“Suit yourself,” she says just as someone bumps hard into my shoulder. Figuring she’ll retreat back to the bar, I retrain my focus on the swaying bodies fighting for dominance in that senseless way only the drunk and excitable do.

I steady the guy who stumbled into me with a hand to the chest, his beer slopping over his hand and onto my arm. I grimace and pull away once he’s got his feet under him. He doesn’t even seem to register me.

“They sound good tonight.”

I glance down to find Ivy’s eyes trained on the stage behind me. It turns out on nights where the guys play, Gavin has a buddy from his days in the Marines come help work the door. I guess I missed him last weekend. I was a little distracted after all. So my job tonight is to more or less babysit the crowd of bar goers and protect the guys on stage from getting stampeded by a swarm of uncoordinated limbs while they play.

“Don’t they always?” My eyes flicker between her piercing green orbs and the crowded space.

“This is only your second show,” she says, shuffling closer to me so we don’t have to scream as the guys start in on an old Dashboard Confessional cover, slowing it down for the first time tonight. The crowd instantly begins singing along.

“Maybe I just have a good ear for these things.”

She side-eyes me, then shrugs, crossing her arms, the bottle hanging loosely from her fingers.

“He’s already fucked up,” Ivy says as the chorus kicks off, and the noise elevates ten-fold. It’s not what she says, but how she says it that piques my attention.

I follow her unreadable gaze to Waylon where he sits behind his drums, eyes slid shut as he gives his whole body to the performance. A sheen of sweat cakes his skin in a dewy glow and his arms seem to quiver from the exertion and rush of the show. And perhaps, if Ivy’s right, something else...

“How do you know?”

She gives me a look I still can’t decipher, and then says, “Maybe I just have a good eye for these things.”

And then she’s gone, disappearing through the crowd.

Looking back at Waylon, I can’t help but flash back to how we left things this morning.

It’s a good thing I haven’t completely let myself go since football ended last fall. I might have not been as fast as Waylon set out to be—especially when he got spooked and bolted—but I had enough stamina to at least keep him in sight so I didn’t get lost in the woods somewhere.

Okay, and I was also a little fucking concerned, despite my better judgment.

I stayed back when we got back to the bar, watching from a safe distance as he disappeared inside without a backward glance.