At Night IV
The next morning.....
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Morning light breaks through the blinds in thin, golden stripes that crawl across the sheets. Claire stirs, half asleep, reaching for the warmth that isn’t there. The space beside her is cold, but it still smells like him: soap, smoke, the trace of his cologne.
She sits up, hair a mess, and pulls one of his shirts from the dresser. It hangs to her thighs, soft from too many washes. The shorts she left earlier in the week wait crumpled near the bed. She steps into them and crosses the quiet apartment.
From the hallway, she hears it before she sees him — a low, hollow resonance, soft as breath. The kind of sound that doesn’t fill a room so much as haunt it.
She stops in the doorway.
J’s on the couch, head bowed, the hollow body guitar balanced against his thigh. The light from the blinds falls across his hands, striping them in gold and shadow. He’s not playing anything real, just drifting, letting the notes find each other.
She watches him play. Long enough that the coffee in the pot cools another degree. Long enough that she forgets to move.
There’s something in the way he listens to the instrument — like he’s waiting for it to speak in a language she barely understands. The way his fingers linger as he works through a song, not pressing, just touching, as if he’s afraid to wake something sleeping inside it.
Her chest tightens. She doesn’t name it, but she knows.
He looks up then, like he’s felt her watching. Just enough to meet her eyes, then back to the guitar.
“Hey,” he says, quiet.
She almost answers, but her voice catches. So she just smiles, small and unsteady.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he says.
She steps closer. “What are you playing?”
“Nothing, really.”
“It’s beautiful.”
He half-smiles. “Then I guess it’s something.”
She moves to the kitchen, pours herself coffee from the pot he left on, and returns to sit beside him. The air smells like dry roast and pinewood. He keeps playing.
After a long silence, she asks, “Why’d you quit?”
He plucks a few more notes before answering. “Didn’t Jess tell you?”
“I want to hear it from you.”
He stops. The strings buzz once against the fretboard before going still.
“Because it stopped sounding like me,” he says. “Every note had to pass through someone else’s filter. Too dark. Too soft. Too something. By the end I wasn’t writing anymore. I was translating.”
He sets the guitar beside him. “Warped was the last straw. Even Grohl said it—it doesn’t get better. Just louder.”
Claire studies him. “Maybe it doesn’t have to get better. Maybe it just has to be yours again.”
He shakes his head. “But it never is. You play their game or you don’t play at all. The minute you do, you’re a product. A cell on a spreadsheet.”
“Then don’t play their game,” she says. “Play yours.”
He exhales through his nose, a dry laugh caught halfway. “Their game pays the bills. Puts the record in stores. Gets you on the road.”
He lifts the guitar again and runs a line up the neck, quick and effortless, each note sharp as glass.
“It’s never mine,” he says. “By the time it hits the mix, it’s somebody else’s idea of me. Turn it brighter. Cut the distortion. Make it sell.”
“So play the game,” she says, watching him. “Play it until you can afford not to.”
He glances at her, then back at the guitar. “That’s the problem. You start playing it for survival, and somewhere along the line it becomes who you are.”
She leans in, voice softer. “Then maybe start over. Just you. Just this.”
He doesn’t answer, he just starts to play again, softer this time.
She watches the movement of his hands, then says quietly, “I don’t mean to intrude. I just think you have something special here — a gift you obviously still want to share.”
He looks over, half a nod, eyes returning to the fretboard.
“It’s not that simple,” he says. “Every time I try, it turns into something else. An angle. A pitch.”
“Then maybe that’s the point,” she says. “Play until it isn’t an angle anymore.”
He keeps his eyes on the strings. “You make it sound easy.”
“It’s not,” she says. “But maybe that’s what makes it worth doing again.”
He lets the line hang, then plays a run that isn’t for her, but she feels it anyway.
“Agency’s expensive,” he says. “And it’s not just money. It’s time. Relevance. You step away too long, and they forget you ever mattered.”
Claire leans in again, closer than before.
“Then make something they can’t forget.”
He stops playing and she closes the distance between them. A gentle kiss.
“Something they can’t deny,” she murmurs against his lips.
She pulls back and says, quieter still, “Something that feels like this.”
He doesn’t answer. He just looks at her for a moment — long enough that she feels seen, not watched — and then his eyes fall back to the guitar.
He shifts it against his thigh, thumb brushing the strings. A new sound, softer, uncertain at first. Then it settles into something low and human, all breath and wood and ache.
She stays close, one hand resting on the couch between them, feeling the vibration travel through the frame.
It isn’t a song she knows. Maybe it isn’t even a song yet. But it’s beautiful in the way beginnings are: fragile, temporary, entirely his.
He keeps playing. The music shifts, soft and searching, like he’s talking to himself through the strings. Time slides from seconds to minutes. Neither of them moves.
When he finally speaks, his voice sounds different. Quieter, but clearer.
“You really think I should give it another go?”
She looks at him. “I think you already are.”
He nods, barely. The ghost of a smile. His fingers find the melody again. They are now certain, almost whole.
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