I stop.

It feels like time’s stopped, the earth has ceased spinning. Like I’ve turned to stone, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, hard like stopping a runaway truck barreling downhill, but I do it.

Darcy’s trembling. I don’t know if it’s the cold or if it’s me or if it’s everything, but she doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t move at all, her eyes still closed and her face tilted up, lips slightly parted. Everything about her right now screams kiss me but she said don’t.

And I could, but I don’t.

Instead I lean my forehead against hers, disappointment washing through me like a tidal wave. The cold tip of her nose touches mine, and neither of us moves for a long moment.

Then Darcy slides one hand up my arm, puts it over my hand, laces her fingers through mine.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Don’t be,” I whisper.

I pull back and kiss her on the forehead, her skin beneath my lips. I linger for a few seconds too long, heart hammering, mind racing.

This doesn’t make any sense. I know that. I know that if you looked up mixed signals in the dictionary you’d find a picture of this moment, of Darcy telling me not to kiss her while she holds my hand and apologizes and I tell her it’s okay.

But it strangely doesn’t feel wrong. It feels disappointing, it feels tangled, it feels messy and sharp like walking barefoot through badlands.

I feel like a pool float that’s deflating, sinking through the water toward the bottom, looking up at the strange, bright, distorted sky through the water.

But it doesn’t feel wrong.

“We should head back,” she finally says, and takes her hand out of mine.

When she steps away, she doesn’t quite look me in the eye. On the drive back to the lodge, we don’t speak, and then I’m alone in my hotel suite again, in the dark.

I put half a pie into the mini fridge, then slump on the couch and stare out the window at the moonlit night, and I try to think about all this but I can’t.

* * *

At eight forty-five the next morning, I knock on Darcy’s door with my elbow, a cup of coffee in either hand, and she answers looking like she literally rolled out of bed when she heard me knock.

“Hey,” I say.

Darcy looks at the coffee in my hand, but not me.

“Thanks,” she says, her voice flat and toneless. She’s still not looking at me.

I hand her a coffee. She swings the door wide, and neither of us says anything. She’s looking at the floor, the walls, the coffee, everywhere but at me.

I fucking ruined it, I realize.

All I had to do was stay the course. Be her friend, not something else.

And I fucking ruined it.

It’s ten times worse than last night when she said don’t, like sandpaper grating against my insides.

I should have just kissed her.

It would still be ruined but I’d have kissed her.

We sit at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, staring at the paintings on the walls and saying nothing. At 8:56, Gavin rings with a video chat. I’ve never been happier for him to be early.

“Morning, you two,” he says, sounding chipper as fuck, practically grinning from ear to ear. Of course he is, he’s back in Los Angeles with Marisol and probably got some morning nookie or something.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hey, Gavin,” Darcy says, taking a long swig of coffee.

Gavin’s eyes on the screen narrow slightly, though maybe I’m imagining it. The screen’s not very big.

“I’ve got news,” he says. “Actually, I’ve got fantastic news.”

“Yeah?”

“What is it?” I ask.

We’re not nearly as excited as Gavin thinks we should be, that’s fucking obvious. Now his eyes definitely narrow, and he leans down toward his phone camera.

“What’s happened?” he asks.

We glance at each other, the first time we’ve made eye contact that morning.

“Darcy, you’re all right?”

“Fine!” Darcy says, way too fast.

“Have you punched someone?” he asks me.

“It’s early,” I say gruffly, because I want him to stop fucking prying via videochat. “What’s the great news?”

Gavin leans back, almost going out of frame, and grins.

“We’ve got a drummer for the tour!” he announces.

“That’s great,” Darcy says, her tone not reflecting great in the least.

“Who?” I ask.

“You’re familiar with Girl Bomb, yeah?”

Now Darcy sits up a little straighter, suddenly interested.

“I love Girl Bomb,” she says. “Girl Bomb is fucking great.”

I just nod in agreement.

“Well, they’re taking a break right now, so Joan Leonard’s agreed to fill in for Eddie for the rest of our tour.”

Darcy gasps, one hand flying to her mouth.

Gavin reaches out and turns the phone. Sitting next to him is a woman wearing a black tank top with a white skull and crossbones, her curly brown hair shot through with gray, one hand curled around a mug.

“Hi, I’m Joan,” she says, waving.

“Hi,” Darcy breathes.

“I asked her if she could come by yesterday and give some of our songs a go in the studio,” Gavin says, adjusting the phone again so we can see them both. “And it really went beautifully, and she’s available, so as long as the two of you approve, here she is.”

“That’s fine!” Darcy says, still gawping at the screen.

It’s obvious that she thinks this is way better than fine.

“She’s obviously not ours permanently,” Gavin goes on. “Girl Bomb’s set to start recording — when was it?”

“Some time this winter,” Joan tells him.

“But we’ve bought ourselves quite a lot of time to find another replacement,” Gavin goes on.

“I don’t envy you,” Joan says.

“I don’t envy us either,” I say, half-joking. “We thought it had worked out the last time.”

“It’s almost like musicians are temperamental or something,” Joan says dryly.

“Yeah, they can be pretty crazy,” Darcy pipes up, leaning in toward my phone. Clearly still starstruck.

“We’ll be there Friday next so we can start rehearsing,” Gavin says. “So, Nigel found a few places up near Tallwood that might be suitable as a rehearsal space but obviously neither of us has been able to check them out...”

