You are heartache, it read.

The card was a heavy stock, black, lined with a deep burgundy around the edges and those three words were written in silver.

Red isn’t for love. Red is blood.

I bled for you, she told me. My virginity, my heart, all ran red for you, Ransom.

Then, just then with her taunting me in a voice harsher than she’d ever used before, pushing in that pain, that overwhelming needle of dread, I jumped from my bed, not caring that my body was so damn tired. I threw open the door and stumbled out of my room.

All around me, in the hallways, on the stairs, out in the backyard around the deck, there were people my age, my peers, laughing and drinking and loving this time in their lives. They were free and happy and teetering near lives that seemed endless, limitless.

I didn’t understand any of them. I couldn’t smile with them as though I was as carefree and young as they were. I never would be again. But I was full of need, and while I couldn’t care less about the laughter and the drinking, I was glad of the opportunity to prowl.

I moved around the party like a voyeur, looking for someone to help. Someone who looked like they needed it more than I did. Like they’d gone to this party to forget. Just like I tried to do every day.

I found her sitting in the corner of the living room, nursing a red Solo cub, pretending to drink whatever it was that Ronnie Blanchard had offered her. I’d never seen her before, not that I generally paid attention to anyone around me.

She didn’t look like Emily, and she didn’t remind me remotely of the dancer or of Aly. She was tiny, probably no more than five foot and she wore her hair in a blunt pixie cut with platinum blonde highlighting her heart-shaped face.

“Ransom,” Ronnie called, slapping my shoulder when I stood in front of the pixie. But I didn’t answer him, didn’t bother to acknowledge him at all, my eyes focused on the girl. That hand on my shoulder fell away and in my peripheral, I noticed him cursing under his breath. “Another one bites the dust.”

I didn’t know if he meant me or Pixie Cut, because I could only stare down at her, watching those small, bright eyes of her, so light blue they looked gray, widen. I figured that she knew me, or at least knew of me. I got that she’d probably heard everything about me. CPU was a small campus, private, unlike our secrets. Very little was ever allowed to stay hidden.

“I…” she stared and I thought maybe she’d protest, but then I knelt in front of her, moving my head to watch her, see if she’d tell me to leave her alone.

She didn’t say a word.

“You alone?” I wasn’t asking about a boyfriend. Didn’t care if she was there on a date. She knew what I meant. She had to.

“Yeah,” she finally said, holding my hand when I offered it. “All alone.”

One nod and I gave her a second more to consider what she was doing, giving her the yellow light I always wanted them to take. Then, when she gave no indication of stopping me, I slammed into drive. “I can make you feel good.”

She wanted me to. Followed behind me through the crowd, not saying a word, up the stairs to my room. I didn’t explain the roses, knocked the note off my bedside table before she could ask about it. And then, with that tiny, tiny body stretched naked across my bed, I set out to serve my punishment.

This was not like being with the dancer. There was no seduction. I paid Pixie Cut no compliments because my head was too clouded by guilt, that sick, constant enemy that had taken root inside me and refused to leave.

It was routine, usual, habit. I knew what to do, how to touch her so that she became no single woman. There was nothing personal in it at all. Nothing real. She was them and as I took her with my mouth, not caring that she yanked on my hair, that her moans and chants of “yes” became louder than the music rattling the windows, I served like I was meant to, doing whatever the hell I could to give something other than heartache, no matter how empty it was.

I didn’t ask her name, just like I hadn’t with any of the others. How could I? How could I let them become real to me, become more than a simple penance? What would I be if I forgot my sins? If I did that then she would be truly gone and even the memory of her, my sweet Emily, would be lost forever.

Happy anniversary,Ransom.

“You too, baby.”

7

There was music. Always. Childhood memories, dreams that reoccurred over the years, every happy and miserable moment of our lives in Nashville always included music. Like that time Bobby, my mom’s elderly boss, the closest thing to a grandmother I’d ever had, decided to throw me a tenth birthday party. The kids at my school had been scared of my size and my quick temper, so only a few of the guys from my junior high football team showed up. Mom spent a solid hour apologizing to me, trying to pretend there weren’t tears in her eyes over the apparent slight. Bobby and Mark, my mother’s gay best friend, had to drag her out of the kitchen to tell her to suck it up, that she was far more upset than I was. We spent the rest of the party camped around the piano singing songs about farting and diarrhea and other gross boy shit that Mark remembered from his times at Lacrosse camp. It had been the best birthday I remembered having, ever.

Or, when I went an entire summer in pain every single night because my limbs were growing too quickly, that damn Hale DNA hurrying to make me like my father before I was ready, and Mom lying next to me while Mark or his partner Johnny rubbed peppermint oil on my throbbing legs. She sang to me then, or hummed throaty and low. That was the summer she taught me Ava Maria in Italian. Anytime I can’t sleep, that’s the tune that calms me, makes me remember that I had a mother and two adopted fathers who cared enough about me to lose sleep, who wore themselves out to make sure I was in as little pain as possible .

There was always music. Even in the most desperate, unbearable moments. When I got tossed from my school in eighth grade for losing my temper and sending that bastard Mikee Sibley through the glass window for trying to attack a girl who was barely thirteen, my mom sat me down in front of the piano, telling me that the keys would be my therapy, that the notes would blast away the hopelessness.

Music had worked for that angry, fourteen-year-old I’d been. It had worked for me since then, but I had let the accident, my guilt, distract me from my therapy and had not played for over a year.

I’d tried it, with Mom’s insistence, when I could not silence that voice I thought was Emily, when I sank too heavy in the grief that tightened around my heart every single day since I last saw my girlfriend, Mom forced me in front of the piano, or plunked her vintage Gibson guitar in my arms, begging me to play. It had become common for me to pacify her by just doing what she said, and so I’d tried, pushing a smile onto my face, gripping the neck of that guitar tight and playing every song I knew until my mother’s expression didn’t look so tight. Until I thought her worry had eased.

But it wasn’t real. Music stopped working for me. I missed it almost as much as I missed Em.

It was not a surprise to hear music playing as I approached the lake house that Sunday. But it was not only my mother’s raspy alto singing “I Dreamed a Dream” that I heard as I walked inside. There was another voice, this one higher, wobbling, sounding scared as my mother picked up the bridge. It wasn’t bad, but nothing about those voices sounded in harmony. One was trying too hard, the other was overpowering.