Page 19 of Not a Friend (Crescent Light #1)

Four Years Ago, September

I almost told my mom about you.

S ummer stretched slowly. Nate and Grant finished their master’s programs in May, and Grant moved. It was only thirty minutes away, but his farewell party could have convinced anyone he was going off to war.

My time with Nate stretched on as well, though our meetings remained irregular as ever. Between my summer courses and internship at a local paper, his post-grad production job, and the time Crescent Light spent at the studio, the stars rarely aligned.

But the more time I spent with him, the more I collected the small details that added up to the sum of who Nate was. The insignificant things only someone who knew him intimately got to see.

Like the crease that would appear between his eyebrows when he was concentrating, trying to make chords fit his musical vision.

Or the freckle placed precisely in the middle of his shoulder blades.

Or the rare occurrences where he would really laugh.

He was an observer by nature and tended to quietly grin or let out a breathy sort of laugh through his nose.

But occasionally, something would strike him as funny enough that laughter would burst from him, teeth flashing, dimple popping in the process.

Those laughs were my favorite because they were rare. A treat few got to see.

He kept a pocket-sized leatherbound notebook on him, just in case inspiration struck, and he scribbled in it constantly.

Sometimes, we would be right in the middle of a conversation, and he would suddenly hold up a finger, pull out the notebook, take a few seconds to write his thoughts onto the pages, mumble an apology, and prompt the conversation to continue where it left off.

The first few times it happened, I stared and completely lost my train of thought.

But as time went on, my confusion turned into fascination.

I found myself wishing I could hover over his shoulder to read the pages he so diligently penned.

Or better yet, I wished I could crack open his mind to see the world as he did.

A world where the simplest word, sound, or image could conjure up such inspiration that you couldn’t help but pause everything for a moment and document it.

In early autumn, just as the trees started to yellow and turn a beautiful burnt orange, Nate called me.

“What are you doing this Saturday?” he asked the second I answered.

“Saturday?” I stretched my arm above my head, alleviating some of the pain from hunching over my laptop for the last three hours. “I was planning on spending the day on my couch, why?”

He laughed as if I was joking. I wasn’t.

“Well, as exciting as that sounds, wouldn’t a little road trip be so much better?”

“It depends,” I lied. “A road trip to where exactly?” I would’ve happily road-tripped to the middle of nowhere if it meant spending time with Nate, but he didn’t need to know that .

“Boston. My little sister’s birthday is next week and I need to go pick up her gift. Care to keep me company?”

I loved Boston. Even though I hadn’t been there since I was a teenager, I romanticized it enough that it now held a special place in my heart.

It represented a long-lived dream, one where I would end up content, comfortable, and fulfilled.

But I never dwelled on the dream for long, afraid of the disappointment I’d feel if it never happened.

I hummed, feigning indecision. “What’s in it for me?”

“Are you telling me the pleasure of my company isn’t enough? That hurts, Oli.”

That Saturday, Nate picked me up a smooth ten minutes behind schedule.

Sliding into the passenger seat of his car was always a treat.

Being suddenly surrounded by the leather and fabric softener scent of him had become my favorite kind of addiction.

Only now, there was also the faintest hint of spearmint gum.

And under that, lingering cigarette smoke.

He hadn’t been smoking the last time I saw him, claiming to quit for the second time in six months, but a pack sat snugly in the console under his radio.

“How’s quitting going?” I quirked an eyebrow at him.

He sucked on his teeth. “Not great.”

The tattoo on the back of his right arm—The Fool—peeked from under the sleeve of his black t-shirt as he pulled out of my apartment complex. The black ink did all the right things against his triceps when his arm flexed. I openly stared at him as he merged onto the highway.

“Enjoying the view?” He smirked .

“Very much so.”

Within minutes, his hand came to rest on my knee. So casual. So intimate. The time between our last hangout and now didn’t make a difference. It never did.

“So, what are you getting your sister that’s so special you have to pick it up two hours away?”

He checked his blind spot, neck stretching to give me a delicious view of his jaw.

“Paige’s favorite author had an impromptu signing at a bookshop up there, and they signed a bunch of books, including a new one that just came out.