Gavin, Darcy and I talk business for a while. Darcy reassures Gavin about twenty times that her back is healing properly, even though her eyes keep darting to Joan, who’s sitting next to Gavin, piping up every so often with thoughts and advice.

Darcy’s the bass player for one of the biggest bands on the planet. She’s played in front of fifty thousand people, in huge arenas. She’s met Bono and Mick Jagger. The four of us — her, me, Gavin, and Liam — once got high with Snoop Dogg.

Once, when the bass player for Green Day sprained his hand doing something dumb, they asked her to fill in for a show.

But right now, she’s so star struck that she’s practically silent, just nodding along wide-eyed. Girl Bomb has never been a particularly huge band — successful, sure, but not wildly so — but they’ve been around forever, and Darcy’s loved them for as long as I’ve known her.

Fuck, the first time I ever watched Gavin and Liam shoot up together we were listening to Girl Bomb. We were all sharing a dressing room as some shitty club in San Francisco, and Darcy and I were sitting on a couch, sharing her iPod headphones and trying not to watch the other two stick needles into their arms.

I’m forever going to associate the lyric hold my heart, break it if you want with that moment: Darcy so earnest and unguarded, one of the first times I saw her with her spikes down as the other two nodded out. Half wonderful and half terrible.

I don’t share that particular memory with Joan.

When we end the call half an hour later, Darcy still hasn’t said much, and she still doesn’t make eye contact as she drains her coffee mug, the phone screen black. I lean back, putting my phone into my pocket again, and just look at her.

Finally, she looks at me across the table, her bright blue eyes a shock against her nearly-black hair, still wild and mussed from sleep. And she’s fucking beautiful. She’s always fucking beautiful, even now when she looks down and takes a deep breath and chews the inside of her lip and looks into her paper coffee cup like there’s going to be something written on the inside of it.

“Do you want more coffee?” she finally asks. “I figured out the coffee pot.”

“Sure,” I say, because there’s nothing else to say. She scrapes her chair back, grabs my mug, and heads across the room into her tiny kitchenette. She’s wearing short shorts and a t-shirt, the wrinkles of her bandages visible through it as she leans over the sink, rinsing mugs out.

Silence as she pours water and measures coffee grounds. Silence as the coffee brews and she stands on one leg, her other foot perched against her knee like a flamingo, gazing out the window. Silence as she puts sugar in hers and leaves mine black, then brings them back to the table.

“Let me change your bandages before I get out of here,” I say, blowing on the hot black liquid to cool it.

She swallows.

“You don’t ha—”

“I thought we were fucking done with that?” I say. It’s too sharp and she looks at me, her light eyes hard, but then she looks down again.

“Thanks,” Darcy says, her voice soft but distant, just in case I didn’t already fucking feel like a monster.

We finish the coffee. We walk to the bathroom, where her burn supplies live, and I wait with my back turned while she takes off her shirt and covers her front. I still brush her hair from her neck as I unwind the ace bandage. I’m still gentle as I pull the tape off, always careful not to hurt her.

The burn doesn’t have blisters any more. It’s faded to a bright, ugly pink, the skin puffy and shiny, and for the thousandth time I fight the urge to kiss the top border where it overlaps her shoulder. For the thousandth time, I touch her and watch the goosebumps travel up her neck and down her arms, down her sides, past the dimples in her back right above her jeans.

I tape on another bandage, the process considerably less involved now that it’s halfway to healed, and I let my fingers drift over the vertebrae in her neck, the notch of her waist, and I try not to think about the way her thighs would feel against my face.

It doesn’t work. They’d feel fucking fantastic, not to mention the way I know she’d moan. Grab my hair in one fist.

Fuck. I’m hard, but I turn away, pretending I’m not. Darcy wraps the bandage back around herself, pulls her shirt over her head. I think about all the different kinds of dog breeds that exist — Corgis and Dachshunds and Great Danes and Dalmatians — until my hard-on has faded.

We leave the bathroom, still not having said a word.

“I’ll be back again this evening,” I say, shoving one hand through my hair. It’s the first time we’ve scheduled this, because normally we’re already together. But I have a feeling we’ll be spending today apart.

Darcy bites her lip. She swallows, her hands in her pockets.

“There’s supposed to be a There’s a Ghost in My Beach House marathon on right now,” she says.

I shift my weight to my other foot.

“I was watching the previews of it last night and once of them’s a dog ghost,” she goes on. “Want to hang out for a couple of episodes?”

I do. Despite fucking everything, despite the fact that I should be going back to my suite and jerking off, or hell, going to wherever single people hang out in Tallwood at ten in the morning and finding someone to fuck, I do want to watch stupid TV with her.

Goddamn it.

“What kind of dog?” I ask.

“Great Dane.”

I shrug, trying to look nonchalant and not like there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

“Sure,” I say.

Darcy half-smiles, the first one I’ve seen from her all day.

We sit on the couch, Darcy leaning back gingerly. There’s an enormous 18^th-century mansion on the Connecticut coast on the TV.

“How do you think the dog died?” she says, her body an inch from mine. “And why’s it haunting the house?”

I consider this for a moment as the camera swoops in through the front door of the house, panning up a huge staircase.

“Hunting accident,” I say. “And because it knows where the bones are buried.”

Darcy snorts at my dumb joke, but she’s smiling, and I let the first glimmer of hope stick in my chest.

It’s not what I want, but maybe it’s not fucked. Not completely.