vee ☆

Letter from Paige Bueckers to Azzi Fudd

(undated, circa 2001)

Rookie,

I’ve rewritten this letter about six times already and I still don’t like the opening line.

I was going to start with something poetic like “It’s raining here,” but it’s not. It’s dry as hell.

Then I thought about starting with “I miss you,” but that’s not a sentence that deserves to sit alone at the top of a page, it’s too fucking heavy.

So I guess I’ll just start like this:

Hi.

I’m sorry. (You can underline that one if you want. I mean it.)

I don’t really know how to write apologies without sounding like a Hallmark card written by someone who’s never done anything wrong. The problem is, I did a lot of things wrong. (Some to me, most of it to you).

I’ve been thinking a lot about addiction — which is the kind of sentence only people in recovery ever say — and I’m both embarrassed and a little angry about it. 

It’s strange, you know? Realizing that I built my whole personality around not needing anyone and then turned myself into someone who couldn’t be alone for five minutes without lighting something, snorting something, or drinking something.

You used to tell me I drank to disappear, and I think you were right. (Don’t get used to hearing that from me.)

You were always right about the hard things.

The truth is, I hurt you because you were the closest thing I had. 

When you told me you couldn’t be my other vice, I wanted to scream, because I thought you were abandoning me. 

Now I realize you were trying to save me — and maybe yourself. 

You were the only person who ever told me no without disappearing afterward. 

I was mean to you sometimes, especially when you didn’t deserve it. I said things that I thought sounded clever but were really just sharp. And I mistook cruelty for control.

Azzi, you kept giving me kindness and I kept treating it like it was charity.

I hate that.

I don’t remember everything about the overdose, but I do remember waking up and seeing your hand on the hospital bed, holding mine. 

That felt like a cosmic joke. That the person I’d pushed away the hardest was the one who still came back.

I think you already know this, but addiction is not romantic. It’s just boring destruction.

The weirdest part is, I thought all of that made me interesting. Rookie, now I see it just made me small.

I’ve been learning things here, slow and stupid, like a child learning how to walk. 

You’d laugh if you saw me now. I meditate. I journal. Fuck, I even made a smoothie last week 

My therapist says I should forgive myself, and I said, “I’ll do that when Azzi does.” (So no pressure or anything)

I know you can’t be my girlfriend. I get it now. 

I respect it, and if friendship is all I get, I’ll take it. Happily. 

You don’t have to write back right away. Just know that every sober day I have now has your fingerprints on it.

You were the first person who believed I could live differently, and I’m starting to.

Sometimes, when the nights get quiet and I can’t sleep, I hum your name under my breath. It helps. 

Tell my cats I said hi. Tell my plants I’m jealous. Tell yourself you did the right thing.

Yours, however you’ll have me,  

P.

P.S. I know I made your life harder. I know I scared you. I know I made you think you’d have to write my obituary for real one day. I promise I’m trying to make sure you never have to do that again.

P.P.S. If friendship is the only thing I get, I swear I’ll be the best goddamn friend you ever had.

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Rehab

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

The hardest part about rehab is that it’s boring.

Rehab is beige walls and coffee that tastes like pennies, and the same meal three times a day because your body still doesn’t trust food. 

Paige spent thirteen months in rehab, at least, that’s the neat number the clinic gave me when I asked for a statement for her file. In truth, it was closer to fifteen if you count the in-between time — the weekend she came home and didn’t call, the relapse.

She relapsed once. And I want to write that, because people like to pretend recovery is a straight line. It’s not. 

I went back to work, because what else do you do?

The world didn’t stop for her, or for me. I wrote about newer artists — the pop prodigies who smiled for every camera, the rising stars who didn’t know what heroin smelled like.

The airwaves shifted, replaced by studio polish.

Rock, as we knew it, was dying. Or maybe it had just evolved into nostalgia — the way people talked about Paige in past tense, like she was a myth instead of a person still breathing. 

Every magazine wanted retrospectives: Where Were You When Burning Red Came Out? 

I hated them all. 

She wasn’t even gone, and they’d already started writing her obituary (To be fair, so had I).

Sometimes, in bars, her voice would come on, and I would excuse myself to the bathroom and sit in a stall until it ended. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to cry in public. The truth? I didn’t know if she would ever sound that alive again.

Months passed, and then, one afternoon, I saw her reflection in the glass door of the CBS building.

I almost didn’t recognize her. 

The hair was shorter, uneven; her cheeks were sharper; She stood there, hands in her jacket pockets, the way she used to before stepping onstage.

She smiled when she saw me. 

 “Hey,” she said.

It had been nearly two years.

I said, “You look different.” “I’m trying something new,” she said. “It’s called not dying.”

We both laughed.

We went to a coffee shop near Dupont Circle. 

She ordered tea, she winced at the taste and told me she missed cigarettes more than music. She said rehab taught her two things: that boringness was worse than pain, and that she could survive almost anything except herself.

She didn’t say much else about it. 

Outside, the early 2000s were already humming with a different rhythm. 

Boy bands, pop princesses, music videos about nothing. The country had moved on from the idea of rock being revolutionary, and Paige’s generation was being packed into box sets.

Every producer I talked to said the same thing: Nobody wants guitars anymore.

But Paige wasn’t thinking about guitars. For the first time, she didn’t talk about her next album, or about writing, or about fame. 

She talked about her cat, and her plants. And she talked about wanting to tell the truth, when I asked her what truth, she smiled and said:

 “The kind that doesn’t sell.”

A few months later, she called me at 3 a.m.

“Let’s talk,” she said. “But this time, I’ll try to tell the truth.”

That was the beginning of everything again.

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CBS Features — September 3, 2001

“The Comeback: Paige Bueckers on The Art of Starting Over” Interview conducted by Azzi Fudd, Washington D.C.

The hotel suite is nothing like the ones she used to stay in.

No champagne, no chaos. Just an open window, a mug of coffee gone cold, and Paige Bueckers sitting cross-legged on the floor, her guitar leaning against the wall like an old friend.

She’s smaller now, though not physically. It's her volume that’s changed, like her armor has worn down to something human.

Her hair is back to its natural shade, shorter at the ends — a haircut that looks like a promise to stay.

AZ: It’s been… what? Two years since you’ve done a formal interview? PB: Two and a half, technically. But who’s counting? AZ: Everyone.

She smiles faintly, her hands still move like a performer’s, even when she’s sitting still  there’s rhythm in the way she fidgets.

PB: I wasn’t ready to talk. You shouldn’t talk when you’re down AZ: And now? PB: I’m up, Rookie.

(There’s a pause long enough to breathe in)

AZ: How are you, Paige? PB: I’m alive. That’s the headline, right?

She says it with a crooked grin.

AZ: That’s a good place to start. PB: It’s not bad. I wake up early now. I eat breakfast. I don’t throw things when I can’t find my lighter — mostly because I don’t have one anymore. AZ: Do you miss it? PB: The lighter? AZ: The smoking PB: (smiling) Sometimes. I miss not caring. But I don’t miss how small I got. AZ: You used to say that silence was worse than pain. Do you still believe that? PB: (thinks) Silence isn’t death. It’s just… quiet. Death it’s Death

For a long time, Paige’s mythology thrived on noise.

The rebel girl from Minnesota who made punk feel holy, who drank like she was allergic to tomorrow. Now, she looks like she’s trying to build a smaller mythology, one where she doesn’t have to burn herself to prove she’s alive.

AZ: What did you learn, in all that time away? PB: That I’m not special. AZ: That’s a surprising answer. PB: It’s the truest one I have. Every musician thinks they’re immortal. Well, turns out I’m just another idiot who almost died on drugs. AZ: Are you lonely now? PB: Less. (pauses) You know, it’s funny. When you’re famous, people want to touch you all the time. They think that’s love. But it’s not.  AZ: You were always writing about connection, about wanting it and running from it at the same time. PB: (smiles) Yeah. I used to think wanting someone meant they had power over you. I disagree with that now. AZ: That’s new. PB: So am I.

Her voice is rougher now — smoke-stained, maybe permanently. 

But when she laughs, it still fills the room.

AZ: People are going to want to know if the new record is about all this. PB: It’s about breathing. That’s as specific as I’ll get. AZ: Come on. Give me something. PB: (grinning) Less “let’s die beautifully,” more “let’s just live.” AZ: That’s a good quote. PB: You always say that when I sound like I’ve been in therapy. AZ: Have you been? PB: Yeah. Turns out, unpacking childhood trauma works better than coke. Who knew?

(A laugh breaks the tension)

AZ: What do you think about pop taking over? PB: I think it’s fine. Pop’s fun. AZ: Some people would say you helped make that possible. PB: Then I hope they’re sending royalties. AZ: So you don’t care that people call rock dead? PB: Rock’s not dead. It just grew up, went to rehab, and started journaling. AZ: That’s an answer only you would give. PB: That’s why you keep interviewing me.

She stands up, stretches, and walks to the window. 

AZ: Do you ever think about everything that’s been written about you? PB: Only when I can’t sleep. Then I read it out loud in funny accents. AZ: You don’t ever want to correct the record? PB: Nah. The truth’s boring. AZ: And yet you said you wanted to tell it. PB: Yeah, but not for them. For me.

She sits back down. The afternoon light cuts across her face, and for the first time in hours, she looks young. 

AZ: What scares you now? PB: The quiet. But I’m learning to listen to it. AZ: Do you think you’ll ever stop making music? PB: Probably. Not because I want to — just because someday I’ll run out of things to say AZ: You’ve always said you hate being analyzed. PB: I do. AZ: Then why keep letting me do it? PB: You’re cute.

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Vice Versa (2002–2003)

Editor’s Preface — Azzi Fudd (2025)

You could tell Vice Versa was coming before anyone heard it. 

Paige always telegraphed her resurrections. A snide quote here, a grainy photo there, a rumor that she’d been seen humming to herself in a diner. 

When the magazine piece dropped, it wasn’t an announcement.

It was a warning shot.

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Rolling Stone (Op-Ed by Paige Bueckers, March 2002)

“Pop Isn’t the Problem — You Are”

Look, I love guitars as much as the next washed-up rock romantic, but some of you sound like ghosts yelling at the living.

Every decade, we pick a new villain. Once it was disco, then it was synths, now it’s pop. 

The truth is, pop didn’t kill rock — Rock overdose on its arrogance.

People say I’ve gone soft because I like melody now. But maybe that’s just growing up. 

Maybe rebellion looks different when you’ve survived yourself.

Here’s a confession: I like Britney Spears. I think she’s cool as hell. 

Rock used to mean freedom. And somewhere along the way, we decided it meant misery.

So yeah, I’m making a pop record. 

Call it betrayal, call it evolution, call it whatever helps you sleep.

Just remember: Every time you accuse someone of selling out, what you’re really saying is that you’re afraid of changing.

I’ve already changed. You can catch up or stay angry

— Paige Bueckers

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Letter — Paige to Azzi (sent on Sherry Bomb stationery)

Rookie,

The label says I should “control the narrative.” 

I told them I’d rather just write a song.

Everyone’s calling me a sellout. You’d think I joined the CIA instead of the Billboard charts.

You know what’s funny? I like writing about love.

The new record’s called Vice Versa. Because I think It's a clever little name

Don’t worry, it’s not about you. (Okay, maybe a little.)

— P

P.S. Can’t wait for the tabloids trying to guess who “you” is on my songs. 

