Chapter Seventeen

MATTS WAKES SYRUP -slow to sunlight on his face and the even breathing of someone sleeping beside him.

Sydney sleeping beside him.

The sun tips through the curtains they left half-open the night before, highlighting the fine hairs on Sydney’s upper arms, distinct and golden between the slanted shadows painted over her. Everything feels oversaturated in the early-morning light: Her tattoos are a riot of blacks and blues, reds and yellows; the edge of her teeth, barely visible between parted chapped-pink lips, are a stark white; a dozen different shades of brown shine in the curls spilling across her pillow and partially obscuring her face. Matts watches as slow-moving dust motes circle Sydney’s still form; he watches with a possessive thrill as her chest moves beneath his shirt, and with sudden clarity, it comes to him that he is well and truly fucked.

There’s no uncertainty anymore.

He’s in love with her.

Now, he just has to figure out how to keep his feelings in his chest and not in his mouth long enough so that maybe she’ll fall for him, too, and then they can both be terrifyingly beholden to each other.

Matts shifts, sitting up in a careful forward crunch, and slowly, so slowly, pushes her hair out of her face. He strokes a finger down the soft wispy curls at the nape of her neck. He resists the urge to press his thumb to the pale bruise under the hinge of her jaw even though the animal thing in his ribcage demands it.

Matts knows that humans are most vulnerable when sleeping and evolved the capacity for recuperative, deep, sound sleep because they could. With cooperation and trust, humans developed a method to resist predation that many other species didn’t.

He watches Sydney breathe, realizing her trust feels like a responsibility. He wants to be worthy of it. He wants to show her he’s worthy of it. He wants to touch her. Maybe even more than he did before. Now, Matts knows what the weight of her feels like in his arms.

He goes to make coffee. Staying in bed is no longer an option.

When Matts returns, two mugs in hand, Sydney has roused enough to locate and put on her glasses but is still sprawled out, rumpled and ethereal in a tangle of sheets. She’s muttering something about the sunlight’s audacity and writing an angry letter to the solar system.

He sets Syd’s mug on the bedside table as she probably can’t be trusted to keep it upright yet. Also, he doesn’t trust himself to touch her right now, feeling as much as he is. Wanting as much as he does.

A brush of fingers could be his downfall.

“Oh God, I love you,” Sydney mutters, wiggling toward the coffee. Matts nearly trips over the rug that has been in the center of the bedroom since the day he moved into the apartment. He decides a shower is in order.

When he returns, damp, cold, and with what feels like a better grasp on his dignity, Sydney is sitting up in the bed. She still doesn’t look entirely aware of her surroundings, but Matts isn’t worried for the safety of his sheets anymore as she cradles the mug in her hands.

“Mmph,” Sydney says as Matts moves to the closet to find a pair of sweats.

“Good morning to you too,” he says.

“I slept for nine hours,” Sydney mutters, voice creaky from disuse. “I can’t remember the last time I slept nine hours straight.”

Her hair is a positive riot of bedhead. He wants to see her like this every morning.

“Do you need to get a topper for your bed in the tour bus?” he asks.

“I think it’s more related to the company than the bed,” Sydney says, completely without artifice.

She’s smiling softly at him as she sips her coffee, and Matts can’t help but follow the line of her throat as she swallows. A pair of moles rests just where the stretched collar of his shirt falls over her collarbone. He knows what they taste like now.

Matts looks away. “I guess I don’t snore then?”

“You don’t. And I feel safe here.”

“You don’t feel safe at home? Or when you’re traveling?”

“No, I do. But I sleep lighter, usually. Small noises wake me. But last night—” Sydney gestures toward the bed. Toward him. “You took the side closest to the door. And I think subconsciously, I felt, I don’t know…like I could…relax. Like you wouldn’t let anything happen to me.”

She’s doing this on purpose, he thinks. She has to be.

“That’s true.” Matts does not reach for her and counts it as a personal victory.

