Lincoln snorts. “Those two get weirder every damn day.”
Another few minutes pass, the cheers growing to a dull roar. We’re seriously considering starting without him when Ryder finally steps through the back door, Smith following him.
“Fucking finally,” Aiden mutters, signaling to the tech crew. “He’s here, let’s get going.”
I look into Ryder’s face as he stops beside me in the wings and know, within the first instant, that something is wrong. Terribly wrong. His eyes are rimmed with red and dark with thoughts I can’t decipher.
“Are you okay?” I ask, grabbing his hand. It’s limp — he doesn’t lace his fingers through mine, or return my warm squeeze. “Ryder, you’re scaring me.Look at me.”
My breath catches as he complies. His gaze locks on my face, so empty you’d think he was staring at a stranger.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” I say, feeling my eyes start to prick with tears. “Tell me what happened.”
But there’s no time. The house lights go down as Linc and Aiden run out. The audience screams their approval, more than ready for us to finally start our set. The roadies are pushing us forward, signaling for us to take our spots centerstage.
“Ryder,” I whisper in the dark, trying to keep hold of his hand. Trying to hold onto him, when I feel him slipping away from me.
He lets go.
When he speaks, he only says one word, his tone so devoid of hope and love and that infectious charm of his, I barely recognize it.
“Later.”
* * *
He’s off,that much is clear.
At first, I think he’s drunk, or maybe high. But I’m not so sure, anymore. His words aren’t slurred. His eyes aren’t hazy. He’s simply…
Not himself.
I can hear it in his inflection, see it in the stiffness of his posture, the tension in his hand as he grips his guitar, the veins in his neck as he leans into his mic. As though the Ryder I know, the Ryder I love, is somehow lost, buried beneath this closed-off stranger singing beside me.
Thankfully, the audience is so enraptured, they don’t seem to notice.
My heart races almost as fast as my mind while we blunder through our first five songs. I can’t fathom what could’ve set him off like this. Can’t imagine what could be bad enough that he’d disappear for hours on end, blowing off our date, nearly missing our show…
“You’re the moon, I’m the sun, stuck in distant skies…” I sing, trying to catch his eyes.
“I’d gladly burn out, to see the light in your eyes,” he echoes, avoiding mine entirely.
I grit my teeth and carry on. There’s no other choice, with twenty-thousand people watching our every move.
We just have to make it through this set.
Then we’ll deal with…
Whatever the hell this is.
We’re almost done, almost through… one song away from our curtain call… when someone in the front row screams, “PlayMove the Stars!” during the brief interlude beforeFaded.
At those words, Ryder’s whole body goes stiff. He glances at me, shakes his head, and snatches his microphone off its stand.
“Y’all want to hearMove the Stars?” he asks the crowd, sounding nothing like himself. It’s as though someone else has overtaken his body.
The audience screams at the top of their lungs.
“Well…” Ryder’s eyes narrow. “Unfortunately, I’m not in the mood to sing that one tonight.”