Rock Wedding (Rock Kiss #4) - Nalini Singh Page 0,23
three of them focused on Noah.
“Shut up,” was Noah’s pithy response, and yeah, there was a hint of red on his cheekbones.
Not a blush though, Abe thought with a frown. This color seemed to have more to do with a surge of emotion. Whatever he wanted to talk about, it was important to Noah. Staying quiet, Abe let Fox handle this—the other man knew all Noah’s secrets, though David and Abe had witnessed his demons, could guess terrible things underlay them.
“Hey,” Fox said, staying relaxed in his chair. “This is us. Blood brothers forever.” A reminder of the promise they’d made on a boarding school playground after getting involved in a fight against a group of bullies that had left them bloody but victorious. “What’s up?”
CHAPTER 8
“I HAVE THIS THING,” Noah said at last.
Blowing out a breath, he shoved a hand through the golden blond of his hair. “A song. It’s not Schoolboy Choir material.”
“If it’s yours,” David said, “it’s Schoolboy Choir material. We’re not a threesome—” He groaned as the rest of them, even Noah, cracked up.
Fox was the one to say it. “Sorry, David, you’re a nice guy, but ain’t no ménage à trois happening here.”
Rolling his brown eyes, David said, “You idiots know what I mean. Schoolboy Choir has four members. It is whatever we bring to it.”
Abe nodded, his grin fading as Noah’s expression turned nervously hopeful. Even with friends, the guitarist didn’t often show emotion so openly. “Play it for us,” Abe said. “If we don’t like it, you know we’ll tell you.”
Others might not have understood why that made Noah’s shoulders relax. Those people hadn’t made music together for over ten years, from the time they first started the band way back in boarding school. They didn’t understand what it was to put your soul out there and hope people didn’t kick it. Having friends who had your back? It was everything.
Sarah had always had his back.
The thought was a hard one to bear—because Abe knew he hadn’t had hers. Not the way she deserved. Not the way she needed. If he could go back in time, he’d pound himself bloody, but he couldn’t. He had to live with the consequences of his actions, live with the fact that he was the one who’d made Sarah leave. It was all on him. No one else.
Music in the air, faint and quiet, a melancholy backdrop to the words Noah began to sing. The guitarist had a good voice, and this song, it needed that smooth, powerful voice, not Fox’s gritty edginess.
The song he sang was about a sparrow with a broken wing, and it fucking tore Abe’s heart right out of his chest, left it bleeding on the floor.
A stunned silence was Noah’s applause after the final word faded from the air.
Then Abe and David blew out their breath almost at once while Fox just looked at Noah in a way that made it clear exactly how deeply the song had impacted the lead singer.
“Goddamn. That’s powerful, man,” Abe said, his voice thick with a bucket load of emotions. “It made me think of Tessie, like she’s flying free same as that bird in the song.”
Noah’s dark gray eyes held Abe’s, his throat moving as he said, “Yeah.”
Nothing more needed to be said. Abe didn’t talk about Tessie, not even to his closest friends, men who’d all known and played with his baby sister and who’d stood beside him at her funeral. Sarah had pushed open that door with the raw honesty of her own grief and now “Sparrow” had shoved it open wide.
A deep but gentle rhythm, David beating it out on the drums.
Nodding, Fox picked up the guitar he’d set aside and began to weave his music with David’s.
Abe wasn’t even aware of moving from his keyboards to Tessie’s piano.
It just felt right to pull off the dustcovers, to take a seat on the piano stool and add the beauty of the keys to the music his blood brothers were creating. “Sparrow” wasn’t a song for keyboards or fancy arrangements. It was pure and beautiful, and it needed the same accompaniment.
When Noah began to sing again, Abe knew they’d gotten it right.
And as he played, he knew Sarah’s heart would break when she heard this song… but that she’d love it too. Because heartbreaking as it was, “Sparrow” also held a deep vein of hope of which Abe wasn’t sure Noah was aware.