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Excerpt — Vanity Fair Profile, August 2002

“The Return of Paige Bueckers: Quieter, Cleaner, Still Dangerous”

In person, Bueckers looks younger than 42. Her eyes are clearer now, but the same stubborn spark lives behind them. 

She jokes about her “retirement from chaos,” but the music she’s making suggests anything but retreat.

She plays me an unfinished track from Vice Versa — all honeyed synth and clear vocals. “It’s a song about waking up,” she says. “The literal kind. Mornings fucking suck.”

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Phone Transcript (August 2002)

(recorded with consent for reference notes)

PB: The thing about getting sober is, I lost my fucking rhythm. AZ: You mean creatively? PB: Everywhere. AZ: You sound happy. PB: Don’t start rumors, Fudd.

(A laugh)

PB: I keep thinking about that letter I wrote you. AZ: The one where you apologized? PB: The one where I said I’d be your best friend. AZ: Yeah? PB: I meant it. 

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Vice Versa (2003)

Released February 17, 2003 — Platinum within three months.

Tracklist (select):

Static

Pop Song for Old Men

No Reason (single)

Dirty Mouth

Vice Versa

Bad Reputation

Halo Drive

Lungs

Midnight Apartment 

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NME Review (2003)

Vice Versa is Paige Bueckers’ softest record and somehow her most dangerous.

“Pop Song for Old Men” skewers the purists; “Vice Versa” seduces them back.

There’s joy here — not naive, but earned.

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“Vice Versa” — Written by Paige Bueckers (2003)

My sins are smaller, same obsession Write it down, that’s my profession.

Vice versa, it’s give and take, Love’s a gamble, art’s the stake,

You can keep your heaven — I like my scars, Rock never dies —  on my guitar.

Vice versa, honey, that’s my curse, Every punk just writes their worst.

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The World Tour (2004–2005)

Editor’s Preface — Azzi Fudd (2025)

The world tour was supposed to be her victory lap.

People thought Vice Versa was about redemption, about Paige learning to play nice.

In all truth? The World Tour was about control, about seeing how close she could get to the edge without falling off.

And the tour was her way of proving she could live on that edge without drinking.

I’d love to say it was easy. It wasn’t.

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Letter — Paige to Azzi (January 2004)

Rookie,

I said yes to the world tour. Don’t laugh. I know what you’re thinking 

But I need to know if I can still be me 

You once told me that my addiction wasn’t just the bottle. You were right. (God, I hate writing that sentence.)

So I’m going to test it.

No booze. No drugs. Just me.

Wish me luck

— P

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Excerpt — Rolling Stone, April 2004

“Paige Bueckers: Still Loud, Still Alive”

At 44, Bueckers has nothing left to prove — but that hasn’t stopped her from trying. 

The Vice Versa world tour is her first in nearly a decade, and it already feels like a miracle.

 Her setlist swings between confessions and anthems, her voice sharper, her jokes cleaner, her eyes clearer.

“Rock’s not about dying young anymore,” she tells the crowd in Chicago. “It’s about not dying, period.”

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Phone Transcript — May 2004 (Stockholm stop)

AZ: You sound exhausted. PB: I’m not immortal. AZ: Are you sleeping? PB: Define sleeping. AZ: Paige— PB: I’m fine. Really. I’m just—trying to remember how to 

(silence)

PB: Do you miss me? AZ: Every day. PB: Good. Then I’m not doing this for nothing.

Editor’s Note

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

People talk about recovery like it’s a straight road. It isn’t.

But she stayed sober.

Every show. Every night.

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Tour Memo — London, August 2004

BUECKERS ARRIVAL — 19:30 LOAD-IN — 20:00 PRESS CALL — CANCELLED (“no interviews tonight”)

SECURITY BRIEF — “Crowds expected to double. Maintain distance.”

(handwritten at bottom: “She hates the cameras again.”)

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Tabloid Clipping — September 2004

“BUECKERS SNAPS AT PHOTOGRAPHERS OUTSIDE THE SAVOY — ‘GET A JOB’”

Witness reports companion Azzi Fudd intervened, leading the musician to retreat into her vehicle.

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Letter — Azzi to Paige (undelivered draft, 2004)

Paige,

You can’t keep picking fights with ghosts. They’re not after you. They’re after a picture that proves we’re together.

I know you hate being looked at. But if you keep shouting back, you’re just giving them new headlines.

I love you. (You’ll roll your eyes at that. I can feel it already.) I love you anyway.

— A

Editor’s Note

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

I never sent that letter. I just folded it and stuck it in my notebook. She didn’t need more advice, she needed peace.

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Excerpt — NME Review, January 2005

“The Vice Versa Tour: A Quiet Riot”

Halfway through her London encore, Paige stops singing and just listens. 

The crowd sings the chorus of “No Reason” back to her — word for word.

She laughs, puts her hand to her chest, and mouths, Thank you.

It’s not rockstar arrogance anymore. It’s grace.

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Letter — Paige to Azzi (July 2005)

Rookie,

I’ve been gardening. (Yes, you can laugh again.) There’s something addictive about watching things grow slowly 

I don’t know what we are.

But when I write, I still start every song with your name in the margins.

— P

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Post-Tour Dressing Room, Minneapolis, February 2006

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

The room smelled like sweat and Paige sat in front of the mirror, wiping the last of her stage makeup off with a trembling hand.

I didn’t knock. I never did.

She looked up for a moment, neither of us said anything. 

PB: You came. AZ: You didn’t ask. PB: You always come.

Her voice cracked halfway through the sentence, and I stepped closer. 

The sight of her hit harder than I expected. Her hands were shaking a little, then steady against my shoulders.

The hug started carefully, then she exhaled, and suddenly it was not a hug anymore.

It was a homecoming. It was frantic. It was kissing.

Her breath smelled like mint and she pulled back just enough to look at me.

PB: I didn’t drink.  AZ: I know, your mouth tastes like mint. PB: I think I can trust myself again. AZ: I think I can trust you again.

We kissed again — soft, slow, and inevitable.

When she whispers, “I’ll earn it every day,”

I believe her.

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Excerpt — Vanity Fair Retrospective, 2015

“Looking back, the Vice Versa tour feels like the moment Bueckers transcended myth. It wasn’t her loudest or wildest chapter — but it was the one where she learned how to live without imploding.

Those who were there say you could feel it in her voice: a raw, healed hush, as if she was singing for someone just beyond the spotlight.”

Editor’s Note

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

That someone was me.

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Privacy (2006 - 2010)

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

I think there’s a moment in every love story when it stops trying to prove it exists.

When it no longer needs to be loud or legendary, or even understood. When it becomes something small and steady, like a heartbeat. 

That was us, in those years.

After the tour, Paige and I disappeared — not in the romantic way people like to imagine, but in the quiet, domestic sense. 

We stopped showing up to things. 

She still made music; I still wrote. But we both learned how to do it without letting the world consume every piece of us. 

She kept her house in Minnesota, near the water, and I stayed in D.C., in a walk-up apartment where the heat never worked right. 

We saw each other on weekends, sometimes longer, and we called it balance. 

It wasn’t secrecy that kept us apart — it was protection. 

We didn’t want to give anyone the chance to pick at something that finally felt whole. 

Paige once said, “What we have doesn’t belong to anyone else,” and she wasn’t performing. She said it while washing dishes, half-distracted, sleeves rolled up, sunlight cutting across her collarbone.

She didn’t even look at me when she said it. She just meant it.

People speculated, of course. 

They always do. 

The tabloids called her “mysteriously domestic,” which we both found hysterical.

Apparently, being sober and unavailable made her an enigma. 

She’d tell me about new riffs she was working on, about her band learning to rehearse in daylight, about how she’d accidentally adopted another stray cat.

When her label begged her to do a feature about “the comeback of the decade,” she said, “If they want a quote, tell them to use an old one.” 

Eventually, they stopped asking. 

The one exception was that interview. CBS called it “a rare check-in.” 

We sat across from each other, microphones between us. When the interviewer asked about us, she smiled, the kind of half-smile that meant she’d already decided what truth to give “It’s a friendship built on stubbornness," she said. “We just refused to die separately.” 

I remember nodding, that was the official story.

Those were some of the best years of my life. There was laundry, and mornings that smelled like burnt toast, and Paige trying to learn how to make coffee. There were arguments about stupid things — toothpaste caps, schedules, my tendency to leave drafts scattered everywhere. 

Sometimes, on quiet afternoons, she’d sit on the floor with her guitar and play half-songs she never recorded. I’d be editing something on the couch, and she’d call out, “Rookie, does this sound too sad?” And I’d answer, “Only if you stop there.” 

When I look back now, I realize how rare it was.

We lived in the quiet, we earned it. ﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍

E-mails

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

By the 2010s, our lives had gotten quiet in a way neither of us ever expected. 

The world had changed — so much noise, so many people shouting their own names into the void. Paige watched the “Internet” with a kind of horrified fascination. 

She didn’t hate it, not really; she just couldn’t understand it.

She’d say things like, “Why does everyone wants to be seen?” And then she’d look at me across the kitchen table, half-smiling, and say, “We got out just in time.”

There were days she’d text me links, and I could feel her oscillating between amusement and unease. “It’s like watching someone else’s ghost,” she said once, referring to a grainy concert clip from 1988 with over two million views.

The internet had made her immortal without her consent, and that frightened her more than death ever had.

She didn’t post, and refused to. “If they want a quote, they can find it,” she said. 

Paige didn’t like the speed of it all, she wanted meaning to last longer than a scroll. “Songs used to be played for years,” she told me once. “Now it just trends for a weekend.”

Still, she wasn’t bitter, just curious. 

She’d watch interviews with younger couples posting on Social Media and say, “They’re brave”  then she’d look at me and smile “We’re pirates, Rookie. We hid our gold.”

Email replaced our letters. I still have the folders — labeled by year, sometimes by mood.

 Even when we lived in the same city, she liked to write. She said typing made her honest.

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Email — Paige Bueckers to Azzi (March 2012)

Subject: existential nonsense

Rookie,

I thought I’d die before thirty. That was the plan, the prophecy, whatever you want to call it. 

And now the only thing dying is my Wi-Fi connection (?)

Everyone keeps asking what’s next. 

“A memoir? A comeback? A brand?” (Kill me) I think they want me to invent a new version of myself they can sell nostalgia for.

But what if this is it? What if I already said everything worth saying at twenty-two, and high on stage?

Maybe that’s the point: To outlive the myth and see what’s left.

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Email — Azzi Fudd to Paige (Reply)

Subject: Re: existential nonsense

You’re not dying, grandma.

You don’t need to invent yourself again. Just be someone who gets to wake up.

Also, please fix your Wi-Fi.

— Azzi

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Modern (2010 - 2015)

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

By then, our relationship had settled into a rhythm.

Paige had traded cigarettes for herbal tea (she still hated it) and guitars for house projects she never finished.

I was still writing, though less often about other people. 

We never married. 

Not because of principle, not even because of fear — it just didn’t feel necessary. 

Paige liked to say, “Marriage is a legal synonym for ownership, and I’ve never been great with leases.”

Still, the topic came up. Usually late at night, after a bottle of wine (mine, not hers) and a few too many jokes about mortality.

“You know,” she said once, sprawled on the couch, a cat purring on her chest, “I’d marry you if I believed in that stuff.” I didn’t look up from my laptop. “And I’d say yes.” She laughed and said, “Perfect. We’re engaged in spirit.”

