Page 33 of Guitars and Mistakes
He needed a whole team of people to save him.
And I was the only one coming to his rescue.
I didn’t even know if he’d want me. I might arrive to find him so stuck in his own world that he sent me back away. He might be angry to see me. He might not even want the help.
But I’d never found a broken bird I didn’t want to save, and Rivers Shine was no different. He was a little bigger than a bird, a little darker and potentially more damaged.
And I wasn’t going to leave him here to try to heal on his own.
I marched up to him and took his hand as gently as possible. When he looked up at me his eyes were shadowed. Haunted. They focused on me and he frowned, opening his mouth like he was in fact going to tell me to leave him alone.
I put a finger to his lips. “Let’s go,” I said, pulling him up.
“Where?”
“Outside. We’re going to take a walk and you’re going to tell me what the hell is wrong, and I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer.”
To his credit, he didn’t tell me no. He didn’t resist. He tightened his fingers around mine, stood up, and followed me back through the swinging gate and toward the closest exit.
RIVERS
Look, I’m not trying to say Lila was an angel.
I mean she had the coloring for it. I’d always assumed angels would be either blond or flame-haired, and her skin was pale enough to be nearly translucent. Enormous green eyes, a smattering of freckles, and a smile that could actually make your soul feel like it had been cleansed of anything you’d ever done.
Hell, she could have put on a set of wings and a halo and I wouldn’t have been surprised.
But still. I wasn’t saying she was a Real Live Angel.
I was just saying that I was sitting there in that dark restaurant with even darker thoughts marching their way through my brain and taking me right to Hell with no one to even try to keep me company. My band—my friends—were up in their rooms probably asleep already, their minds a million miles from where I was. They hadn’t wondered where I’d gone.
No one ever wondered where I’d gone.
Except Lila.
Lila, who showed up like a vision in the darkness, took my hand, and pulled me away from the thoughts that were trying to drag me down. Just like she always did. No matter where I went, she found me. And she always brought her light with her. Even when I didn’t want her to.
So I got up and followed her, both enchanted and annoyed at her presence but definitely incapable of saying no to her when she said she wanted to take a walk. Because the truth was I didn’t want to be by myself. I didn’t want all of the memories going through my head or the thoughts they led to. I didn’t want to look at any of that.
I’d spent my whole life living with it and I was exhausted.
I knew who and what I was and that I’d never be anything more than that. Hell, just look at what I’d come from. But if Lila was going to drag me outside and give me something else to look at, give me some of her warmth and fire instead of the shadows that were eating away at me, I was going to let her.
She pushed her way through the first exit she found, towing me along after her like some enormous dog on a leash, and turned to her right, where she pointed us toward a deserted field. I almost stopped and stared, I was so shocked. We were in the middle of fucking Jonesboro and the city was rising up all around us, all office buildings and hotels. How the fuck was there an empty field right next to our hotel?
And had she known? She was walking toward it like she’d already planned all of this, like she’d marked the place out for our special use, and I couldn’t escape the idea of heractuallybeing an angel. Had she ordered a deserted space for us? Had she somehow magicked it into being? Demanded that the universe provide it?
I shook my head, almost laughing. I was definitely insane if I thought that.
Or I’d had too much to drink.
It was probably the latter. Or at least mostly the latter.
“Where are we going?” I asked anyhow.
“To that meadow. Obviously.”
Right.
