Page 139 of From Drummer to Gamer

Matty Evans had my heart, and he just took it with him.

And I let him.

The entire time I stood there, I kept thinking how I never got to ask him why he called me his firecracker.

And now I never will.

CHAPTER 32

MATTY

I couldn’t feel a thing.

It felt like my entire body had been doused with freezing ice.

I felt numb.

More than that, I felt broken.

I thought I had figured out my life. I thought I had everything in order. I thought I had rules that I lived by.

But she broke every single one of them.

And now she has broken me.

All I wanted to do was go back there and drag her back home to me, but she didn’t want me for me.

And the caveman in me wanted to say he didn’t care, but the man who loved her a little too much would give her anything she wanted, and shedidn’twant me.

I thought music was what kept me alive.

But no, it wasn’t, and I didn’t think it ever did.

Music never made me feel the way she did.

Sierra was the sole song that sang in my heart.

And she was the beat that thrummed it alive.

But now my heart was no longer alive, it was just a dead beating organ living inside a locked cage, and only she held the keys to that.

But she was gone.

Gone forever, and now I was a dead man living.

CHAPTER 33

SIERRA

It had been fourteen days since I broke up with Matty.

Fourteen days of endless agony.

Like I was breathing air to live, yet I felt so cold and dead at the same time.

I just couldn’t stop thinking about him.

Was he walking around the block to get his coffee? Did he miss the green apple muffins I made him? Did he work out extra hard in the gym?