none of that was important to me, though. what was important was that amy came here. she was wearing a tailored shirt that was anything but businesslike, tapered against her waist, clinging to all the fine curves and making her breasts stand out. she turned her head and ran an angry hand through her hair, setting pearls dancing on the silver hoops in her ears. the light caught on a matching necklace, a perfect circle of silver, dropping a line of smaller pearls from her collarbone to her cleavage.