We started spending more time in Minnesota. It was supposed to be temporary — a summer, maybe two — but I never left since. 

The lake near our house froze solid in winter, and sometimes we’d skate across it at night, wrapped in too many scarves.

We were getting older, and we could feel it. 

Paige’s hair had gone shorter, her skin softer, the sharpness of youth replaced by a kind of weathered light. She called herself “vintage” one night and I told her she was “limited edition.” She liked that better.

We talked a lot about meaning. What it means to grow up, to stay alive, to make art when the world moves on without you. 

Paige struggled with irrelevance more than she admitted. She said she didn’t care about critics, but when her newer records didn’t sell the way the old ones had, she’d pretend not to notice. 

I noticed.

But she also changed. 

She found joy in small things: morning radio, crossword puzzles, feeding stray cats, painting her porch the wrong shade of blue. 

We never had children. We didn’t need to.

Instead, we collected animals, neighbors, and half-finished projects. 

There was jealousy sometimes, still. 

Paige would see my name on bylines with other artists and call me a “traitor.” I’d tell her to shut up and play something new.

When I think of the 2010s now, I think of Paige in the kitchen, humming something unfinished, sunlight catching the grays in her hair, the sound of her saying, “We made it”

And we did.

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Diagnosis (2010 - 2015)

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

It started with the kind of cough you laugh about. 

Paige always coughed a lot — from laughter, from smoke, from running late and sprinting. But this one lingered. 

Weeks went by, and the sound became sharper, drier, something I didn’t like. 

She kept brushing me off. “Rookie, I’ve had worse hangovers than this.”

I told her she should get it checked out. 

She told me I was being dramatic.

Then she went.

It was in its early stages. Thank God, it was early. 

The doctor said the word malignant but followed it with contained, small, treatable.

Paige looked at him and said, “So, not the full ending yet?” 

The poor man didn’t know if she was joking. I did, she was half-joking.

Later, in the parking lot. She didn’t cry, didn’t even look scared. 

She said, “Honestly, Rookie, with how much I’ve smoked, I should’ve been a statistic years ago” 

Chemo began that spring. 

She was lucky, responsive to treatment. Her hair was already short by choice, so she didn’t lose much of it. 

She’d run her fingers through the strands like she was testing the odds.

We tried to keep it light. 

We watched old movies and made a running list of all the things she wanted to do when she got out: eat greasy food, dye her hair pink again, go to a concert she wasn’t performing at. 

She hated being treated like a patient, but the nurses adored her anyway — she told them jokes, signed their old vinyls.

The thing about Paige is that she doesn’t do fragility well. Even when she’s pale, sweating, and gripping my hand so hard it goes numb, she still finds something to make me laugh. “If I die,” she whispered one night, “Write something funny. Say I finally quit smoking.”

I said, “You’re not dying.” She said, “Fuck, then you better find a punchline.”

It wasn’t all easy. 

There were nights she’d get quiet, stare at the wall, and mutter things like, “Maybe God is telling me to stop trying to outlive myself.” She didn’t like that her body could betray her. 

But then there were mornings when she’d wake up and say, “You know what’s crazy? I feel better” As if her body healing had somehow made her softer too. 

She started eating better, walking slower, saying no to things that once seemed urgent. 

She wasn’t chasing anything anymore.

The tabloids didn’t know. 

The world didn’t know. 

For the first time in her life, Paige Bueckers had something that belonged entirely to her. Ironically it was fucking cancer

By summer, the scans were clear. 

The doctor said remission like it was a reward, but Paige called it “a technicality.” 

“I’m not dying,” she said, “but I guess I’m not immortal either. Kinda disappointing.”

We celebrated with bad pizza on the porch.

She took one bite, made a face, and said, “Maybe I’m too healthy for this now.”

That night, she leaned her head on my shoulder and sighed

 “I get to keep annoying you.” I told her, “I’ll take it.”

Looking back, I think that was the first time I saw her truly at peace. 

She was right. With how much she’d smoked through the years, she was lucky — outrageously, undeservedly lucky. 

She said that herself, often, like a punchline she couldn’t resist.

“Guess even the universe doesn’t want to deal with me yet.”

I laughed every time. 

Because that’s the thing about Paige: she can find humor in the places where other people find endings. 

When she got the all-clear, Paige swore she wasn’t going to “turn it into a headline.”

“Don’t you dare,” she told me “If I see ‘Rock Legend Battles Cancer’ anywhere with my face on it, I’ll move to the woods.” “You already live in the woods,” I said. “Then I’ll move deeper,” she shot back.

But she was the one who called me a month later and said, “Alright, Rookie. Let’s talk.”

We did it at her kitchen table.

 No lights, no stage, no PR handler hovering with a clipboard. The conversation started casual, then she said,

 “You’re gonna write this anyway, right?” I didn’t answer. She smiled. “Yeah. You always do.”

She didn’t want the word fighter anywhere near it

 “That’s not who I am,” she said. “I didn’t fight anything. I showed up, took the medicine, did what the doctors said, and got lucky.”

I wrote that line down exactly as she said it — and, of course, it became the pull-quote.

When the article came out, the headline was:

PAIGE BUECKERS SURVIVED CANCER — DON’T CALL HER A HERO

It ran in Vanity Fair and got picked up everywhere. 

They called her brave for refusing to be brave. Paige thought that was hysterical.

She didn’t even read the full piece at first. 

One night, I found her sitting in the living room, reading a printout.

When she saw me, she said, “You didn’t make me sound too nice. Thank you.”

That was her version of approval.

The response was overwhelming. 

Letters, flowers, essays. 

A whole wave of fans who said they’d gone to the doctor because of her story. 

She said, “Well, shit, now I can’t die. I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”

She started writing again, too — not for an album, not for anyone else. 

Just little phrases, half-poems.

 I’d find them tucked under coffee mugs, scrawled on grocery lists. Things like:

“The quiet used to scare me. Now it sounds like home.”

It was the most sober she’d ever been — in every sense of the word.

When people asked if she was making a comeback, she’d laugh. “I don’t think I ever came back from anything. I just didn’t leave.”

Then, when they walked away, she leaned toward me and whispered, “Rookie, that’s gonna be my epitaph. ‘She was stubborn as FUCK.’”

She laughed so hard she coughed.

And this time, I didn’t flinch.

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Cat Moms (2019–2020)

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

The lake house was never supposed to be permanent. 

Paige bought it in the late 2000s as a kind of joke  “a place to hide when the tabloids get rabid,” she’d said. 

But after the cancer, after everything, the joke became a life.

It’s small and uneven, built like it’s leaning toward the water, with paint that always looks like it needs a second coat. 

By the summer of 2019, we had an army of stray cats. I think the first one just showed up at the door, and Paige said, “We can’t just not feed it,” and that was that. 

The next week there were three. 

A month later, five. 

They came and went like ghosts, and Paige pretended she could tell them apart.

Paige couldn’t play guitar for long stretches anymore. Her fingers were cramped. 

So she picked up painting, at first it was a disaster, then she started getting good, in the way only Paige could: obsessive, curious, and artistic.

She painted the lake. 

The cats. 

Once, while I was asleep. I woke up to find myself on canvas, and her standing there with the brush like she’d caught herself doing something intimate.

When she showed it to me later, she said, “I didn’t get the color right.” “What color?” I asked.  She pointed at my eyes. “That one.”

We’d text each other from different rooms, even when we could’ve just shouted across the hall:

Paige: do you think cats can tell we’re gay Me: they absolutely can Paige: that’s why they keep bringing us dead birds. Me: maybe they’re just bad at affection Paige: same

Another day:

Me: the basil’s dying again Paige: maybe it just wants to reincarnate into something less needy Me: like you? Paige: rude 

And my favorite:

Paige: do you think we got pets because we didn’t have kids Me: probably Paige: we’d make terrible parents Me: yeah. Paige: yeah but they’d have great taste in music

Sometimes I’d catch her sitting by the window with a cat in her lap, humming nothing in particular. I’d ask what she was thinking. 

She’d say, “About you.”

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Rolling Stone — March 2021

“The Low-Key Couple: Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd” By: C. Denton

It’s a gray morning in Minnesota, and Paige Bueckers is making tea. 

Azzi Fudd, sits across the kitchen table, half-buried under a cat and a stack of books.

They don’t correct me when I call them a couple. They don’t confirm it either. 

Bueckers, now sixty-one, is still effortlessly magnetic — blue eyes sharp, smile wry, a little more lined but no less mischievous. Fudd, 58, has the calm gravity of someone who’s seen fame up close and chosen to walk the other way. 

Together, they radiate something like peace.

When I ask about their life these days, Paige laughs.

“We garden. We argue about music. We feed strays. We’re wild,” she says, voice thick with irony. “I’m boring now. I buy ergonomic furniture.” Azzi adds, “She says that like she doesn’t still rearrange the living room at midnight” 

Paige grins, unbothered.

They’re not on social media — Paige deleted her last account in 2015 (“I prefer mystery,” she says), and Azzi claims she never liked the noise of it. 

“There’s nothing wrong with people sharing their lives,” she says. “It’s just… not for us. We’ve spent so many years being seen, it’s nice to just look at each other.”

I ask if they still work together. 

Azzi shakes her head “Not formally. I wrote about her life for decades. Now, I write about other people.”  Paige interrupts, “She’s lying. She still edits my liner notes when I forget how commas work.”

They both laugh. 

Outside, snow falls softly across the lake. 

They talk about music, age, and legacy. 

Paige says she’s not sure she believes in legacy anymore. “People remember the wrong things. I’d rather be forgotten by the world than misunderstood by it.” When I bring up the word private, she smirks. “It’s not privacy,” she says. “It’s rebellion. You can’t sell what you can’t see.”

Before I leave, Paige points at the article title on my notes — The Low-Key Couple. 

She throws her head back and laughs. “Low-key? Me? God”

She’s still laughing when I walk out the door.

Editor’s Note

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

Paige laughed for three days after that piece ran. “Low-key couple,” she kept saying, like it was the punchline of the century

“They make it sound like we whisper at each other.”

But I think she secretly liked it. 

For someone who’d spent her whole life under bright lights, being described as quiet must’ve felt like a strange, hard-earned compliment.

Public interest in us surged for a week or two — the usual think pieces, the recycled photos, people online trying to calculate how long we’d been “secretly together.” 

Paige read some of them aloud in ridiculous accents until we were both crying with laughter.

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The Book Proposal (2022)

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

It started the way most of our biggest moments do. By accident.

We were sitting on the porch, the lake catching the last orange of summer. 

Paige had a cat asleep in her lap and a cigarette she wasn’t supposed to be smoking tucked behind her ear.

The day had been long and easy — gardening, reading, a nap that turned into a full afternoon — and I think the quiet made her restless. 

She hates when things stay still for too long; she starts looking for ways to shake them.

She leaned back in her chair and said, offhand but deliberate, “You know, Rookie, maybe you should just write the damn book.” I laughed. “What book?” She didn’t blink. “The one people think already exists.” When I didn’t answer, she looked over the rim of her glass. “Then people will stop asking if I’m still alive.” “Think about it,” she said, quieter now. “We don’t have kids. We don’t have heirs. Maybe that’s our legacy.”

The word legacy hung in the air like a ghost.

 I knew she’d been thinking about it for months — since the diagnosis, since the recovery, since we both realized that time had started moving faster again.

She wasn’t nostalgic. She never is. 

She just wanted control over the ending.

