Page 2 of Discordant Cultivation

Show me what you’re hiding.

The lyrics, when they came, were about dying in his sleep. About things that stole consciousness and never gave it back, and a terror of trusting something not to murder him in the dark. Vale held his breath. It was absurd. He’d heard thousands of performances, produced hundreds of tracks. This was just another street musician with a decent original. Except his chest ached, and his fingers itched to grab his phone and record this too and add it to the collection he wasn’t obsessively maintaining.

The boy’s voice never stuttered when he sang, transforming into something fluid and desperate.

But he performed it like he was reading from a script.

Technically perfect. Emotionally distant.

Afraid of your own words, aren’t you?

Vale watched the musician’s chest rise and fall in controlled patterns, he watched him maintain a careful distance from the song’s meaning even as he delivered it with an edge of pain. Seven people stopped to listen.

His potential was staggering.

The execution was cowardly.

Vale wanted to shake him. He wanted to pin him against the brick wall and demand he sing it again, properly this time, with all the terror he was so carefully hiding. Wanted to—

He pulled out his wallet with more force than necessary, the leather creaking in his grip.

The kid began packing up without saying another word. Vale folded two hundred dollar bills—enough to pay a bill or buy groceries—around his business card and approached while the musician focused on his equipment.

“Excuse me.”

Brown eyes snapped up, wide with that brand of fear from someone who expected trouble from strangers. Up close, his face was even more interesting—hunger and exhaustion had sharpened boyish features into the kind of beauty that emerged slowly, then all at once.

His photographs hadn’t captured the exact shade of those eyes, or the way his eyebrows made his features too expressive for their own good. Vale had to consciously stop himself from reaching out to touch that face, to feel if his skin was as soft as it looked.

Vale dropped the money into the open guitar case and walked away without another word.

Call me. Be brave enough to want more than this corner, this life, these pathetic tips from people who don’t understand what they’re hearing.

Vale made it to the coffeeshop across the street before the need to see the boy’s reaction became unbearable.

The kid found the cash immediately, unfolding the bills with shaking fingers. He looked around like he expected cameras, a prank, or some explanation for unexpected good fortune.

Vale’s heart was in his throat as he memorized the exact moment the boy’s face shifted from confusion to recognition. This was absurd. He was a successful freelance producer. He didn’t lurk near coffee shops watching musicians react to business cards like some kind of—

The boy pressed the card to his chest, closed his eyes, and exhaled like he’d been holding his breath for weeks.

That’s it. Want something better.

Vale made it home in record time, canceled all his meetings, and spent the next four hours pretending to work on a demo that had been due for weeks. His production software stayed open on his laptop while he checked his phone every seven minutes. It was ridiculous. The boy might not even call. He probably wouldn’t call.

Then his phone rang, and Vale answered before the second ring.

Too eager.

“Um, h-hi.” That voice again, careful and stuttering. “This is—I’m the guy from this morning? With the g-guitar? You left your c-c-card and I wasn’t sure if—”

“I remember.” Vale’s reflection smiled back at him from the window of his home office, the city’s lights two hours away by train. “What’s your name?”

He’d been waiting for this—the name he could attach to all those videos, all those observations, all that careful documentation. The piece of information that would make the boy real instead of just a fascinating subject.

“K-Kieran. Kieran Thorne.”

Perfect. Even your name sounds broken.