Sydney yawns into her mug before swinging her legs off the bed and standing, one hand clutching the coffee to her chest, one fisted and stretched up toward the ceiling.

“Breakfast?” she asks.

The morning is slow—scrambling chicken-spinach eggs and buttering toast interspersed with small teasing sips of kisses before Sydney pulls him back into the bedroom. She eats her food while mostly in his lap. And then she stays there, demanding that Matts show her his electric guitar skills.

It’s awkward, playing with her pressed between his chest and his guitar, but it’s also sort of perfect, especially when it devolves into her trying to finger the strings while he mans the fret for a truly discordant rendition of “Layla.”

Sydney’s just as reluctant as he is when they have to leave, and she holds his hand in the car, singing along softly to the radio, hair in her face, smiling into the wind. When he parks at the ranch, Sydney dramatically proclaims she’s lost the ability to walk, and perhaps, he should take her back home with him and provide some sexual healing. Matts makes the obvious decision to pick her up and carry her inside while she sings Marvin Gaye in his ear.

“I come bearing your lead singer and guitarist,” Matts calls to the assorted people in the living room. “Where should I put her?”

“Oh, wherever there’s space,” Sky says, gesturing magnanimously to the couch.

Except when Matts moves to dump Sydney on the empty cushions, she tucks her face, oh so sweetly, into his neck…and sinks her teeth into his shoulder.

“ Ow ,” Matts says and sits with her in his lap instead, which was probably her goal.

“What?” Devo asks.

“She fucking bit me,” Matts says.

“Maybe don’t sound so pleased about it,” Rex suggests.

“Or look so enamored,” Devo adds.

“Sorry. I don’t have any control over that.” Matts doesn’t sound sorry. Probably because he isn’t.

“Disgusting,” Devo proclaims.

“Oh, you are not one to talk,” Sydney says over Matts’s shoulder. “We had to put up with your slut era. You can handle a little light biting.”

“Facts,” Sky agrees. “Nothing Sydney does will ever surpass the Flamingo Incident.”

“Slut era?” Matts repeats. “ Flamingo Incident?”

“We don’t need to discuss it,” Devo says.

“It involves Devo’s pasty ass, a sorority girl, and a large but honestly not large enough flamingo-shaped pool floaty,” Rex explains.

“Stop talking, or I’ll quit, and you’ll have to find a real manager,” Devo threatens.

They all consider the hassle that would entail and, evidently, decide silence is the best option.

“Thought so,” Devo mutters.

Sydney reaches for the acoustic guitar propped against the arm of the sofa and pulls it into her lap, nearly hitting Matts in the face with the headstock. She strums a few cords.

“Hey, Deevs, speaking of managerial duties and nudity, did you hear back from the Rolling Stone people about the pictures they want to use?”

Sydney leans her head back to whisper into Matts’s ear, “These photographers are obsessed with getting me naked.”

“Same,” he whispers back.

Devo sighs. “They sent the proofs. I can show them to you later.”

“Judging by your tone, you’re willing to admit I have grounds for concern, then.”

“Maybe,” Devo says.

She picks out a lazy scale. “I have so many grounds I’m the master of an estate. I’m landed gentry with all these grounds. I’m high society.”

“Yes, Syd. Fine. Jesus.”

She strums for emphasis. “I dine with four and twenty families!”

“Oh, look, we made it two minutes before our first literary reference. I think that’s a record.”

“You recognized it.”

“I’ve been indoctrinated against my will.”

“Sorry,” Matts says. “What was the literary reference?”

“Jane Austen,” everyone present says.

“‘ Pride and Prejudice ,’” Devo specifies.

Sydney pretends to wipe away a tear. “I’m so proud.”

“I still don’t get why you don’t want to embrace your role as rock’s new sex icon,” Sky says. “I guarantee those pictures are bomb.”

“I’m a sexual icon in the same way that a potato is a battery,” Sydney says.

