Raf leans back in his chair, the front legs lifting off the concrete, his dark eyes tracking between Bells and me with the lazy satisfaction of a man watching a nature documentary.
"Adorable," he says.
"Fuck off," I growl.
Bells laughs and her fingers curl into the collar of my shirt.
She's warm.
She'salwayswarm, and she weighs nothing, and her hair smells so good I refuse to let myself think about why. Refuse to let myself think about what she was going to tell me on that rooftop in the fog.
I slip my arm around her and she makes a satisfied little sound against my throat.
I hold her a little tighter.
"Remember the last time we played this venue?" Raf asks suddenly. "When Nash forgot his bass strap and used a fucking bathrobe belt?"
Phoenix laughs. "It tore off during the third song."
"His guitar dropped three feet mid-riff and he just…" Raf mimes catching something one-handed. "Snagged it. Didn't even miss a note."
"He missed a note," I say.
Both of them look at me.
I don't talk about Nash.
Not like this. Not casually. Not in the same sentence as laughter. Nash lives in a grave I visit alone and in notebooks I keep locked away and in the dark fucking space behind my ribs where everything good went to die.
But Bells is warm in my lap and Phoenix is looking at me with those stupid earnest blue eyes. And Raf is waiting, his pick frozen between two fingers.
"He missed the F sharp," I mutter. "Came in on the G instead. Covered it with a slide."
"Classic Nash," Phoenix says softly.
"Classic Nash," Raf echoes.
The silence that follows isn't heavy.
For once.
It's just... there. The three of us sitting with the ghost of the person who connected us, and for the first time in a long time, his presence doesn't feel like a knife in my chest.
It feels like an open hand.
Bells shifts on my lap. Her arm tightens around my neck.
She didn't know Nash, and she never will. But she's carrying the weight of his songs, and she carries it well enough that sometimes, when I'm having her run through all the songs she knows to figure out just how much of Nash was ripped off by her shithead "manager," I forget to be furious.
Phoenix breaks the quiet by pushing off the wall and snagging a meal replacement shake from the tray. He cracks it open, takes a swig, makes a face.
"How do you drink these?" he asks, reading the label. "This tastes like a box of chalk had sex with a mango."
"Don't drink my food."
"I'm taste-testing. For quality control." He holds the bottle out to me. "Speaking of which. You should eat something before we go on."
My jaw tightens.