“You really want me to write it?” I asked. She smirked. “I want you to tell it right. You’ve been narrating my life since I was twenty, you might as well finish the job.”

That was the moment this whole thing began.

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Email from Azzi Fudd to Paige Bueckers

Subject: Book Proposal (Or: the thing you started)

Paige,

You’re getting your wish.

I started writing last night. Just a few pages, but it’s happening. 

You should know, though, that it won’t be a biography. I can’t do that. 

It’ll be something else — a mosaic, maybe. 

If this is going to be our legacy, I want it to sound like us — a little reckless, a little romantic, mostly honest.

Also, I’m not calling it The Book. 

That’s terrible branding.

My current shortlist includes:

The Pirate’s Heart

After the Noise

Untitled (Love Song)

Don’t roll your eyes. I can hear it from here.

P.S. If you die before I finish, I’m dedicating it to the cats.

﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍

Email from Paige Bueckers to Azzi Fudd (Reply)  

Subject: Re: Book Proposal (Or: the thing you started)

Rookie, no one send e-mails anymore

Also, I’m literally in the garden, but I’m glad you didn’t say this in person. 

I didn’t want to look ate your pretty brown eyes when I said those titles fucking sucked

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CBS Features — August 12, 2024

“The Last Interview: Paige Bueckers”

Interview conducted by Azzi Fudd at Lake Minnetonka, Minnesota

The porch creaks when I open the screen door, the same sound it’s made for thirty years. 

Paige Bueckers is already there, coffee mug in hand, hair freshly dyed the shade of blonde that used to set photographers trembling. 

A few silver strands betray her age, 

The morning light catches her face — same sharp jaw, same impossible blue eyes, but softer now, framed by fine wrinkles that gather when she grins.

AZ: I’m starting this now before you get us cancelled. PB: Cancelled? Rookie, I’ve been retired from sinning since 2003.

She gestures toward the recorder. “This thing on? Better get it right — it’s the last time anyone’s hearing from me.”

I laugh. 

She smirks, the corner of her mouth curving 

AZ: So — this is it. The last one. PB: (mock gasp) Don’t sound so relieved. AZ: I’m just making it official for the record. Paige Bueckers’ final interview. PB: “Final interview.” Sounds like I’m about to get executed. AZ: You said this yourself, not me. PB: Yeah, yeah. But I’ve said a lot of things. I said I was quitting touring in 2006. Guess what happened in 2007? AZ: The world tour. PB: Exactly. I’m a liar by nature. Keeps me interesting.

She leans back in the porch chair, sunlight sliding over her.

AZ: You still look like a rockstar. PB: You still look twenty-five. Which is rude. AZ: Dye helps. PB: Lies. You’re still disgustingly beautiful.

Her tone is playful, affection disguised as teasing, the way it always has been.

AZ: Tell me about the book. PB: Our book. AZ: Your idea. PB: You’re the journalist, darling.  AZ: You said, quote, “Write the damn thing before people forget me.” PB: Doing you a favor, of course.

We laugh for a moment, the air fills with birdsong and the smell of coffee. 

Paige reaches for the recorder and adjusts it slightly, like she can still control the soundboard of her own story.

PB: You know what’s weird? Seeing it all in print. It reads like someone else’s life. Like I was method-acting the whole time. AZ: Maybe you were. PB: Maybe. You were the director.

There’s a small silence 

AZ: People are going to call this your farewell. PB: It is. But not the tragic kind. I’m not dying. 

She grins again, lines deepening around her eyes, not signs of age, but proof of how often she’s laughed at the world.

AZ: If this is the last time the public hears from Paige Bueckers, what do you want them to remember? PB: Oh, that’s easy. Remember that I was funny. AZ: Funny? PB: Yeah. People forget that. They remember the overdoses, the Grammys. But I was hilarious. AZ: You were. Are. PB: You’re just saying that because you’re married to the myth. AZ: To the woman. And we’re not married 

Then, softly:

PB: Married in spirit, but, good answer

I smile, can’t help it

AZ: Do you have a favorite line that never got published?

She frowns, thinking.

 Her hands, still ringed with silver bands, tap against the table in rhythm.

PB: Yeah. It was for a lyric that never made the record. “I hate being admired, I rather be loved.”

AZ: Why didn’t it make it? PB: Too honest. 

She was still performing, just for me this time.

And even then, even after all these years, I kept thinking: she’s still beautiful.The wrinkles just told the story better.

The sun has turned the lake into glass. 

Paige has switched her coffee for lemonade and her chair for the porch railing, balancing there like she’s twenty again.

She’s talking about something unserious — the Grammys, maybe, — when I ask it.

AZ: Why did you choose me?

She blinks. 

AZ: For that first interview. 1985. You didn’t do press, remember? You turned down Spin, Rolling Stone, Billboard. So why me?

Paige leans forward, her expression a perfect imitation of mischief and confusion.

PB: You’ve been wondering that all this time? AZ: I think it’s a fair question. PB: Okay, then smile. AZ: (deadpan) What? PB: Smile for me. AZ: Paige. PB: Come on. You asked a question, I’m giving you an answer.

I groan but do it anyway. A small, self-conscious grin that I immediately regret.

She points at me triumphantly.

PB: See? That. That’s why. AZ: What? PB: (grinning) The most beautiful fucking face I’d ever seen. AZ: Oh my God. PB: I saw your photo in the press kit and told my agent I wanted to talk to you.

I cover my face with my hands. She’s ridiculous, this is probably a lie anyway.

AZ: You cannot possibly be telling me that I got the biggest interview of my career because you thought I was pretty. PB: I can and I am. AZ: I— You said you read my article on the D.C. punk scene! PB: (shrugs) I did. AZ: You wanted me to like you. PB: I wanted everyone to like me (pauses)  Especially you. AZ: You’ve never told me this before. PB: You never asked. AZ: I’ve literally been asking questions for forty years! PB: Yeah, but not that one.

I shake my head, and she looks absurdly pleased with herself.

AZ: So I got the story because of my face. PB: And you stayed because of your brain (beat) And your patience. But the smile definitely got you in the door, darling. AZ: You are absolutely insufferable. PB: (softly) The best thing I ever said yes to.

There’s a pause 

AZ: Do you ever think about that version of us?  PB: All the time. But I don’t miss it. I like that we survived it.

She grins, but her eyes linger on the water, and I can tell she’s thinking about those years.

PB: You know, I used to think the best parts of my career were the albums or the tours. But looking back, it’s the in-betweens. The writing at three a.m., talking to you backstage. That was the work.  AZ: You’ve always been romantic about misery. PB: And you’ve always been romantic about me. AZ: (snorts) Don’t flatter yourself. PB: Oh, I don’t need to. You wrote a whole book about me.

I throw a napkin at her. She dodges it.

AZ: How do you actually feel about your career now? About everything you built?

She leans back, face thoughtful for a moment.

PB: I think I made a lot of noise trying to prove I existed. And it worked. Maybe too well. AZ: Do you think people misunderstood you? PB: (smiles) No, I think they got exactly what I wanted them to.  AZ: And what about the rest of it? The fame, the mythology, the headlines? PB: The headlines were fine. I never fucked with fame

She’s quiet after that, and the silence feels earned. 

The recorder hums, cicadas chatter in the trees, and I think about how rare it is to meet someone who can still surprise you after forty years.

AZ: Anything you wish you’d done differently? PB: I wish I’d bought more land before it got expensive (grins) But no, not really. 

The afternoon light has gone syrupy by the time we get to the last part. 

Paige insists we move inside because “I’m too old to be photogenic.”

She’s lying on the couch now, one arm draped over her eyes, hair sticking up from where she’s been running her hands through it.

I sit across from her, the recorder balanced on the coffee table, blinking its little red light.

AZ: Let’s talk about pirates.

She groans. “You always start with the embarrassing stuff.”

AZ: It’s not embarrassing.  PB: It’s childish. AZ: It’s very you.

She drops her arm, revealing one squinting blue eye. 

PB: Fine. What about them? AZ: You’ve always said you love pirates, you’ve been saying that since the eighties. Do you still like them?

Paige sits up, slow and deliberate, like she’s bracing herself for something serious but doesn’t want to give it away yet.

PB: Of course I do (pauses) You know, people used to think pirates were greedy. But the truth is they just didn’t trust the world with what they treasured. I get that. AZ: So you still think some things should be hidden. PB: Absolutely. Especially now. Everyone’s addicted to exposure. Everyone wants to prove they’re alive by filming it. You sneeze, you post. You fall in love, you livestream.  AZ: Do you think that’s possible anymore? For two people — two famous people, even — to keep something private?

She studies me, as if I’ve asked something dangerous. 

PB: I hope so (pauses) God, I really do.

She looks out the window, where the lake has turned into molten gold. 

PB: Because being loud is easy. But being quiet together—that’s the real thing

She looks at me again, her expression suddenly open, the kind that used to undo me when we were young.

PB: You were always that for me.

I don’t answer right away.

AZ: You think that’s why we lasted? PB: We didn’t last. We outlasted

We both laugh a little, though it sounds more like an exhale than a joke.

AZ: If you could say one thing to those kids like us now — the ones trying to love each other — what would you say? PB: Love doesn’t need an audience. You don’t owe anyone your joy. The best things I ever had were the ones I never shared. AZ: And your treasure? PB: (smiles) You know damn well

She gestures toward me.

PB: Sitting right there asking annoying questions.

When I turn the recorder off, she leans back, satisfied.

 “That’s it?” she asks.  “That’s it,” I say. She tilts her head, thinking. “So this is the last time anyone ever hears from me?” “Yes.” “Good.” She pauses. “You’ll make it sound beautiful, right?” “I always do.”

Final Letter from Paige Bueckers 

(Found sealed, postmarked from Lake Minnetonka, addressed to Azzi Fudd. Read publicly only upon the publication of the book.)

Dear Rookie,

You told me this had to be a letter — that it had to end with my words, not yours.

 I’ve spent my whole life running my mouth into microphones, and still, I’ve never said half the things I meant to. So this one’s for you, and for whoever’s still reading, and maybe for the part of me that still can’t believe I got this far.

You also told me not to be dramatic. (Which is like asking a fish not to swim, so forgive me in advance.)

First things first: I’ve always been terrible at goodbyes. That’s why I never actually said one.

Every time a tour ended, I called it a “pause.”

Every time we broke up, I called it “space.”

Every time life tried to shut me up, I called it an encore.

This — right now, this book, these words — is the closest thing I’ll ever give to a curtain call.

When you asked me to write this, I thought, God, what’s left to say? We’ve already confessed everything. You wrote the truth better than I ever sang it.

So what could I possibly add? Then I realized — you wanted a letter, not a lyric.

And letters, unlike songs, don’t have to rhyme.

So here it goes.

You didn’t make me better, Azzi. You kept me alive.

I’ve said a lot of stupid things in my life — publicly, privately, occasionally on live TV — but I’ve never said this, so I’ll say it now:

 I’m proud of what I made, but what I’m grateful for — that’s you.

You were there when I was a headline, when I was a has-been, when I was a half-person trying to remember what breathing sounded like.

You saw me without eyeliner, without the leather jacket, without the myth.

You saw me sick and shaking and ugly and scared, and you stayed anyway.

You asked me to end this book, here’s my attempt at closure:

When I think about my life, it doesn’t play in order. It flickers.

The first interview — you in that too-serious blazer, pretending not to blush. The years we lost, the years we got back.