“Disagree,” Matts says. “Hard disagree.”

“Gross,” Devo mutters.

He doesn’t want to, but… “I need to go,” Matts says, shifting Sydney out of his lap so he can stand. “You’ll be at the game tomorrow?”

“I will.”

“Good.”

“Good,” she agrees, grinning up at him.

“Oh, just fucking kiss already,” Sky mutters.

They do.

*

MATTS’S DAD CALLS him the following morning. Nine hours before their fifth—and final, if they lose—game in the second series of their playoff run.

Other guys, they might expect a pep talk. Encouragement.

Matts has been expecting a call for a different reason.

He sits down and retrieves his Rubik’s Cube before answering on speaker.

“Dad,” he says.

“That girl you brought home with you,” he starts because God forbid they exchange pleasantries. “Karl says she’s a transexual.”

Of course it was fucking Karl.

“Transgender,” Matts corrects. “And Syd’s a lot of things. The transgender part doesn’t even make the list of top five most interesting things about her.”

His dad ignores the deflection. “Son, the tattoos and the clothes I could handle, but this—”

“I’m not asking your permission,” Matts interrupts. “Just so we’re clear.”

His dad’s voice goes flinty. “Justin. It isn’t right. You have to see that she, or he, or whatever—it isn’t right .”

“I get that this is a shock to you,” Matts says levelly. “But I need you to understand that you’re talking about the woman I love. So, if you can’t be respectful, I will hang up on you. And we won’t speak again until you can be respectful.”

He practiced those sentences. He workshopped them. Tried different inflections for emphasis. He said them to himself in the mirror. In the car. Because he knew how his dad would react when he found out, and Matts wanted to be ready. He’s spent most of his life fumbling through arguments, unable to get his words out the way he wanted, inelegant and embarrassed by his fumbling. He needed to be better than that for Sydney. So, he practiced. And he’s proud that his voice doesn’t waver.

His dad says nothing for several seconds, and then, “You love her?”

“I do.”

“I thought you said you weren’t together.”

“We weren’t when we had that conversation.”

“How long?”

“Since that night in Gunnison, actually. She heard what I said to you. About how if she showed the slightest bit of interest, I’d get on my knees for her.” Matts solves the cube with a last, deft twist of his fingers. “She showed interest.”

He gets a vicious enjoyment from his father’s heavy silence.

“You know what people are saying about you online?” he says finally.

Matts slides the cube into the GAN ROBOT. “I cannot emphasize enough that I do not care what strangers on the internet think about me or my relationship.”

“It could impact your career.”

“You said the same thing about staying with the Hell Hounds after Alex and Rushy came out,” Matts reminds him. It was probably the biggest fight they ever had. Another one where Matts tripped over his words and ended the call wanting to punch something. Or cry. “And then, we won the Stanley Cup, made it to the final the following year, and my contract renewal last year was three times what I was making before.”

“You’ll be out in the second round this year,” his dad says.

It’s cruel. But it’s also true. He knows their odds of winning their game tonight, much less somehow crawling back from a 3–1 deficit, is unlikely.

“Because Alex and Rushy and Kuzy are injured. Our performance in the regular season was excellent. The fact that we’ve gotten this far in the playoffs without them is—” Matts stops to breathe. To focus. He won’t let his dad derail the conversation into rehashing old arguments he’s not prepared for. “That doesn’t matter. You were wrong then for telling me to leave. And you’re wrong now.”

“I’m trying to protect you.”

“I don’t think you’re hearing me. I love her.”

His dad falls silent again.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” he says finally. “I don’t know how you can—” He sounds helpless. “I don’t understand it.”

“I’m not asking you to understand,” Matts says.

“Then what am I supposed to do with this?”

“Nothing. Just—” Matts’s chest is suddenly tight. “Just try to love me. And maybe try to love Syd too. You shouldn’t even have to try that hard because she’s—” He clears his throat. “You could try. And you can tell Karl to fuck off.”