I happen to know the bookshop owner. She said she could put a copy of each signed book on hold for me as long as I picked them up by the end of the weekend. ”

“Books signed by her favorite author?” I sounded more amazed than I probably should’ve. I didn’t know why the level of thoughtfulness he showed for his sister came as a surprise to me. “She’ll love that.”

“And since it’s Paige’s twenty-first birthday, I figured I’d get her a fancy bottle of wine or something to go with it.”

“Aren’t you a good big brother?”

“Try to be.” He flashed a crooked smile.

We listened to music from his phone and enjoyed the comfortable silence for a while. He hummed along as he drove, fingertips absentmindedly drumming on the top of my leg with the beat. Every once in a while, he’d ask me to look up a song to play next, but we mostly kept to his shuffled playlist.

Our music taste was largely the same, with the odd exception of a classic folksy song that he’d request, or a trendy pop song that I’d follow up with.

As the drive stretched on, a sort of game began.

It started with Nate asking me if I’d ever heard of a particular band he liked.

I had. Then, he asked me if I’d heard a specific B-side song he swore was their most underrated track. I hadn’t .

“You haven’t lived until you’ve heard it,” he told me, reciting the title for me to look up.

I pressed play and dutifully listened to the whole thing. He was right.

“Wow,” I said as the last chord reverberated through the car.

“Right?” He squeezed my thigh. “It’s so good.”

“You know what it kind of reminds me of though?” I asked, my fingers already flying across his phone’s keyboard, searching for the song on my mind.

“What?”

I pressed play on the title, a single from a little-known indie band and easily one of my top five favorite songs of all time. “This.”

We spent the next hour introducing each other to deep-cut artists and even deeper-cut songs, taking turns giving each other’s requests a genuine listen.

I couldn’t say each song was to my taste, necessarily, and I was sure the same was true for him, but we agreed after each track that they were objectively good.

“I’m sending this one to myself,” I told him as I hit the share button on the artist profile of the easy-listening singer-songwriter he’d last requested. I’d done the same to a new-age rock group ten minutes prior.

“Can you add the last song you played to my saved music while you’re at it?”

“You got it.”

I plugged my phone into the sound system when my battery got low, and relished in the fact that he was now at the mercy of my music. The game had died down, so I switched over to a shuffled playlist of all my downloaded songs while we chatted about nothing in particular.

I didn’t notice the Crescent Light song that started playing until it was halfway through the first chorus.

Shit .

In the days following seeing Nate’s band play at Brick Road Bar, I’d found time to look them up and listen again in private.

They were just as good in studio recordings as they were at the bar.

It was all I needed to validate I wasn’t just caught up in my lust for Nate—Crescent Light was really fucking good.

I’d downloaded a few of their songs and added them to my regular rotation, and over time, I became a genuine fan.

I’d even caught myself humming their songs while studying, folding laundry, doing dishes.

Nate knew I liked his music, but the extent to which I liked it was my little secret.

Apparently, I’d been listening so regularly I’d all but forgotten that the guy who sang them, who wrote them, was sitting two feet from me.

Feeling my cheeks turn tomato red, I prayed Nate wasn’t paying attention and covertly grabbed my phone to press Next.

“Hey, that’s a great song!” He glanced at me with a mock-wounded expression as the next song began. His eyes lingered on my flushed cheeks.

“Sorry. It’s probably weird to hear your own voice on my playlist.” I dismissed my embarrassment with a wave of my hand. “But I agree. It’s a great song.”

“I do get sick of the sound of my voice sometimes.” He shrugged. “Plus, all I hear are the mistakes. Things I wish I would’ve done differently.”

“I can understand that. Sometimes, your worst critic is yourself.”

He lifted his eyebrows as if to say, Damn right and kept his eyes firmly on the road. The new song filled the car, giving me an excuse to hum along casually.

“I think it’s cute you have one of my songs saved on your phone.”

“I have more than one song saved, Nate. I have a whole EP on here. I wasn’t lying when I told you I liked your music. ”

“Really?”

I laughed at his disbelief. There was no way he didn’t know how talented he was. “Yes, really. I’m a fan.”

He shot me a smug look. “Well, I expect you to be in the front row when we play Wembley someday.”