Chapter Thirty-Two
Jonathan
My fingers idly strum over the guitar strings, and the notes jangle against each other, out of tune. I know they’re out of tune. It should bother me more than it does. But I’m not playing anything anyway. Just noodling. Hoping it’ll jar something loose.
So far it’s not working.
Since Gabby tore my heart out and took it with her, I haven’t been able to write. Not anything worthwhile anyway.
I didn’t try much for about a week. First I was focused on trying to convince her to change her mind. That we could manage to work things out.
But she wouldn’t take my calls or text me back. When my phone lit up with her name and picture flashing on the screen, nervous hope rose in my chest. All that came crashing down when the voice on the other end was low and masculine.
“Hi, Jonathan. This is Lance, Gabby’s older brother.” He put special emphasis on the words older brother. “I know we haven’t had a chance to meet yet, which I’ve thought is a damn shame for a while now, seeing as how we live in the same town. But you and Gabby have been busy and wrapped up in your own bubble, so I get it.”
He spoke calmly and reasonably, telling me that if I cared about Gabby as much as I said I did, I’d let her go.
“I love her,” I said. “I’m in love with her. I don’t want to let her go.”
He sighed. “I get it, man. I really do. But this is what she wants.”
“I need to talk to her. I want to hear it from her. Then I’ll leave her alone.”
“I’m pretty sure she was clear about what she wanted when she was there earlier. Gabby’s many things, but indirect isn’t one of them. When she has something to say, she always gets to the point. It’s a family trait. We get that from our dad.”
I was speechless for a minute. Because he was right. She was always clear about what she wanted. From the beginning, she’d made it clear that she wanted me. And now she didn’t anymore.
“Is she—“ I had to clear my throat to get the words out. “Is she okay?”
He snorted. “What do you think, man? She told me she loves you, but she broke up with you because she can’t come up with a way for your relationship to work out. She’s heartbroken, but she’s trying to save herself from worse pain later.” He paused for a beat. “And as much as it kills me to see her this way, I can’t say I fault her logic. I know it’s not what you want to hear, but it’s probably for the best in the long run.”
“Right.”
He said a few more things, but I stopped listening after that and just made agreeable noises on autopilot until he hung up.
She loved me but she didn’t see a way for us to be together long term.
I’ve been wracking my brain for weeks now, trying to come up with a way to prove her wrong. Figuring out a plan that would end with us together.
Because I’ve never found anyone that makes me feel the way she does. Ever. And I can’t fathom coming across that again any time soon.
The door to my bedroom in my parents’ house pushes open, and my brother Brendan leans against the doorframe. “Are you going to keep strumming out of tune chords? Mom’s about to leave just to get away from that obnoxious sound, as she calls it, or come in here and tune it for you.”
A half smile pulls at my lips. “Sorry. I’ll tune it.”
He waits while I pluck at the strings and turn the knobs to get the fourths to line up before speaking again. “What are you working on?”
I shake my head, and strum through another slow chord progression. “Nothing, really. I’m supposed to be writing songs for my upcoming album. But I haven’t had any luck lately.”
He cocks his head as I play through the same five chords again. “That sounds interesting. Got a melody to go with it?”
“Nope.” I play them again, and he stares at my hands moving on the instrument before meeting my eyes again.
“She did a number on you, didn’t she?”
I grunt in response. I know they’ve all been steering clear of me since I got back. Between Gabby breaking up with me almost a month ago and being blocked ever since, I haven’t been the best company.
“Try playing through the individual notes in the chords a few times. Rearrange them and throw in some extra ones. See if anything pops.”
I stare at Brendan for a minute, surprised he’s making songwriting suggestions. He was our drummer, but as far as I know hasn’t touched it in years. And songwriting was never his thing.
But I do as he suggests, breaking up the chords I’ve been messing with, once through in order, then I start pulling them apart further, starting at different points in the chord, adding in a few extra notes to fill in the gaps. Passing tones, I think Gabby always calls them. My grasp of theory is much more elementary than hers. My mom taught us all to read music when we were kids, but since she didn’t learn how to read music until she was in college, she didn’t emphasize it as much as Gabby does.
“Tuning helps, doesn’t it?” Brendan’s voice pulls my head up, a smirk on his face.
Chuckling, I nod. “Yeah. It does.”
“No wonder nothing’s been working. You’ve been half-assing it so much that you can’t even bother to play in tune. How do you expect anything to sound good?”
“That’s not—“
“Yeah,” he interrupts, his voice softer, losing the teasing quality it just held. “I know. But you’ve signed a contract. You have to produce. You’ve always been the one to channel your feelings into your music the most out of the three of us. Now’s the time to do that.”
I stare at him as I pick a few more notes, considering his words. Clearing my throat, I drop my eyes back to the guitar. “Good point.”
The notes start rearranging themselves into something like a melody, and I hum along as I play. When I decide I have something worth writing down, I look up to find Brendan gone and my door closed again. I’ve been so caught up in figuring something out that I didn’t even notice him leave.
But he did what he came to do—kick my ass in gear and get me writing again.
I dig my notebook and a pencil out of my backpack. I brought it home for the break because I knew I needed to write new songs, but haven’t gotten it out yet. Nothing was coming before now.
Picking up my guitar again, I play through the melody, cementing the notes in my mind before committing them to paper. But all of this reminds me of Gabby. Scribbling the notes on the staff paper, the angled slashes for note heads, the vertical slashes for stems. She’s changed so much about me, about my music, and the difference in how I write things down seems to embody all of it.
Toward the bottom of the paper, I start to scribble out words, the beginnings of lyrics. It’s rough. This one’ll take some work on the poetry side, a little more polish to make it sound right. But for now I’m roughing out my ideas, needing to capture them before they float away, never to return.
As the lyrics and melody start to take shape and come together, so does a plan. Because even if she doesn’t change her mind, I need to communicate to Gabby what she’s done for me, what she means to me. And it’s more than just her help with my music, though God knows I already miss that. It’s more than any one thing.
It’s all of it.
All of her.
She is everything. And she needs to know.