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“Welp.” Laz laughed. “Jay must be getting a blowjob back there. Guess we’ll hear how he sings while he’s cumming.”

More screaming. “Jay. Jay. Jay.” His name rolled into a chanting staccato.

Jay blew out a ragged breath. Laz teased him about blowjobs, knowing he’d committed to abstinence from alcohol, smoke, drugs, and sex. Laz also knew he had been teetering precariously on that straight edge ever since he learned about Charlee.

The burn in his throat spread behind his eyes. She was gone, but she could never die. She was alive in him, guiding his thoughts and holding together what was left of his heart.

He strummed the beginning chords. He didn’t hear them. He felt them. In the stretch of his chest. In the heat of his blood pushing through his veins. In the burning around his eyes. He felther.

He cleared his throat and turned on his mic. “This is calledYouWeren’t Just a Girl.”

The drugging tones of Laz’s guitar joined his own through a slow-building chord progression. Then the instruments fell silent for his vocal solo.

“When I walked into your eyes, I saw tomorrow.” He swallowed. “I saw you sleeping next to me. I saw you holding me.” He licked cracked lips. “I saw you loving me.”

He pushed heavy breaths through the mic. “You weren’t just a girl.” His heart ached, bending with the refrain. “You were a vision. And without that vision, I would perish.”

Laz eased back in with a crawling tempo, accompanied by Rio’stap-tap-tapdrum beat in 4/4 time. Wil’s pulsating bass guitar brought the measures together with a deeper modulation.

As Rio opened up the hats and played quicker, Jay moved the chords up the fret in a fast, even legato and raised his voice. “I know something about pain. I have enough to liberate. I don’t know how to let it go.” His vocals cracked. “I don’t know how to let you go.”

His throat was on fire. Not from the strain of his vocal chords, but from the mass of grief simmering to escape. He sang the refrain hushed and pained. “You weren’t just a girl.” He choked, and Rio threw a concerned expression over his shoulder.

“You were a vision. And without that vision, I would perish.”

The harmony of instruments began the complex climb of the song. Jay grasped at the next verse, couldn’t feel it. So he altered it. “In my vision you hear me. You hear me say. There’s no metal. No rivets. No man of steel.”

The guitar pick in his hand shook and screeched the chords. His heart pounded painfully. “Take me to your grave. You weren’t just a girl.”

Sudden vertigo quaked his knees. He sang an improvised verse. “It’s getting dark. So dark. I can’t see you.” His fingers locked up. “I’m losing you.”

The pick dropped to the stage. His guitar followed, and the music crashed to a deafening silence.

He walked away. Down the metal stairs. Across the field. Away from the lights. Away from the crowd.

He walked until the burr of cicadas drowned out the distant roar of people. Then he dropped to his knees and pressed his fist on his sternum as if it could hold in his sob. It couldn’t.

Footsteps crunched the dried grass behind him. A moment later, a slender shadow fell over him. He looked up into blue eyes. They weren’t exquisite or unforgettable. Just…blue.

“You have a beautiful voice.” She knelt before him. “In fact, you are an incredibly beautiful man. And I think you could use a little lift. Allow me.”

His cloud of grief labored his breath, squeezed his chest, and fogged his mind. He wasn’t alone in the fog. There was a spark. His beacon in the dark. “Charlee.”

She smiled. “You can call me Charlee.” She pulled on the chain around her neck and a small vial appeared from between her breasts with a tiny spoon attached. She dipped it in the vial and held up a scoop of powder.

Her plain features blurred, fading in and out and morphing into the visage of his dreams. His fantasy raised her little spoon to his nose and blinked huge inimitable blue eyes. “Sniff, baby.”

Charlee wouldn’t tell him to sniff. She would never be able to tell him anything. Looking into the face before him, she was all he could see. Christ, he needed to let her go. He needed to forget.

He sniffed. A zing pulsed through him. His senses opened. The sky deepened. The soil smelled richer. And the powder-coated finger sliding over his gums and the roof of his mouth trailed ice.

His mind fractured in memory.Don’t be so cold, little boy.The shed loomed against the night sky, waiting.

A tongue replaced the finger. It stabbed in his mouth and his own lay limp and numb. “Charlee?”

“Mmm.” She purred and rubbed her tits against him.

The numbness trickled down his throat and enveloped the chasm in his chest. The ache at the center melted away.