67. Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Toby

M y fingers throb.

My face aches.

My eyes sting.

And yet I've never felt more fucking alive than I do right now.

With my heart in my throat and a sweaty brow, I lock eyes with the woman I love standing in the sea of bodies, and somehow fall deeper in love with her.

She's so fucking beautiful .

And so fucking mine.

I play to her, for her, as Rex leads us into the next song that has my eyes burning even more.

Each lyric off my brother's lips, I echo back. Some into the mic when I'm supposed to for the backup. But all of them sang straight to her.

She inspired each word. Each line a moment of us. Each verse, a promise.

Because this song is the one that Rex helped me write.

For her .

I'm fucking flying by the time the last line leaves his lips, a growl into the void of the venue, and I drop the beat back to a soft melody of repeated strings.

It's the beginning of the next song, one of our older ones, but then Mac switches the beat of his drum to a different one.

It catches me off guard enough that I toss a look at him, but follow his lead and switch the tune.

"Tonight … is a very special night," Rex tells the wild crowd, his voice echoed in the in-ear-monitors shoved into my ears. "But you already know that, don't you?"

He pulls a marker from his pocket, one of those ones that are super thick, and uncaps it.

"Sometimes, life fucks us up," Rex says, and a cadence of agreement filters through the IEM's. "And sometimes, that fuckup … sends us to some places that we may not wanna go." The man nods along, the fans all cheering. "But what do we do with it? When we're in those places. The dark ones with seemingly no way out."

My heart pounds in my chest.

"We get the fuck back up, right?"

The mass goes wild.

Rex lifts his hand, his palm facing the crowd.

"Do you know how long it takes to form a habit?" Rex pauses as some patrons yell out answers we can't actually hear, then nods. "Thirty days. Do you know how long it takes to break that habit?"

I swallow hard against the emotion building in my throat when Rex lifts the marker to his raised hand and makes a thick black slash across his palm. " Three months … but we're not here to celebrate three months."

The yells are loud as he makes a second slash across his palm, the marks creating an X.

"We're here for two hundred and thirty days ."

My lungs hitch and my heart feels like it might stop.

"Let's fuckin' see 'em."

Rex raises his arm up high, palm facing out, and with it, thousands of As Above's fans lift theirs.

And each one of them, from the back to the front, all hold high the same mark on their hands, forming a sea of thick black X's.

A mark signifying that every one of them have chosen to abstain from alcohol, at least for the night.

The very same mark I put on my own hand before I showed up here tonight, as a reminder to the promises I not only made myself, but the ones I made for Anna, too. For my brothers here on stage with me.

For my pops.

My fingers faulter on the strings and my vision blurs.

"For Toby."

" For Toby. "

It takes me a moment to blink my vision back, but when I do, it's aimed right at her.

Anna .

My Anna.

Her arm is raised just like the rest of them, her palm donning the same mark as mine, adoration shining in her wet eyes.

I know she can't hear me, but I couldn't stop the words from tumbling from my lips if I tried.

And just when I thought tonight couldn't get any goddamn better, my girl grins at me with shining eyes, nods her head, and mouths the same three little words right back to me.

I love you .