“I can’t be a hundred percent sure.” My smile was fake, and we both knew it.
“Was he involved in something—”
“No.” Was that really the first conclusion everyone jumped to? “Nixon didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing that happened in there can have any legal ramifications, and it’s not like we have any morality clauses anyway.”
My phone buzzed again.
Ben glanced from my hands to my face, then pushed off my doorframe and headed back into the hallway. “Someone get me Amy Manson!”
I uncovered my phone as soon as he was out of sight.
Nixon: I read a statement to the board about the abuse
Nixon: He wasn’t even in the room before I left
The tension in my chest eased a bit. He hadn’t been forced to see his father.
He was really doing it—the work to get better. He wasn’t avoiding his past or shutting himself away in his apartment…or our Colorado house…and he was doing it sober, with his friends to back him up.
The ache from missing him threatened to consume me as I typed out a reply.
Zoe: I’m proud of you.
Nixon: I love you
My fingers hovered over the keys, but I just couldn’t go there. Couldn’t give him that power again. The first time I’d given him those words, he’d destroyed me in less than a day. It didn’t matter that my heart lodged in my throat every time I thought about him, not when it came to the very real need for a little self-preservation.
My phone vibrated.
Nixon: 3 months
I swallowed. That, I could handle.
Zoe: Three months.
20
NIXON
Damn, my girl was beautiful. I leaned over my guitar and scrolled through her last couple of Instagram posts, and sighed like the lovesick fool I was. Three weeks down…too many to go.
The only reason I’d opened my account back up—after deleting all the bullshit I hadn’t posted over the last few years—was hearing that Zoe had finally gotten one. It was the closest I got to her.
Her emerald-green eyes stared back at me through the screen, mid-laugh, with her arm around Naomi at Puget Sound. Guess she’d finally taken some much-needed time off. Missing her wasn’t even an emotion anymore as much as it was a state of being. Add to it the fear that she wouldn’t wait, wouldn’t take me back, wouldn’t want to handle the shit that being with me would inevitably heap on her, and I was hanging on to my sanity by a thread.
But it was a thread, which was more than I’d had this time last year. I was usually mid-spiral by the first week in May.
“Zoe post another picture?” Jonas asked, walking onto his porch and handing me an orange soda before taking the chair next to me.
“What makes you think it’s Zoe?” I asked, giving her one last look before shutting my phone off.
“You follow three people, and if you’re looking at Quinn or me like that, we’ve got problems.” He picked up his guitar and retuned the E.
“True.” I glanced at the notebook that sat on the small, wrought iron table between us. “Where were we?”
“Chorus.” He took a swig of his iced tea and set it back down. He strummed the same progression we’d followed with the first. “How about we split that first line here—” He tapped the paper.
“You’re the only thing—the only thing that matters,” I sang.
“Yeah. That’s good.”
I wrote the new variation down as he strummed it out, then penciled in my next thoughts as I spoke them aloud. “In this parade of mad alibis—a thousand little lies—intentions fall like confetti.”
Jonas stopped strumming and looked over at me. “Damn.”
“Or we could flip it—”
“No, that’s perfect. We should have sobered you up years ago.” He grinned. “Mad alibis. Nice.”
“Whatever.” I scribbled down the chord progression before strumming it out. Had to admit, my brain was on fire now that it wasn’t constantly weighed down. Did every song I write have a hefty dose of Zoe in it? Yeah, but most of my thoughts did too.
Jonas read off the paper and nodded as he moved through the melody. “Let’s repeat the hook here.”
I nodded as he sang it back. “You’re the only thing—the only thing that matters.” His eyebrows raised as he followed up with the next lines. “Holding me steady with little more than a memory—the only thing—the only thing that matters.”
I had a full-out smile by the time he put his spin on the end. “It’s good.”
“Yeah. Like…single good. Like ‘call Quinn and get on a plane so we can record it’ good.”