All my worries suddenly seem so distant and small that when I look back I can’t even recognize them. Who cares? Who cares about anything but this?

Frankie moves against me, spaces notching against curves. She’s breathing harder, too. She runs a hand up beneath my shirt, over my back. Each fingertip leaves a track of fire. Or ice. I can’t even tell.

And then, slowly, she pulls away. She puts a finger against my lips and smiles up at me.

“Anders Thorson,” she murmurs. “You really like to keep a girl waiting.”

I smile back. We both start to laugh.

“Since December,” she says. “I’ve been waiting since December to do this again.” Frankie laughs some more, eyebrows pulling together. “Why were we waiting?”

“I don’t know,” I say, because I don’t. I don’t know anything.

Frankie pushes lightly at my chest. I lean back, and she gets up, smoothing her hair and tugging her sweater back into place.

“I’d better go,” she says, sidling toward the window. “But I want to see you again. Alone again. Not in front of a crowd. And not four months from now.”

“Good.” I’m still trying to get my breath under control. “Me, too.”

“How about tomorrow? After the show?”

“Sure. Perfect.”

“Good.” Frankie’s lips curve upward. I want to touch them so much, it makes me dizzy. “Then I’ll see you at the Crow’s Nest.”

I offer her my knee, and Frankie uses it as a step to climb up and through the window.

I look past her into the blue-black woods. “Hey. How did you get here?”

“My car.” Frankie nods into the distance. “I parked way back on the road, so nobody here would hear me come or go.”

I grin. “You planned all of this.”

Frankie grins back.

Then she hops down from the stump and flies off into the trees. I watch her go. I’m just turning away from the window when I catch sight of something else.

A pale flash behind a big pine. A shape that looks like a face. Glittering eyes.

I freeze.

I stare at that spot for more than a minute, but whatever I saw doesn’t reappear. Maybe it wasn’t there in the first place.

I shut and lock the window.

Then I flop back onto the bed that still smells, really faintly, of Frankie Lynde.

I take a deep breath.

What am I fighting against?

If life’s trying to give me what I want, why don’t I just freaking take it?

I roll over on the bed and grab Yvonne from her spot on the floor. I lay her across my chest. The sleek surface of her body begins to warm. I can feel my heartbeat reverberating inside of her.

There was a guitar that used to hang on the wall at the Underground Music Studio. A Fender Stratocaster. Arctic White. The tag dangling from its neck said it was six hundred dollars, but it might as well have said six million. The Fender was there when I started lessons with Flynn nine years ago. Back then the only guitar I owned was an acoustic we’d gotten for free from one of Mom’s coworkers who didn’t play anymore. It came with a cardboard case and a pack of spare strings and a book called You Can Play Folk Guitar! I’d sit on the lumpy navy couch in the middle of the studios, waiting for my lesson with my own crappy guitar beside me, and I’d stare up at the Fender’s pearly curves and glossy finish. It looked like it had been made of magical snow.