“Justin.”

“I need to go.”

“Justin,” his dad repeats. “You know I do, right?”

“You do…what?”

“Love you.” It’s gruff. Unpracticed. Unexpected.

Matts exhales. “I do.”

“Well. Good luck tonight.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

He hangs up, uncertain how he’s feeling.

Matts decides he doesn’t have the emotional bandwidth to interrogate it.

He opens Instagram instead and goes to Sydney’s profile.

Her most recent post is a close-up of her leaning into a mic stand toward the end of a concert, hair sweat-tangled around her face, eyeliner smeared. Her eyes are closed, and she’s smiling, fierce and sharp around whatever lyrics she’s singing. She’s gorgeous.

Matts makes the mistake of looking at the comments, but before he can generate any rage about the shit-talking taking place, he realizes that Sydney has already answered several of them.

Like one from a woman who commented a bible verse and said, very passive-aggressively, I’ll pray for you .

Oh, that’s so sweet , Sydney responded. In that case, I will dance naked under a full moon for you .

Or the one who commented, Doesn’t matter what lies you tell yourself, your birth certificate will always say you’re a boy .

Sydney answered that one with a confused emoji and, My birth certificate also says I’m six pounds. Things have changed .

Or the one from some asshole with a truck as his icon: Wonder whose dick is bigger, yours or your boyfriend’s?

What an offensive question , she responded. Have you SEEN Matts? Obviously, him .

Instead of telling the guy he’s a fucking idiot, Matts likes Sydney’s response.

And then he forces himself not to moon any longer over his girlfriend—is she his girlfriend? They didn’t ever specify; he’d like to specify—because he has a PT appointment and still needs to pick up lunch before his nap. Matts scrolls back up to the picture one last time before shoving his phone in his pocket.

Hockey. He needs to focus on hockey. He can deal with feelings later.

*

MATTS PLAYS ONE of the best games of his life.

He’s on the ice for thirty-six minutes and thirteen seconds, and he pushes hard, as hard as he can, through every single one of them. Through two overtimes. Through twelve face-offs. Eight face-off wins. Six shots on goal. Two goals. One assist. One fight.

He finds lanes. He makes passes. His stick is an extension of his arm, and his skates are solid underneath him, and all he can think about when he’s on the bench is his next shift. His next pass. His next goal. It’s math and muscle memory. Physicality and fear. Matts uses every bit of his skill, his weight, and his height to dominate. And it works. Every time he comes off the ice, someone pats his helmet or yells compliments at him—for an interception, a breakaway goal, a poke check to a Stars forward that Jeff turns into a goal, a backward between-the-legs pass to Rome for a goal with three seconds left in the power play.

Matts plays one of the best games of his life.

And it’s still not enough.

They lose 6–7.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, and it doesn’t. Not really. But hope is a dangerous thing. And he had hope, small and desperate as it was.

When Matts enters the locker room to the tight condolences of Alex and Rushy and Kuzy, wearing their suits and pained half-smiles, he feels like the worst kind of failure.

Maybe he could have done better. Maybe he could have pushed harder. It was just one point— one point. Maybe if he didn’t lose his edge on that breakaway in the first period, or he won that face-off in the second, or if his pass to Asher were an inch closer in the third. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

When Matts walks into the garage, flanked by his equally quiet teammates, he finds Sydney leaning against the driver’s side door of his car.

“Hey,” Syd says.

He doesn’t respond. He can’t. She doesn’t touch him. Matts wonders if she knows—if she can somehow tell that if she hugs him, he’ll start crying, and he doesn’t want to do that. Not now. Not here.

“I’m taking you home with me,” Sydney says.

Matts needs a moment for the words to compute. “You’re flying to California tomorrow morning.”

“And I’m taking you home with me tonight . No arguments.”

He obeys.

And she takes him home.

