Page 9 of First Verse

I bite my tongue.

Evangeline and I aren’tfriends.We never have been. Most of our childhood, she was my unwanted shadow, following me around and poking her nose into my business. I could never escape her and by extension Rye, who trailed in her wake.

It all changed when I was thirteen and she was eleven and she handed me a sheet of lined paper covered in short verses. As I read them, I heard a melody. Halting and imperfect but still shockingly clear. I grabbed my guitar and a pencil. We spent three hours perfecting our first song, and it didn’t matter that the song itself was crap.

Those hours changed us. We traded parts of our souls, and since that day, when she writes, I hear, and when I write, she hears.

We’re not friends. We’reentangled.She’s inside me just like I’m inside her.

And now she wants the pieces of her soul back?Mypieces?

Never fucking happening.

“Anyway, I’m here if you want to talk.”

I nod. “Thanks, Dad.”

He squeezes my shoulder and walks toward the pool where the kids are now waging war on each other with foam noodles. My eleven-year-old twin sisters, Olive and Ivy, are currently trying to drown Eva’s fifteen-year-old brother, Hunter. Normally their antics would make me smile, or at least take the edge off my bad mood.

Not today.

My mood sours even further as Eva and Rye approach the pool. They’re still talking. Always fucking talking. Rye’s mouth moves nonstop as he peels off his T-shirt, leaving him in black swim trunks. He winds up the fabric and whips it at Eva, who dodges and laughs. A forced laugh, but still a laugh. I’m sure she’s pissed at Rye for spilling her secret to me last night. But him, she’ll forgive. Even though I didn’t say a damn thing to prompt Rye’s confession, I have no doubt I’ve been cast in the role of the villain.

Eva pulls her tank top over her head and steps out of her shorts, revealing a blue bikini. My stomach tightens at the sight of her full breasts in the tiny top. Her long, lean legs. Small waist. Subtly flaring hips.

The house could explode right now and I wouldn’t even notice.

My parents’ biggest worry is that I’ll become an addict. They don’t know I already am one, that I’ve been heroically abstaining from my drug of choice for years, fighting its hold over me with everything I am.

Like an alcoholic with booze, one sip of Evangeline will be too many and a million not enough. It’s why I don’t touch her. Ever. Last night was the closest I’ve been to succumbing. Even contact between my fingers and the silky strands of her hair was a risk, one I’m paying for now as I watch her wind the heavy, white-gold mass into a bun on the top of her head and remember the way her pupils dilated as I yanked that hair last night.

Given the pointedness of my stare, I’m unsurprised when her head turns in my direction. I’ve long chalked up our weird awareness of each other’s regard as a symptom of our souls’ entanglement. I know she can’t see my eyes through my sunglasses, and she’s too far away for me to see her mismatched irises—one hazel, one pale blue-gray—but it doesn’t matter. For five long seconds, we’re alone in the universe.

Then Rye picks her up and throws her into the pool. I hate that he can touch her without consequence. I hate that she lets him.

Dropping my head back, I close my eyes and take long, slow breaths until my balls stop aching and my dick deflates. The discomfort eventually fades—at least the physical one. Mentally I’m still a fucking wreck.

An indeterminable length of time later, a shadow falls over me. I blink up at my mom. Her dark curls are haloed by sunlight, her expressive face wearing a soft smile.

She holds out a small black notebook and a pencil.

“No,” I rasp.

“Yes.”

If anyone on Earth can come close to understanding me, it’s my mom. Maybe because she understands my dad so well. Or maybe because everyone’s wrong and I’m actually more like her than him. At least on the inside.

“I can’t,” I whisper, but I still take her offering.

She clasps my face in her graceful hands and stares at me with eyes I see in the mirror every day.

“We don’t back away from pain,” she says gently but firmly. “We seek out the cracks in our hearts and dive inside. It’s okay to be afraid of the unknown, but we have to take the dive. It’s the only way to keep the darkness at bay. Scoop it out with words, Wild. With music. Don’t let it rise over your head.”

My voice cracks as I confess, “I don’t know if I can do it without her.”

Her eyes burn with understanding and compassion. “You can, and you will.”

CHAPTERFOUR

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