“You have to commit,” I mutter, letting go of his hand and watching his face bunch up in concentration. “Half-pressing just makes it sound like shit.”
“That feels like an attack,” he grumbles, his fingers shaking with the pressure he’s putting on the strings. But to his surprise—and slightly to mine—he strums the chord, and it rings out a perfect pitch.
“See? Commit to it.”
“I feel like there’s an undertone there.” His attention drifts from the guitar, and his fingers go slack, and I can already tell that one chord is the best I’m going to get out of him tonight.
“Maybe there is,” I say as I rest my guitar against the wall and stand up. My back screams at me for sitting hunched over for so long. I press my palms against my lower spine and stretch, letting out a satisfying crack.
He strums the strings again, the chord buzzing with a metallic reverberance. Harper snorts from across the room as I wince.
“Okay, now you’re insulting the instrument.”
“I think the instrument is insulting him,” Luca says, not even looking up from his phone.
“Traitor,” Ryland mumbles as he tries again. His jaw is tight now—he hates not being good at something, especially in front of us.
“You’ll get it. You just have to practice when we’re not here to bully you,” I say, my tone softer now.
“C’mon, Kat, I’m nearly there,” he pleads, giving me a pouty look, but there’s a smile there now, his blonde hair falling over the fretboard, tangled in his fingers.
“Keep practicing,” I say with a small, sympathetic smile of my own before walking over to the mini-fridge and cracking open a cold can of Diet Coke.
“Don’t worry, Kat. Ryland doesn’t carry thefinessefor a guitar. He can only hit things with sticks. He’s barely grown from caveman status,” Harper says from the other side of the room as she wraps up her mic cable.
“Well, darling, would a guitar give me guns like these?” he shoots back, pushing his chest out and tensing his biceps.
I chortle, and the eye rolls from Harper and Luca could have leveled the room.
“It would if you played properly.” I shrug, taking a long sip of my drink.
Ryland throws me the middle finger and returns to the guitar, failing yet again at the chord progression.
“I’m going to get us some pizza,” Luca announces, rising from the couch.
“Fuck it, I’ll go with you. I could do with a break,” Ryland replies, carefully placing the guitar on the stand.
The protests of how much work Ryland has actually done die on my tongue, and I opt to shake my head instead. They bundle up in their jackets and walk out the door, and the cold air from the outside curls around my ankles before they close the door behind them, but not before Ryland casts a quick glance back towards Harper.
After the boys leave, I slump on the couch next to Harper. Our bodies get pushed together in the crater of the couch that’smissing a support beam. We don’t care. I rest my head on her shoulder anyway.
“He likes you, you know,” I say with a playful shove.
“Who, Ryland?” Harper asks with a genuine question in her voice, to which I nod. “No, he doesn’t. We’re like brother and sister. Besides, he has a new person in his bed every week. If he does like me, it’s just to add another notch to the bedpost.”
“Brother and sister?” I repeat, raising a brow.
“Yes.”
“You don’t look at your brother like that.”
“Like what?” she replies, rolling her eyes.
“Like you’re tryingnotto look at him.”
Her jaw tightens just slightly before she laughs it off. But I’ve seen it. The way she watches him when he’s not looking. The way he hands her things first without thinking. The way they always choose to sit next to each other, just close enough that their knees touch, but neither of them moves.
“You’re imagining things,” she says.