Sydney drives him in his car, no words, no music. She pulls him down the hall and into her room. He already showered at the arena, but he doesn’t fight her when she bullies him into the bathroom, turns on the water, strips him with perfunctory sweetness, dropping occasional kisses to his skin as it’s revealed.

The shower isn’t big enough for both of them, not really. But there’s enough space to stand under the nearly-too-hot spray and for Sydney to wrap herself around his back, hands linked over his belly, forehead pressed between his shoulder blades.

Matts wonders if this is intentional too. If she knew this was the only way he’d be able to cry, with the beat of water on his face to excuse the tears and his back to her so she could feel his shuddered inhales but not see the painful, embarrassing devastation on his face.

It feels ridiculous to be so upset over what is, objectively, just a game. Matts wasn’t lying when he told Sydney that hockey wasn’t an intrinsic piece of his identity. But his performance, the validation of winning, and the guilt of losing are a part of him, even if he doesn’t want them to be.

He tried.

So fucking hard.

Sydney presses wet kisses to his slick skin, humming indistinctly, holding him with zero indication of urgency to be elsewhere until, finally, the tension in his back dissipates. Until he’s able to scrub his hands over his face and inhale deep the steam-thick air.

“Hey,” Sydney says into his shoulder. “Can you help me with my hair? It got all tangled, and it’ll take forever to sort it out by myself.”

The request is a relief.

Matts snags a wide-toothed comb from the basket hanging on the showerhead and turns in her slackened arms. She’s docile under his direction, letting him push her until their former positions are swapped: her back to his chest. He has to duck a little to start at the ends of her hair and work his way up, careful not to pull too hard. He shampoos her hair while he’s at it, because it needs to be done, and he wants to do it. Matts combs through it again before rinsing, then discards the comb when he conditions so he can use his fingers on the now silky, clinging curls. He’s careful to cover her eyes when he tips her head back to rinse and digs his fingertips into her scalp to separate the strands, making sure all the product is gone.

“Okay,” Matts says finally, wishing there was a step after conditioning. “I think you’re good.”

“I’m better than good,” Sydney murmurs, leaning into him with a lax drowsiness that he decides is complimentary. “I guess soft hands on the ice translate to haircare as well because that was the gentlest my hair has ever been detangled and probably the most thoroughly it’s ever been washed. It was perfect. You’re perfect. Thank you.”

She’s managing him, he realizes, giving him space to feel without scrutiny. Distracting him with a simple, manual task—one he can complete with tangible success within a few minutes. Praising him for completing it well. Filling, just a little, the empty well of failure in his chest.

She knows him.

And it feels good to be known.

*

BY MORNING, THE disappointment has turned into resignation. It still sits like a dirty, shameful thing in his gut, but it’s not pressed tight against his throat like it was when he left the stadium the night before. Matts probably has Sydney to thank for that.

She woke him up just past dawn with weirdly endearing headbutts and an invitation to make omelets before she had to leave for the airport. However, his hopes of a slow, quiet morning cooking with her are dashed when they enter the kitchen and find it full of people.

Sydney’s parents are at the table with Sky and Paul, Devo is frying something, and Rex is pouring milk into a bowl of cereal.

“Morning, sunshine,” Devo says to Syd. “I have news. From your label. I would have told you last night but—” He nods to Matts. “You seemed occupied.”

“News,” Sydney repeats. She squints at Rex, Sky, and Paul who are all studiously looking at things that are not her. “News which you have clearly already shared with the rest of the class. Okay, then.”

Devo winces. “They want to release ‘Love You Whole’ as a single. I pushed out our departure from LA next week so y’all can have two extra days at the studio.”

“Oh,” she says. “Fuck.”

“What?” Matts doesn’t know much about the music industry, but he’s pretty sure that dismay, or something close to it, is not the standard artist reaction in a situation like this.

Everyone else in the room looks at him as if they know something he doesn’t.

