The Higher We Soar

17. A magician's trick

The next couple of weeks passed in a steady blur of work. The days had a pleasant rhythm, productive yet predictable, moving along with a kind of consistency. Recording sessions unfolded without a hitch, my role mostly supervisory, making sure all the pieces clicked together well. It was peaceful, almost comforting, in its familiarity.

And then there were the nights.

Maddox and I had slipped into a rhythm of our own, an unspoken understanding that needed no words. I already knew how he handled his relationships—casual, fluid, yet somehow deliberate. So I figured we were just that—casual.

Our nights were long and pleasant, and somehow effortlessly comfortable. Most of them spent at his place, only occasionally at mine. I didn't question the arrangement much; there was a certain ease to it. During the day, the studio was my domain—a place where I held control, structure, a sense of reliability. But the nights with Maddox... they were different—looser, less defined. I liked the idea of keeping those worlds separate, of maintaining that divide. Yet, as much as I wanted to believe that, it wasn't entirely true.

Maddox was a constant presence in both, subtly blurring lines I wasn't sure how to navigate. However, this theoretical separation allowed me to maintain a pretense that made everything easier.

He still talked a lot. In the bedroom as well. He could fill any silence with ease, his words flowing effortlessly, sometimes so fast it was hard to keep up. But for all his chatter, there was always this nagging feeling that I didn't really know him—not deeply, anyway. I understood the surface of him, sure: his charm, his passion, that magnetic enthusiasm that drew people in. But beneath that? He was a mystery.

There was nothing weird about that, right? You could say we'd only known each other for a few months and that's too short to truly know somebody, sure. During that time, however, he'd become a master at dodging any real, personal questions. He'd let slip the occasional fragment of his past, random stories from his life before the studio, brief flashes of who he might have been once. But they were just that—fragments. Small, scattered pieces of a puzzle he never let me put together. And no matter how much I wanted to, those bits and pieces were never enough to satisfy the growing curiosity inside me.

Once or twice, late at night, when we were both on the cusp of sleep, I'd catch him staring at his phone. His expression would shift in those moments—change into something distant, something almost unfamiliar. A frown so genuine that it almost didn't suit him. It was a side of him I rarely saw, and when I tried asking about it, he'd brush it off with some casual remark about being tired. Then, like clockwork, that dazzling, million-dollar smile would reappear, perfectly timed to erase whatever darkness had crept into his eyes. It was as if the moment never happened at all. A magician's trick. And maybe that was Maddox's greatest sleight of hand—his ability to make everything disappear, to make you forget you'd even seen it.

Was it even there?

So, I didn't ask anymore. I learned quickly that there was no point.

. . ............................ . .

"No way," I muttered one morning, half in disbelief, as I hurried to find my shirt. "Are you serious?"

Maddox, still lounging in bed without a care in the world, barely glanced up. He stretched lazily, the muscles in his arms shifting under his skin, completely oblivious to the fact that the sheets had slipped halfway off the mattress, leaving very little to the imagination.

"What's so weird about that?" he asked, his tone casual, almost amused. "You're on social media yourself!"

I scoffed, tossing his pants at him. "Yeah, but I wasn't the one who swore up and down that I'd never be caught dead with socials. And now, just one suggestion from Sophie, and suddenly you've got accounts on two different platforms?"