You still look exactly the same, by the way. You’ll say that’s a lie, but it’s not. You still have that precious dimple when you smile.

That’s my favorite part of you, the dimples.

 The second favorite part is your brain.

You’ve always been the smarter one. I’ve always been the one who needed reminding.

And since you’re going to be too professional to print this part, I’ll say it anyway for whoever’s reading — what I want my last words in the book to be: Dear reader, Azzi Fudd has the prettiest damn smile I’ve ever seen.

Now go publish your masterpiece. And promise me you won’t fix my grammar.

P.S: Since this is apparently my “legacy,” I’ll do what I never did wel: give advice.

Not to you; you never needed it.

To whoever picks up this book and thinks love and fame are the same thing: they’re not.

One feeds you. The other eats you alive.

To the girls coming up after me — if you’re lucky enough to find an Azzi Fudd of your own, promise me you’ll hide her like a treasure.

Keep her safe. Guard her from the noise, the cameras, the cruelty.

Make sure the world in all its ugliness never touches her.

Your “Azzi Fudd” will be the best thing you’ll ever have.

Keep her safe.

That’s what love is — something quiet, something yours. And if you’re lucky enough to find it, I hope you have the sense to hold on tight, laugh a lot, grow old together, and never, ever let the world make you explain it.

Quiet before the Storm

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

If there was ever a quiet before the storm, it was the months after Burning Red. 

Paige’s name was on every wall, every edgy teenage bedroom door with a poster curling at the corners. 

She wouldn’t give interviews anymore. 

Not to Rolling Stone, not to Spin, not even to NME, who’d been begging for months. 

Only me.

When I met Paige, I was twenty-two, living in a brick-walled apartment off Dupont Circle. Colleen was my roommate, and we were both working entry-level jobs and splitting canned soup at midnight. 

My parents thought I’d wasted my degree by going into “arts journalism.” Paige thought it was the only kind of journalism that mattered.

When Burning Red hit platinum, my editor sent me to shadow her for a weekend piece.

That weekend never ended. 

When I ask what she wants people to know about her, she shrugs:

“That I’m just trying to stay human while everyone’s busy mythologizing me.”

After that profile ran, my phone didn’t stop ringing.

I followed her from city to city, notebook full of her one-liners and contradictions. 

By the time the Burning Red tour ended, I was no longer sure where my career ended and she began. 

Overnight, I became the Paige Bueckers journalist. 

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Excerpt — Spin Magazine, March 1989

“The Bueckers Bible” — by Staff Writer

Music journalists don’t write about Paige Bueckers anymore.

They write through her.

The best of the lot — Washington’s own Azzi Fudd — seems to have been adopted as the singer’s mouthpiece.

Insiders say Bueckers won’t so much as tune a guitar if Fudd’s not in the room.

Editor’s Note

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

She’d started joking that I was her “press secretary,”.

 One night, after too many drinks and too little sleep, she said quietly,

“If you’re the one telling my story, do I still exist when you stop?”

I didn’t know what to say.

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Excerpt — Los Angeles Times, July 1989

“BUECKERS ERUPTS AT LABEL PARTY — ‘GET ONE WHILE I’M STILL STANDING’”

Rock sensation Paige Bueckers caused a scene last night outside the CBS summer party when paparazzi swarmed the artist and a female companion identified as Washington journalist Azzi Fudd.

Witnesses claim the star shouted profanities and threw a drink before being escorted inside by security.

Fudd declined comment.

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Letter — From Paige Bueckers (hotel stationery, that night, slid under my door)

Rookie,

I hate that they know your name now. I hate that they think they know mine.

I wanted to hold your hand. I wanted to bite a camera. I did the wrong one.

Meet me in the service elevator at 1:10. We’ll practice leaving without being seen.

— P

Editor’s Note

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

I went. 

We kissed between floors, and she laughed into my mouth 

“Fucking hate papparazis” she said.

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Excerpt — People, August 1989

“THE GIRLFRIEND THEORY”

Speculation continues around Paige Bueckers’ relationship with CBS journalist Azzi Fudd.

Sources claim the two have been “spending an unusual amount of time together” following the singer’s explosive Venice incident.

“She’s obsessed with this reporter,” says one studio insider. “Won’t talk to anyone else.”

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Gossip

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

Every story about Paige started with noise.

But ours kept unfolding in the quiet, in hotel rooms where she took her boots off one at a time and asked, “Do you still like me when I’m sober?”

After Venice, after the flashes, we went underground (Or tried to)

She said she didn’t care about the gossip, but she did — not about being called gay or reckless, but about the idea of being known. 

She hated being definable. 

People like to imagine we were suffocating under the secrecy.

We weren’t.

What suffocated us was the noise — the speculation, the headlines, the whispers at every after-party that always started with “Did you hear...” and ended with our names.

Paige never cared that no one knew. 

She cared that everyone wanted to.

In those early years, privacy wasn’t our prison — it was our country, and we built a life inside it.

There were hotel rooms where the curtains never opened, long drives with no radio, shared cigarettes on fire escapes at 2 a.m. while her band slept two floors below.

I’d watch her tune her guitar, barefoot, and she’d watch me watching her.

She liked that I wasn’t impressed.

She said fame made her feel like glass. Everyone was looking through her, no one was looking at her.

I was the exception.

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Letter —  From Paige Bueckers (torn page from a notebook, postmarked from Dallas, August 1989)

Rookie,

I keep replaying that night. Your little noises. The way you looked at me after. Like I’d just set our lives on fire. Maybe I did.

Every magazine in America is writing about my mouth. No one’s writing about yours, but me.

Call me when you land. Or don’t. I’ll call you anyway.

— P

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Private Notes — Paige’s Journal (1989)

8/19 — “You say I make you nervous. I say you make me real”.

8/21 — “I drink to remember your pulse. I snort to quiet your name. Every habit started holy.”

8/28 — “Your lips are a religious experience, I’m on my knees”

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Letter — From Paige Bueckers (handwritten on Sherry Bomb stationery, December, 1989)

Rookie,

They’re running out of new ways to describe me. “Androgynous.” “Rebellious.” “Provocative.” How long until they just say “human?”

I wrote something for you tonight. Not a song yet. 

— P

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Demo Transcript — “Quiet Wars” (Paige Bueckers, 1990)

You kiss like a confession I can’t make twice, my soul burns where your mouth bites.

And I want peace but peace gets bored, so we fight for our love like a quiet war.

(laughter, Paige’s voice off mic)

PAIGE (off mic): You’re gonna say that’s too dramatic in your little Review of the new album, ain’t ya?.

AZZI (off mic): I’m gonna say it’s honest

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Quiet Wars

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

That line gutted me: “We fight for our love like a quiet war.”

It was the first time she’d said love out loud, even if she hid it in a rhyme.

She’d played thousands of shows by then, but that night it felt like she was performing only for me.

She didn’t write “Quiet Wars” for an album.

She wrote it for me. The tape never made it to the label.

She kept it in a shoebox with the words “for Azzi, not for sale” scrawled on top.

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The Garden 

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

We were in a greenroom that looked like a broom closet — fluorescent light, folding chair, her leather jacket hanging off the mic stand.

She was sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, tapping her rings against a water bottle like a metronome.

I said, “You’ve done this a hundred times.” She said, “Not like this.”

She wasn’t nervous about her first show at Madison Square Garden; she was nervous about how she would be seen in her first show at Madison Square Garden .

 “This fucking victory lap,” she said. “What if it’s just my funeral?”

I just took her hand, pressed my thumb against the inside of her wrist, and felt her pulse hammering like Nika’s drums.

When the stage manager knocked, she kissed my palm and said,

 “Wish me luck, Rookie.”

Then she stood up, rolled her shoulders, and walked out to 60,000 people.

That was the show that made her immortal.

I’ve seen the footage a hundred times since. The grainy VHS, the lights gold, her hair plastered to her face.

Every time, I wait for the part no one else sees: her looking just offstage, right where I stood, and exhaling like she’d finally let go.

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Excerpt — Rolling Stone, July 1990

“Bueckers Sets the Garden Ablaze”

Some performances change a career.

Paige Bueckers’ Madison Square Garden show changed a generation.

She walked onstage barefoot, in ripped jeans and a sleeveless white tee, guitar slung low, hair damp like she’d just come from the rain.

Her voice cracked on the first line and no one cared. When she hit the chorus, the crowd sang it back, 60,000 strong.

She smiled, mouthed something no one caught on camera, and walked offstage crying.

(Editor’s note, 2025: What she mouthed was “Rookie”)

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Letter — From Paige Bueckers (hotel stationery, New York Hilton, postmarked the morning after)

Rookie,

I couldn’t sleep. My head’s still buzzing. I keep hearing them, and thinking: that was me.

But I also keep thinking: that was you.

 I walked onstage with your fingerprint still on my wrist.

The world can have my music. I’m yours.

— P

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Aftershock 

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

Every myth has an aftershock, and Madison Square Garden was ours.

The night the world fell in love with Paige Bueckers — and the night I started losing her.

The Garden had turned her into something bigger than a person.

She’d call at 3 a.m. from hotel rooms in Paris or Tokyo, slurring half sentences, saying, “You’d hate it here. Everything smells like perfume.”

 When I didn’t pick up, she’d leave voicemails that sounded like songs.

“Rookie,” she’d say, “the sky looks fake tonight. Tell me something true.”

I’d listen the next morning on my way to work and think, She’s lonely.

I didn’t realize it was withdrawal.

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Letter — From Paige Bueckers (handwritten, Los Angeles, February 1990)

Rookie,

I can’t walk outside without seeing my own face. Billboards, magazines, TV, all of it. I thought I wanted this. I think I did.

I saw a photo of us from the Garden, someone caught you in the wings. You were watching me.

When are you coming back to me?

— P

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Excerpt — People, April 1990

“The Voice of a Generation… or Just a Girl Too Loud for Her Own Good?”

Paige Bueckers’ explosive rise continues to blur the line between brilliance and burnout.

The singer, who recently sold out Madison Square Garden, has been spotted leaving L.A. bars at dawn and reportedly “snapping” at fans.

Bueckers’ representative declined to comment.

(Editor’s note, 2025: That article was the first one that scared me.)

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The Grammys

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

The Grammys were supposed to be a celebration.

She won everything: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, and Song of the Year for “Hysteria.”

We hadn’t seen each other in almost three months.

I’d been buried in work at CBS, and she was somewhere between London and Los Angeles, touring, drinking too much, calling me from hotel bathrooms at dawn.

She told me not to come to the ceremony.

“I don’t want to look at you and forget my lines,” she said.

But she still sent a car. 

Still left a hotel key under my name. 

Still texted, “Room 812. Don’t knock.”

When I saw her that night, she looked otherworldly — hair slicked back, suit sharp, a single silver earring shaped like a dagger.

She hugged me so tightly I could smell the champagne on her skin.

“Jesus, Paige,” I said, laughing into her shoulder. “You’re shaking.” “Haven’t seen you in forever,” she said. “Let me remember what you feel like.” “You’re supposed to be getting ready.”  “This is me getting ready.”

That’s what I remember most, how much she missed me.

She was drunk on the room, the music, the power, and somewhere in between all of that, on me.

She won her first award and thanked “the people who listen when I sing instead of when I speak.”

She won her second and forgot the speech entirely.

After the ceremony, we met again at an after-party in West Hollywood.

