"I belong to you even if you never call me yours."
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There's something about boys with guitars.
Not just any boy.
My boy.
Well... not officially mine. Not in the way people write songs about or tattoo initials for or use shared playlists as relationship status. But in my head, in my chest, in every fragile little place inside me that comes alive when he looks at me-he's so achingly, irrevocably mine.
And tonight, he looks like he belongs to a different world altogether.
The kind of world where people spin in spotlights, where guitars scream louder than heartbreak, and where one look from him has the power to make you forget how to breathe. Even under the flickering overhead lights backstage, where everything smells like metallic cables and overpriced deodorant, Aadam Alaric Callahan still manages to look like a rockstar and a fallen angel, all rolled into one.
And also... like he's about to throw up.
"I swear," I huff under my breath, tugging the crisp white button-down straight on his broad chest, "if you keep fidgeting like that, I'm going to duct-tape it to your skin."
He chuckled-barely, though. He was too busy plucking through the riff of a song I didn't recognize. Probably something he half-wrote, half-improvised the night before while shirtless and moody in his dorm room with three half-eaten granola bars beside him.
"I'm not fidgeting," he murmured, eyes locked on the floor, not even looking at me.
"You've unbuttoned the same button three times in the past five minutes." I tilted my chin up at him as I fixed the last one near his collar, standing on my toes. "Hold still, Rockstar."
That got me a groan-low, warm, entirely too hot for someone two minutes from soundcheck. He dropped his head forward until his forehead bumped gently against mine.
"Renna, baby," he murmured, eyes fluttering shut, "if you walk away from me even for thirty seconds, I'm gonna combust. Don't leave me with these feral bastards."
My heart. Is. Not. Okay.
A loud crash behind us. Something metal clattered to the ground.
"Who the fuck you calling a bastard, you clingy dickhead?" Cameron shouts from the other side of the chaos zone, already half-draped across the drum kit like it's his throne and we're all peasants. "You forget I made you hot, Callahan. Without me, you'd still be singing Ed Sheeran covers to fucking test tubes in your lab coat."
Freya howled from the side, where she sat cross-legged beside George, perched on a stack of amp cases. "He's right, you know. You didn't even know what a guitar was until Cameron dragged your ass into Year Ten Battle of the Bands."