“But I’m still workshopping it,” Sydney says, maybe a little desperately. “The lyrics aren’t even that good.”

“Maybe not,” Sky agrees. “But the way you sing them is…”

“Devastating?” Paul supplies blandly. “Heart-wrenching? Poignant to the point of tragedy?”

“That,” Sky agrees, pointing at him with her spoon.

“You haven’t played that for me, have you?” Matts thought he’s heard most of the songs they’ve been considering for their next album, but that’s not a title he recognizes.

“Uh,” Sydney says.

“Here.” Rex digs his phone out of his pocket. “I’ve got a recording of it if you—”

“Wait,” Sydney says. “Hold on.”

“He’s going to hear it anyway,” Rex points out. “Like, you know, when it’s on the radio .”

“ What is going on?” Matts asks.

“It’s not about you,” Sydney says—well, shouts. “The song. It’s not about you.” The framing of the statement makes it feel distinctly untrue.

“Okay?”

“ Fuck ,” she says again, even more fervently.

*

THE SONG IS about him. Maybe.

Syd asked him to wait to listen to it until she and the rest of the band left with a string of slightly desperate qualifiers and reassurances that Matts didn’t find reassuring at all.

“Musicians are dramatic assholes ,” she said. “ I was just having feelings one day, and that was the way I dealt with them. It doesn’t mean anything. I swear.”

Except now, he’s sitting in the empty kitchen with Devo’s phone and borrowed headphones, trying not to cry again because he’s already filled his crying quota for the year.

The recording quality isn’t great; it’s an audio file they created in the practice space. But the raw emotion in Sydney’s voice as she sings is palpable, even with the poor acoustics.

The song starts loud, aggressive, a blare of guitars, a veritable stampede of drums, thrumming bass, and shouted lyrics. But the chorus goes plaintive, searching. And by the time it ends—just Sydney and her guitar; no more drums, no more bass—her singing is soft and aching and imperfect. The vocal equivalent of a sob.

Paul was right. It’s pretty devastating.

Where do I keep my love so it won’t eat me alive

Cuz right now it’s pressed against my chest

like a fucking forty-five

I’d hate you if I could,

But that’s not something I control

I don’t know how to love by halves,

So I’m gonna love you whole

Until it kills me, I’ll keep calling

If you keep letting me through

Not your fault that you don’t love me

The way that I love you

God, I know, I know how this ends

I just don’t want it to

Why do you touch me like you love me

When you don’t

Why do you treat me like you’ll keep me

When you won’t

My heart’s not on my sleeve, it’s bloody in your hands

Don’t want your fucking sympathy, just understand

Until it kills me, I’ll keep calling

If you keep letting me through

Not your fault that you don’t love me

The way that I love you

God I know, I know how this ends

I just don’t want it to

I’d hate you if I could,

But that’s not something I control

I don’t know how to love by halves,

So I’m gonna love you whole

Listening to it makes Matts feel like he’s swallowed glass. It’s like the opposite of catharsis, so many feelings piled up on top of one another with nowhere to go.

The fact that he might have inspired it is—

“You okay?” Devo asks.

He startles and pulls the headphones down around his neck.

“Not really.” Matts slides the phone across the table, then shoves the headphones after it.

Devo makes a noise that could mean anything as he collects them to put in his bag.

“She said it wasn’t about us,” Matts murmurs. “That it was…creative license or whatever. That our situation was just a catalyst.”

“Sure,” Devo agrees.

Matts exhales. “I’m asking if that’s true or not.”

“I can’t tell you. I’m not in her head, thank God.”

“If you had to guess.”

Devo scrubs both hands into his hair then drags them back down his face, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes.

“When Syd was sixteen, she had a thing with this kid at school. He was a year older than her, a year younger than me. Popular, good-looking. Nicer than most of his friends. Decent, you know?” He drops his hands from his face, looking exhausted. “I liked him, before everything.”

“Ominous.”