Every famous person in the world seemed to be in that room, and yet, somehow, she only saw me.

“You’re still wearing that,” she said, tugging at the neckline of my dress. “You told me not to change.” “I tell you a lot of things.”

She kept her hand on the small of my back the entire night, I told her to stop.

She didn’t.

“You missed me,” she whispered. “I did.” “Then let them look.”

And that was the problem, someone did.

The photo ran in the morning.

My hand in hers, our faces turned toward each other, mid-laughter, the flash turning everything into white.

At eight a.m., the phone rang, and her voice was hoarse from smoke and champagne.

“Rookie,” she said, “it’s bad.” “How bad?” “Front-page bad.”

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Excerpt — CBS Newswire, February 1990

STATEMENT FROM AZZI FUDD

“Ms. Bueckers and I have a friendly working relationship built on mutual respect. I’ve been privileged to document her artistry over the years, and I deeply admire her as a musician and friend.”

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Interview conducted by Azzi Fudd for CBS Features — April 6, 1990, Los Angeles, California

She shows up to the interview in a white tank top, black slacks, sunglasses inside, and a mood that says don’t ask, don’t tell.

Her publicist hovers by the door like a nervous parent, and Paige waves her off.  

PB: Relax. I promise I’ll behave. AZ: That’s what you said last time. PB: Yeah, but this time I mean it.

She flops into the armchair opposite me, legs slung over one arm of it.

There’s a half-empty glass of whiskey on the table that wasn’t there a second ago.

PB: You look tense. AZ: You look hungover. PB: I won a Grammy. I’m allowed to be both.

AZ: You’ve been quiet lately. PB: Thought I’d give everyone a break from my voice. AZ: You? Giving people a break? PB: (smirks) You say that like I’m loud. AZ: You’re the loudest person I’ve ever met.

She stretches her arms over her head, bones cracking, looking at me through the slant of her sunglasses.

PB: You ever get tired of writing about me? AZ: Constantly. PB: (laughs) Then why do you keep doing it? AZ: Because you won’t talk to anyone else. PB: Exactly. I’m loyal.

She grins, all teeth and mischief.

AZ: So, Paige, congratulations on the sweep. Record, Album, Song — that’s the holy trinity. PB: Don’t forget Best Rock Performance. That one’s my favorite. AZ: Why that one? PB: It’s the only one that actually sounds like me. AZ: How’s that? PB: Uninvited.

There’s a pause. 

AZ: Does it ever feel like too much? The attention? PB: Always. But that’s the job, right? Let them love you until they hate you. AZ: And in between? PB: In between you write about me, and they think they know me.

She pulls off her sunglasses and sets them on the table. 

AZ: There’s been… a lot of speculation about your personal life. PB: (deadpan) Is this the part where you ask if I’m dating you? AZ: I’m asking if the rumors bother you. PB: Only when people get creative.

Her smile is razor sharp.

AZ: So, to clarify— PB: (interrupting) Clarify nothing. It ruins the fun.

She laughs, leaning back in the chair.

PB: Don’t worry, rookie. You can write that I’m single. I am.

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Excerpt from CBS Features (April 1990, print edition)

“After the Grammys, Paige Bueckers is learning to live louder than the noise around her.”

“I’m not dating anyone,” she insists, “Just myself, and she’s hard enough to keep up with.”

She pauses, eyes glinting. “People always want to know who I love. They never ask what I love. And that’s easy, it’s the music”

Paige Bueckers will begin the Burning Red World Tour this summer. Tickets sold out in under ten minutes.

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Letter — From Paige Bueckers (postmarked the next day)

Rookie,

Thank you. For lying for me. I know you hate it.

I hate it too.

I’ll make it up to you

— P

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High

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

When I met Paige, I already knew what addiction looked like.

My mother was an addict. 

So when I saw Paige drinking too much, I recognized it instantly. But I told myself she was different (She was brilliant, and brilliant people are allowed to be a little unsteady).

What I didn’t see — or didn’t want to see — was how much I’d become her coping mechanism.

The truth is, she needed me to keep her standing, and I needed her to make me feel alive.

 It was a dangerous kind of symbiosis.

The moment I left, she cracked.

When I started spending more time at CBS, working on other stories, she’d spiral, miss sound checks, pick fights with bandmates.

Call me mid-rehearsal, whispering, “Where are you?” like it was a lifeline.

And if I didn’t answer? She’d get drunk enough to make headlines.

Once, Nika called me from backstage, voice shaking:

“Can you talk to her? She’s pacing, she won’t go on.” “What happened?” “Nothing. You’re not here, that’s what happened.”

I put her on speakerphone and said her name once.

 “Paige.”

She stopped pacing.

I heard her laugh, that’s when I realized: I wasn’t her girlfriend, I was her new drug.

When I look back now, it’s so clear how fragile everything was.

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Tabloid Clipping — May 1992

“PAIGE SHOVES LENS, SHOUTS EXPLETIVE OUTSIDE SOHO CLUB”

Witnesses say the rock star yelled, “Why the fuck are you in my face?” before being bundled into a black sedan around 2 a.m. 

Sources report that CBS Features journalist Azzi Fudd was also present at the scene. The two were seen exiting the venue separately but entering the same car.

Representatives for both declined to comment on the nature of their relationship.

“She’s unpredictable,” said one onlooker. “She looks like she’s ready to punch the camera.”

— Starline Weekly, May 6, 1992

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Paige Buecker’s Notebook Scraps — used later in “Vice Versa” (’93 draft)

If the pill makes the floor stop moving, why does the ceiling keep learning my name?

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CBS Features — March 1993

“Sound Before Sense” — Paige Bueckers Pre-Tour Check-In Interview by Azzi Fudd

Los Angeles, March 1993.

Paige Bueckers opens the door barefoot, eyeliner smudged, a cigarette dangling from her lips like punctuation.

There’s a gold Grammy on the windowsill being used to hold spare guitar picks.

 PB: I ran out of coffee. Hope gin’s fine.

I decline, and she grins, unbothered.

PB: Still the professional. You haven’t changed. AZ: Neither have you. PB: That’s what everyone’s worried about.

She collapses into a chair and starts rolling the cigarette between her fingers like a metronome. 

AZ: You’re about to start your biggest tour yet. How are you feeling? PB: Tired, which means I’m doing it right. AZ: You’ve been “tired” since 1985. PB: (laughs) Yeah, but I used to fake it better.

She leans forward, elbows on knees.

AZ: People close to you say you’re pushing yourself too hard. PB: That’s what people close to me are for. They worry, I work. AZ: You call it work? PB: I call it survival.

She taps ash into a coffee mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST GUITARIST.

AZ: You’ve said before that you write better when you’re miserable. PB: Everyone does. Happy songs are propaganda. AZ: So you’re miserable now? PB: I’m alive (beat) That’s enough material.

When I ask about Vice Versa, the long-rumored follow-up to Burning Red, her entire posture shifts.

AZ: What’s the new record about? PB: Nothing AZ: That’s not an answer. PB: That’s the only one I’ve got (smiles)

She picks up a guitar that’s missing a string and plucks at it absently.

PB: Everyone keeps asking what it means. The songs don’t mean anything. They just… happen. You bleed a little, record it, sell it, move on. AZ: That sounds cynical. PB: I’m not in the business of healing people. AZ: Do you think that’s what people love about you, the chaos? PB: They love that I live the way they wish they could.

She lights another cigarette with the end of the last one.

AZ: Is that sustainable? PB: Who said I’m trying to sustain it

AZ: People talk about your lifestyle— PB: (interrupting) My lifestyle has better press than I do. AZ: — they say it’s dangerous.

The tape clicks.

AZ: What do you say to people who call you reckless? PB: I say, “Thank you.” AZ: You don’t mind that word? PB: No. 

She finishes her cigarette.

AZ: One last question. What would you tell people who think you’re losing control? PB: You can’t live carefully and expect to make art.

The interview is over.

Editor’s Note

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

This was the interview that started our first real war.

The quote “You can’t live carefully and expect to make art” ran in full-page bold, under a photo of her with a cigarette

 By the time the issue hit stands, that line was already being printed on bootleg T-shirts outside her concerts.

She called me three days later, drunk, and said, “You finally wrote me right.”

I wanted to tell her I hadn’t written her at all.

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The Moment I Knew

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

There’s a difference between chaos and addiction. 

Chaos is dramatic, and addiction is repetitive.

Addiction is the same night lived over and over with slightly worse outcomes. 

When people ask what Paige was “like” in those years — as if personality could explain the prognosis — I tell them she was gifted, funny, stubborn, and chronically unwell.

The shows were dazzling, and the days in between were not.

I did not come to addiction as a tourist.

I learned early what dependence looks like from the outside: how it shrinks a life’s options.

I also learned how it shapes the people nearby. 

You become vigilant, you learn to read breath and pupils, speech patterns and skin tone. You become oddly good at logistics (Where the exits are, what time the pharmacy closes, which friend is safe to call at 2:00 a.m)

With Paige, I recognized the pattern long before I wanted to name it. 

Drinking as pre-show courage, then drinking because a day without it felt impossible. 

The justifications were stable: it’s part of the job; it’s temporary; it’s not like your mother; I can stop when the tour ends; I deserve this

From the outside, here is what I noticed.

Small health flags: infections that wouldn’t clear, hoarseness, tremor on waking, that specific grey around the eyes.

Addiction also reorganizes relationships. 

People like to talk about “enablers” as if we are all indifferent or complicit. 

I was neither.

God, I set rules, I said no, I left rooms, I canceled nights. 

But I also picked up the phone, booked the flight, sat on the floor between her and the door while the worst of the night passed.

There is a common lie that artists tell: that recklessness is synonymous with truth. 

That line looks good in print, and I’m guilty of printing it.

What it actually does, in practice, is making addiction sound like bravery.

 “You can’t live carefully and expect to make art” was a sentence I ran as a pull-quote and regretted immediately. 

Paige was not addicted to danger because it made better songs.

Paige was addicted because the combination of her biology, her history, and the machinery around her rewarded anything that kept the show running. 

This is the most honest thing I can say about that period: I understood exactly what was ahead of us and also had no idea. 

The night I finally admitted it to myself, I sat on the floor of my kitchen and said out loud, to no one, You’re fucked.

If you are reading this because you love someone who drinks or uses the way Paige did, here is the only practical sentence I can offer: boundaries are not punishments; they’re seatbelts.

They don’t stop the crash, but they keep you from going through the windshield with them

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Territory — Europe, 1994

Written by: Azzi Fudd (2025)

The Europe leg in ’94 was short, the nights were long, and in the hours between sound check and stage time anything could happen and often did.

Paige was brilliant onstage and awful off it. 

In Paris she burned through a set like she was racing a clock. 

In Berlin she lost her pick, playing with blood on the strings.

In Copenhagen she skipped dinner

By Oslo she had started using the word fine like a period

“I’m fine.” “It’s fine.” “We’re fine.” 

(The band stopped believing her and kept playing anyway)

Nika had always been the counterweight.

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Backstage — Stockholm, July 24, 1994

Compiled recollections; transcript reconstructed 2025

Paige came offstage laughing too loudly, pupils wide.

Someone handed her a towel, and someone else handed her water (She took the towel.)

Nika blocked the door with one hand on the frame.

NIKA: I’m not watching you disappear. PAIGE: Then close your eyes. NIKA: I’m serious, Paigey. PAIGE: So am I.

KK took a step toward them and thought better of it.

