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lone recipient of this boy’s
intense love and affection. He had gifted me with all of the best
of him.
    And then I had left him.
    I knew I didn’t deserve to seek him out
again. I shouldn’t get to be in the same room as him or reopen his
life to the drama of mine, but being here reawakened something
inside of me. My chest swelled to the music he created, to the
words he wrote. My heart continued to beat as rapidly as it could
and I felt more filled with life than I had in such a long
time.
    Unexpected tears pushed at my lashes and
threatened to spill over. I left him to protect him, but I had
sacrificed everything of myself to do it.
    I couldn’t forgive myself for that. I
couldn’t forgive myself for giving him up.
    Even if it had meant freedom.
    I sucked in a breath as if I knew I would
need it and braced myself for the impact of Ryder’s attention.
    He opened his eyes and his gaze swept over
the crowd gathered for him. His brow scrunched together and his
shoulders tensed even while he finished up his song. And then he
found me.
    His eyes bulged with surprise and his fingers
slammed on the fret of his guitar, ruining the sweet ending that
had been drifting around the room. His head jerked back from the
microphone and he stared at me for a long time.
    Too long.
    The tension in the room skyrocketed as his
attention stayed focused on me. His Adam’s apple bobbed tellingly
and I could feel his furious emotions saturate the room.
    My heart stopped. My breathing stopped. My
thoughts stopped. Even time stopped. And it was just the two of us.
The rest of the world faded away and I was left transfixed by
Ryder’s unwavering concentration and those gunmetal gray eyes that
held me so captive.
    The curiosity of the impatient crowd broke
through my haze as people started to turn around and try to figure
out what had distracted their lead singer. I felt more eyes on me
when Ryder’s bandmates noticed me too and reacted almost as
strongly as Ryder had.
    Ryder must have noticed the aggravated edge
to his fans. He snapped back in place and shifted the guitar strap
across his back roughly. He cleared his throat into the mic and
then again as I watched him visibly attempt to pull himself
together. He was fighting a battle that I had caused and I realized
how bad of an idea this had turned out to be.
    I had been selfish wanting to watch him play
and hear the band again. But I should have waited until the show
was over. It wasn’t fair for him.
    I had been mesmerized by his singing voice,
but when he spoke into the microphone and it was the voice I had
known so intimately, had loved so fiercely, I nearly dissolved.
    “I’m going to change up our set a bit,” he
laughed, but it sounded bitter. Over his shoulder he told his
bandmates, “Sorry, guys. I, uh, I’m going to take some creative
liberty.”
    They all shrugged their shoulders and mumbled
that it was fine.
    Ryder went on, “The next song I was going to
play is called, The Siren’s Soul . It was a love song that I
wrote a year ago and if I’m honest, it’s one of my best. But, yeah,
I’m just not feeling it anymore. So instead, I’m going to play you
another one we’ve been working on called, Aftermath . It’s
more appropriate for tonight.” He strummed his guitar a second and
looked back at the drums. “Bates?”
    Phoenix counted the band off with a, “One,
two, three,” and they played Aftermath .
    If I didn’t think Ryder’s introduction of the
song had been a strong enough message, the lyrics definitely took a
turn for the Loud and Clear.
    In a bluesy, melancholy voice that still
managed to be funky, Ryder sang about black hearts and black souls.
How love isn’t a feeling, it’s an infection. He sang about the lies
of the body and the sins of the mouth. He sang about a girl that
had promised love and delivered pain. She’d sworn happiness and
sentenced death. She made him fall in love with her, and then she
took her black heart and disappeared. She