“Honestly, I think he might have been a little in love with her. But he didn’t want anyone else to know that they were—whatever they were.”

“Why?”

Devo gives him a look, and yeah, that’s fair.

“He was her first kiss—the stupid dare when she kissed Sky doesn’t count in my book. But for months, through the summer and into her junior year, they’d meet up outside school. When they were alone, he treated her right, but he wouldn’t so much as look at her in the hallways. Didn’t even intervene when one of his friends fucking assaulted her one day. After that, she ended things.”

“What was this kid’s name?” Matts asks.

“No,” Devo says.

It was worth a try.

“Point is,” Devo continues, “she was pissed, but she wasn’t broken-hearted. Because she went into it cautious. She knew from the beginning he was keeping her a secret.”

Matts thinks about sixteen-year-old Syd who already had to learn caution rather than falling head-first into love like teenagers are supposed to. He thinks about why.

“People can’t hurt you if you don’t give them the opportunity to,” Matts says. It’s a familiar philosophy.

“Right. Exactly. And it doesn’t help that our biological parents had already fucked her up about being a thing that had to be hidden, you know? Before she ran away, they’d started leaving her at home when we went to church or out to eat. But after she ran away, they didn’t fight for her at all. Which was good for Syd, obviously. But they just— A week after she left, all the pictures of her on the walls were gone. They never once asked to speak to her on the phone or asked me how she was. It was like she didn’t exist to them anymore.”

There are multiple people Matts would like to have a private conversation with.

“I need you to recognize,” Devo says quietly, “Syd’s had too much experience with a very specific kind of—I don’t even know what to call it—subtle cruelty? Maybe? And listen, you’re not like that. You’re not keeping her a secret. That’s good. But this also isn’t like the Bryce situation.”

“So his name was Bryce,” Matts says.

“Can you focus?”

“Sorry. Why is it not like the Bryce situation?”

“You can’t be this stupid,” Devo says. “Because she didn’t let herself fall in love with him .”

Matts might forget to breathe. Just for a minute.

“Oh,” Devo says, studying Matts’s face. “Okay, you are this stupid.”

“Hey,” he objects, and then, just to be sure, “She loves me?”

Devo makes a strangled noise. “Of course she fucking— Did you listen to the song?”

“I—”

“Look, anyone can see that you’re just as crazy about her as she is about you. Except her. Maybe it’s the trauma or whatever. Maybe it’s something else, but I’m pretty sure the pining songs are going to continue unless you give her some explicit reassurance that you’re in just as deep as she is.”

“She hasn’t said anything,” Matts argues. “She didn’t— I was the one that asked if we were even together.”

“And she won’t. She’s going to be all skulls and crossbones on the outside, but on the inside, she wants that Jane Austen shit. She wants shouted declarations in the rain and grand public gestures, and—she wants to be wanted. Loudly. Visibly.”

“I can do that,” Matts says. “Are you sure she wants that from me though?”

“Dude,” Devo says.

“I can do that,” he repeats.

She wants that Jane Austen shit , he thinks.

“I have an idea,” Matts says. “But I’ll need the band’s help.”

Devo considers him for several seconds, lips pursed. “Grand public gesture?” he hazards.

“Grand public gesture,” Matts agrees.

“Are you sure you’re ready for that? There’s no taking it back. And you’ve only been together for what, a couple months?”

Matts just looks at him.

“I’ll add us to a group chat without Syd.” Devo sighs. “No promises they’ll be down, but you can ask.”

Matts nods. He shakes Devo’s hand because it seems like the thing to do.

As Matts walks to his car, he pulls up Rome’s contact information.

“Hey,” Rome answers. “Why are you calling me like a sociopath? Just text me.”

Matts ignores him. “Is Damien there?”

Rome is stymied enough that it takes him several seconds to answer. “He is. Why do you want to talk to my boyfriend?”

Matts exhales. “I need his help writing a song.”