NIKA: You’re going to end up like your father. PAIGE: Don’t. NIKA: Then stop. PAIGE: Don’t know how.

It went quiet.

NIKA: I need you to try. PAIGE: I try every night. NIKA: Onstage isn’t trying. 

Paige’s laugh cracked.

She reached for the water, put it down, reached for the towel instead.

PAIGE: Do not parent me. NIKA: That’s not parenting. PAIGE: Sounds like control. NIKA: Sounds like love.

There is no right line after that line, and Paige chose the wrong one.

PAIGE: Then love me less.

KK flinched. Nika nodded just once.

NIKA: I can’t.

She set the sticks on the dressing table, not dramatic, just final.

 The door shut behind her without slamming.

That was the last show she played with Sherry Bomb.

I caught up with Nika in the loading bay, “Are you coming back?” I asked, because I didn’t know what else to ask.

She looked past me down the white corridor the crew builds and unbuilds in every city.

“Ask her to,” she said. “If she asks, I will”

Paige came out ten minutes later with her jaw set and her hands empty.

“Where’s Nika?” she asked. “Gone,” I said. “Good,” she said.

That was the whole fight.

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Press Brief — AP Wire, July 1994

“Drummer Nika Larsen Exits Sherry Bomb Mid-Tour”

Oslo/Stockholm (AP) — Nika Mühl has departed the Paige Bueckers – led rock outfit Sherry Bomb in the midst of the band’s European tour, citing “creative differences,” according to a statement released by management on Tuesday.

Dates will proceed as scheduled with a touring replacement to be announced. 

Bueckers did not immediately comment.

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Madison Square Garden (again), May 1995

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

The band was smaller now. The crowd wasn’t. If anything, it had doubled.

Paige looked thin in a way that wasn’t glamorous anymore. 

But when the lights came up and she opened her mouth, the world rearranged itself, and she was incandescent again. 

That’s the cruelty of addiction — you get glimpses of the person you fell for, just enough to keep waiting for their return.

The crowd screamed for an encore, and Paige gave them three.

Afterward, she came backstage, eyeliner melted.

“See, Rookie?” she said. “Still got it.”

I told her she scared me.

“Good,” she said. “Means you’re paying attention.”

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First Overdose — Tour Clinic Report (Confidential, June 2, 1995)

Patient: Bueckers, Paige Location: New Orleans — Post-show medical suite Symptoms: Tremors, tachycardia, emesis, shallow respiration Stabilized: Yes Discharged: Against medical advice Recommendation: Inpatient detox, 30–60 days Notes (staff): Patient coherent but resistant. Repeated: “I can’t miss the next city.”

﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍

On the First Collapse

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

When I got the call, I was asleep on the couch.

They told me she had been “briefly hospitalized, for overconsumption of prescribed medication”.

I remember sitting upright, saying, “She doesn’t even take aspirin.” 

Then I remembered she didn’t take aspirin because it didn’t do enough.

By the time I reached the venue, she was already discharged. 

There were photographers outside, and I knew if I went through the front door, I’d be in the tabloids by morning, too. 

I waited by the back exit until the tour bus rolled out. 

When she saw me, she smiled like we were meeting for coffee. 

“Don’t be mad,” she said, already climbing the steps. “I’m furious,” I told her. “I’m fine.” “Then why did they call me?” She looked away “Because you always answer.”

I did, that was the problem.

The first overdose changed something fundamental in me. 

Before that, I still believed I could manage her.

After that night, I realized I wasn’t holding her together, and I was cushioning her fall. 

Every apology came rehearsed, every promise with an expiration date

“Next month,” she said “Next leg.” “After the next show.” 

I drove behind the tour bus for fifty miles before I pulled over and cried into my notebook. 

Not because she’d scared me, but because I knew I’d still write about her, still follow her to the next city, still believe her when she said she could stop. 

That’s the curse of loving an addict: you can’t tell which side you’re on.

Later, when she called from some nameless hotel to tell me she loved me, I didn’t say it back.

I said, “You’re going to die.” She laughed. “Not before the encore.”

And that wasn’t funny, that was torture.

When I finally wrote The Price of Fire, months later, I told myself I did it to save her. 

The truth is, I did it because I didn’t know what else to do.

 Some people intervene with rehab. I intervened with sentences.

God, I wish I could say it worked.

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“The Price of Fire” — The New Yorker, July 1995

By Azzi Fudd

(Editor’s Note, 2025: I tried to retract this piece two days after it ran. Every journalist has one piece they wish they could unwrite. This is mine.)

Paige Bueckers has always been the kind of artist who refuses to come quietly. 

Last week, I watched her take the stage in New Orleans, the setlist was chaotic, and between each track, she drank from a silver flask and laughed at something no one else could hear. “Don’t look at me like that,” she told the crowd. 

There’s a rhythm to watching someone destroy themselves beautifully. 

The first time, it looks like performance art.

 The second, it looks like endurance. 

The third, you start realizing it’s a pattern.

Addiction, for Paige, has become another form of authorship. She rewrites her own limits nightly: one more show, one more drink, one more miracle. 

When I spoke with her earlier this year, she told me:

“You can’t live carefully and expect to make art.”

Recklessness isn’t art. 

She is, without question, one of the greatest performers of her generation. But somewhere along the way, Paige began to mistake the applause for permission. 

We have learned to mythologize women like her. 

At what point do we stop calling this genius and start calling it what it is? The price of fire is always ash.

And Paige Bueckers will pay that price.

(Editor’s margin, 2025: It wasn’t journalism. It was an elegy I wrote for someone still breathing. I told myself I did it to warn her, instead, I became part of the destruction.)

﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍

Faxed Note — July 18, 1995

Nice essay. — P.

﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍

The Crash

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

Paige didn’t speak to me for three months, and she shouldn’t have.

I had done the one thing we promised each other we’d never do — turned the private into performance.

We had built our lives around secrecy, and we thrived in it. To publish that piece was to rip the curtain open on something that had only ever survived because it was hidden.

For a while, she got better. 

She started running again, cutting her drinks in half, showing up to rehearsals early. 

She’d send postcards sometimes, a lyric scribbled on the back.

 “Still here,” she wrote once. 

And then the crash.

It was August of ’97 when Nika’s car spun out on a wet road somewhere outside Copenhagen. 

She survived — barely.

 Paige found out after a show. 

They told her while she was still in stage makeup, a towel around her neck. She asked for me, they said. 

I wasn’t there.

That night, she started drinking again.

I heard the story secondhand — how she disappeared backstage, how they found her an hour later on the floor, whispering my fault over and over. 

How she called my apartment and left a voicemail: Please come. 

How I didn’t pick up, because I didn’t know which version of her I’d find on the other end.

We saw each other a few times after that, always in fragments: in the corners of parties, in apartments, between rehearsals. 

But something essential had shifted, I couldn’t keep watching her come undone again.

That’s what led us to that kitchen in January 1998.

﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍

Transcript, Apartment Kitchen (January 4, 1998)

(Partial recording, restored from microcassette found in Fudd’s 1998 notes. Ambient noise)

PB: You’re not gonna drink? AZ: Not tonight. PB: Since when are you allergic to fun? (pause)

PB: You don’t get to moralize AZ: Shut up.

(A chair scrapes. Paige is pacing. You can hear the ice rattle in her glass.)

PB: You’re not my mother. AZ: I know. PB: Then stop sounding like her. AZ: I want to sound like someone who’s terrified. PB: Of what? AZ: Of coming home to a phone call instead of you.

(Long silence. Paige exhales through her nose, sharp.)

PB: You think I like— AZ: I don’t think you know what you like anymore.

(pause)

PB: I like you. AZ: No, you need me. That’s not the same thing. PB: I’m trying. AZ: Try somewhere I can’t watch.

(a crash—glass hitting tile, Paige threw a bottle on the foor next to me)

 AZ: I’m done with this

PB: Fuck, don’t. I’m sorry AZ: No, you’re not PB: Do you love me? AZ: That’s the fucking problem.

(Recorder clicks off. Then on again).

AZ: Love has limits. You crossed all of them.

(Paige laughs once, hoarse, humorless.)

PB: I’m poison, right? Say it. AZ: You’re not poison.

(soft movement—Paige steps closer, voice low)

PB: Then stay. AZ: I can’t. PB: Lie to me. Just say you’ll stay. AZ: I can’t even do that anymore.

(pause. footsteps. the click of a lighter.)

PB: What happens to all the songs now? AZ: You’ll write new ones. PB: Without you, I can’t AZ: Then maybe they’ll finally be honest.

(tape distortion)

PB: You’re cruel when you’re scared. AZ: So are you. (silence) PB: I’ll call you tomorrow. AZ: Don’t. (beat) PB: You’ll answer anyway. AZ: I hate you.

﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍

The End

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

After the kitchen, I left.

I packed a weekend bag I never opened and took a cab to a friend’s place I barely knew.

I did what people tell you to do when you finally draw a boundary: I didn’t answer the first call, or the second, then I turned my phone face down and practiced breathing.

Paige went back to the hotel the label had her in, and somewhere between the front desk, the minibar and her room, she overdose.

The 911 call made when they saw her body, colapsed on the floor, would later assign a time window “Between 22:40 and 01:10.” 

People ask if I think it was an accident, the honest answer is that I don’t know. 

The honest-er answer is that part of me is sure she meant to scare me, and part of me is just as sure she didn’t care what scared me anymore. 

I know she called twice and hung up once, and I know the last clear word I said was “I hate you.” 

It was shorthand for everything I hated — what the drinking made her say, what it made me tolerate, who we were in those rooms.

The overnight staff at the hospital were efficient in that way you don’t appreciate until your life depends on someone else. 

A resident with gentle eyes met me at the doors and said, “We’re doing everything we can.”

That’s a sentence designed to hold people together through an elevator ride. 

They said “multi-substance,” and I nodded like we were discussing the weather.

Someone asked for next of kin and I gave them her mother’s number from memory and wrote my own name under “friend.”

A nurse took me to a family room with a coffee machine.

She said, “You should prepare yourself,” and then she said the softer version: “It may be a long night.” 

Another doctor explained what had already been done and what they were watching for now: respiratory stability, cardiac rhythm, the way a body tells you if it wants to stay. 

There’s a cruelty in hearing your lover reduced to a list of numbers that all mean maybe.

I sat on the floor and I opened my notebook because that’s what I do when I don’t know what to do.

Then I started the obituary because the doctor said “prepare,” and I only know how to prepare in sentences. 

Paige Bueckers, 1970–1998. 

The numbers looked wrong even as they matched the facts. I listed achievements in a column (Grammys. Madison Square Garden. Burning Red).

I tried to write one thing that wasn’t for public consumption, a single sentence that was only for me, and all I could manage was her laugh.

What if I’d answered at 10:43.  What if I’d gone back. What if I’d been gentler, or harsher, or quieter, or louder. 

My mind tried on versions like coats, and none of them change the weather outside. 

So the anger kept me breathing. 

I was furious at her for choosing the floor of a hotel over the bed we made, and I was furious at myself for believing that leaving would save either one of us. 

Every few hours someone came in and told me not very much in a voice that sounded practiced and kind

“Holding.” “No change.” “We’re watching.”

I remember the headline I would never forgive myself for, and the way betrayal takes hold of your body no matter how noble you believed your reasons were.

If you’re looking for closure here, there isn’t any.

If you are reading this looking for absolution, I don’t have any to offer. I did my best; my best was inconsistent; she suffered anyway. 

Those statements can all be true at once.

I thought about how much of our story had already been written in public, and how little that helped me now, when the only story I wanted was the one where she woke up and I got to say something better than what I’d chosen.

﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍

“PAIGE BUECKERS, 1970–1998”

A Memorial by Azzi Fudd 

She taught us that loudness could be vulnerable.

That a woman could burn and not apologize for the smoke.

She was impossible, and she made it impossible not to care about her.

If there is a heaven that accepts girls like us, I hope she is there, finally at peace.

Editor’s Note

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

It ran online for three hours.

Paige didn’t die.

She stayed under for four days, maybe five — it’s all a blur now.

I stayed in that chair the entire time, writing and rewriting her obituary because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.

When she woke up, her first words were, “Stop crying. You look like hell.”.

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Transcript: Post-Overdose Conversation (Hospital Room, April 30, 1998)

PB: I didn’t do it because of you. AZ: I know. PB: I did it because I didn’t know how to stop hurting myself. And then I hurt you too. AZ: You did. PB: I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to be— AZ: A punishment? PB: Yeah. (quiet) 

AZ: You scared the shit out of me. PB: I scared myself. AZ: I can’t do this again. PB: I know. AZ: I mean it, Paige. The next time, I’m going down with you. PB: That’s why I’m not going to let there be a next time.

PB: I’ll go. AZ: Go where? PB: Rehab. You can even pick it. AZ: Don’t joke. PB: I’m not. AZ: (softly) Okay.

(Paige starts crying then)

PB: I don’t deserve you. AZ: You don’t get to decide that.

Editor’s Note

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

When she hugged me goodbye, she said, “Don’t write about this.”

 And I didn’t — not until now.

﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍

Letter — Azzi Fudd to Paige Bueckers (hand-delivered, Rehab, June 1998)

Paige,

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write, and that includes your obituaries.

I can’t be your girlfriend. 

Not because I stopped loving you, but because loving you in that way would kill us both.

And right now, when I look at you, I see myself disappearing too.

So this is the deal: I will be your friend.

I will bring you fresh fruit on Sundays, and magazines you’ll never read, and I’ll sit with you while you complain about the coffee and the nurses and the world. 

I’ll keep loving you in the only way that doesn’t burn us alive.

I will love you until the day you die —  and I hope that’s very, very late.

But if you go before me, I want you to know you were the first person who ever made me understand what love means.

Stay

Not for me, but with me.

That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

—A.

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Reply — Paige Bueckers to Azzi (found folded in Vice Versa lyric notebook, dated July 1998)

Rookie,

I read your letter three times.

Then I cried, then I laughed, then I asked the nurse for paper.

I’ll take whatever you can give me — the Sundays, the fruit, the silence, the distance.

If love can change shape, then let it.

You’ve already given me more versions of it than I deserve.

I’ll love you every way I can, every way you’ll let me, until the day I die.

And if I ever get to live past that — I’ll love you stil

—P.

P.S. Rookie,

I wrote something last night. It’s not finished, but it’s yours.

﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍﹍

“No Reason” — rough draft

I don’t need a reason to love you, No season, no sign, no cue. It’s the quiet between my heartbeats, The sound of the world when it’s you.

I don’t need a promise or pardon, No map for where this goes. I’d still choose the crash and the madness, If it meant I could love you close.

I don’t need a reason to love you— It’s all I’ve ever known. You’re not the fire that burns me out, You’re the place my soul calls home.

I’m calling it “No Reason.”

You’ll hate it, because you hate when I make things too obvious 

 —P.

Editor’s Note

Written by: Azzi Fudd (circa 2025)

No Reason was track three on Vice Versa. 

When the album dropped, critics called it “the love song of the century.” 

They said it was the kind of thing people get married to, the kind of thing that makes you believe in something again.

Paige and I never believed in marriage — not really. 

But if we had ever done it, if we had ever stood somewhere and made promises we already knew by heart, this would have been our song.

The critics were right about that one.

Somewhere right now, someone’s proposing it. 

And every single time I hear that opening chord, I still feel the same thing I felt that morning in 1999, standing outside the CBS building when it hit the airwaves for the first time.

The most beautiful love song in the world was about me.

For the first time in years, Paige was writing about love without destroying herself to do it. 

She wasn’t drunk, she wasn’t high, she wasn’t chasing chaos for the sake of the art, she was just “in love”.

And now, I have to confess something to you, reader.

 I am crying as I write this. Because I just realized that No Reason was the first song she ever wrote sober.

And after that, she never wrote a song that she wasn’t sober for. 

Not one.

I am crying because I understand, now, that this isn’t just the most beautiful love song in the world — it’s the most important song of my life.

003 : great taste

004 : smart girl

005 : feeling stuff makes you insane, apparently!

006 : girl, so confusing

007 : she doesn't give a flying fuck about you

008 : FUMBLED!

009 : demage control

010 : whatever it is

011 : ellie cocaine williams

012 : if it's casual

013 : say what you mean

014 : trusting your gut

Ellie Williams.

Your brother’s best friend. She’d been orbiting your life for as long as you could remember—sometimes barely noticeable, sometimes all you could see.

The one who never knocked. Who slid the door open like she owned the place, who kicked her sneakers off in the hallway, trailing dirt and laughter in her wake. Backpack slinging over her shoulder, controller dangling from her fingers, her voice already spilling down the corridor before she was even in the room.

You were younger, two years that mattered so much back then. Enough to keep you at the periphery, tolerated but not invited. You’d linger in the doorway of his room, pretending you had a reason to be there. Pretending you weren’t just there to ogle her.

Thirteen, your hair in a crooked braid, still fumbling with eyeliner and chipped nail polish when you first met her. The door opened and there she was—fifteen, all elbows and knees and freckled cheeks, auburn hair pulled back, sitting cross-legged with her whole body leaning toward the screen.

“Yo,” she muttered without looking up, thumbs flying, the glow of pixels flashing against her soft jaw. “Who's this?”

“My sister,” your brother said, shoving another chip into his mouth. “Ignore her.”

And then she turned. Sharp green eyes, a curl of her mouth, one dimple flashing.

“Ellie.”

It took less than a second before her head went back to the screen. A name she tossed like it was nothing, never imagining how much it stuck, how it pressed into your chest like a brand. That dizzy ache, that quickening pulse—you felt it before you even had a name for what it meant.

At first, it was harmless, dumb. A crush you hid in notebooks and in the way you lingered too long. You noticed everything: the way her socked foot tapped against the carpet, the way she cursed when she lost, the way her laughter cracked open the room.

But the crush grew with you.

At school, you saw her across the cafeteria. Always sitting with your brother, slouched in her chair like the entire world bored her, spinning an apple on the table while a girl leaned just a little too close.

You heard whispers—Ellie Williams broke hearts. Ellie Williams had a reputation. Ellie Williams snuck out behind the gym with a girl.

And every time, your stomach knotted. Because you could see it: the hand brushing hers, the tilt of a smile, the bite of a lip. You could imagine it so easily it was unbearable.

By then your fantasies weren’t innocent anymore. Not daydreams of sitting next to her with a controller in your hand too, but of her fingers curling under your chin, of her pressing you into the mattress, of that same laughter breaking against your mouth instead of the living room walls. You carried it like a fever.

But somewhere along the way, you weren’t just the little sister anymore. You grew. And you knew exactly how to use it in your favour. 

It started with the shorts.

The heat was merciless that summer you turned fifteen. Air thick enough to choke on, dust motes hanging suspended in the sunbeams cutting through the blinds. You padded barefoot into the kitchen, skin sticky with sweat, cotton shorts clinging to your hips. They were worn soft, the elastic giving just enough to sit high on your waist and ride higher on your thighs with every step.

Ellie was there already, as usual—propped against the counter, soda can sweating in her hand, pretending to look interested in whatever dumb conversation your brother had just abandoned mid-sentence. Her hair was half pulled back messily, a few strands stuck damp against her temple, freckles stark against the flush the heat brought out.

You reached for the cabinet above her head, stretching on your toes to grab the cereal box shoved at the very back. Your shirt lifted as your arms extended, baring a sliver of skin at your waist, the hem grazing up and revealing more the longer you reached. The shorts shifted too, the fabric tugging across the curve of your spine, the seam biting higher with the stretch.

You didn’t even have to look to know she was staring. The charged silence that filled the space between you made you feel it. You let yourself linger, fingertips brushing the cardboard just out of reach, keeping your shirt rucked up, keeping the fabric stretched across you just long enough to test her. 

When you finally glanced back, her eyes were already there—locked on you. On the curve of your ass, the length of your legs as you strained for the box. Then, syrup-sweet, you tossed a look over your shoulder.

“Whatcha staring at?”

It came out casual even when your pulse was racing, heart hammering with the thrill.

Her jaw was tight, soda can frozen halfway to her lips like she’d been caught mid-crime. Her ears burned red, freckles standing out darker across her skin.

“Nothing.”

The word cracked too fast, almost a stutter.

You smirked, plucked the box down, and turned away, satisfied with how your plan had worked.

Then came the towel.

Steam clung to your skin when you stepped out of the bathroom, the house’s warped mirror still fogged behind you. Droplets slid from your hair, tracing the slope of your collarbone, disappearing beneath the knot of white terry cloth barely cinched around your chest. The towel skimmed scandalously high at your thighs, shifting with every step, every sway of your hips as you padded down the hall.

You’d left your door unlocked on purpose. Timed it perfectly, slowing your steps when you heard hers up the stairs.

And sure enough—there she was, walking past at that exact moment.

“Oh—hey.” 

Your voice lifted with feigned surprise, though you’d rehearsed it in your head.

Ellie stopped short, eyes catching on you like a hook snagged in fabric. For one beat too long she was staring shamessly—at the towel damp and clinging, at the shape of your tits pressed tight beneath, nipples hard and visible through the thin cloth. You watched her throat bob, her gaze flicker up too late.

“H-hey.” She muttered, her voice low and husky. Her hands shoved into her jeans pockets, knuckles straining against denim.

You leaned against the doorframe, tilting your hip, letting the towel loosen just enough to slip an inch lower. The corner of your mouth curled, knowing but innocent, inviting without ever saying so.

From the kitchen, your brother’s voice shattered the moment, shouting her name. Ellie tore her eyes away like the contact burned, muttering something that didn’t land, and brushed past you in a rush, the heat of her body grazing yours before vanishing down the hall.

After that, it was constant.

Well, you made it constant.

The little things stretched just far enough to matter. Brushing past her in the kitchen, letting your hand graze hers, lingering against her shoulder when you reached for a glass you didn’t need. Sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, knee angled so it rested lightly against hers. Sprawling across the couch in skirts that threatened to ride up with every shift of your thighs, slow sips from a water bottle, condensation slicking your fingers before you dragged them across your lips—tongue darting out to catch the moisture.

And every time, her eyes betrayed her. No matter how fast she looked away, no matter how sharp her jaw clenched, you saw it. The flash of hunger. The pause before retreat. The way her hand flexed against her thigh like she was physically holding herself back.

Your brother never noticed, too lost in his own noise, his own world. But you noticed. God, you noticed everything. The way Ellie’s laughter clipped short when someone else’s joke made you double over. The way her shoulders went rigid when another guy touched your arm in the cafeteria. The way her mouth opened like she might finally say something, only to snap shut again.

Ellie Williams. Your brother’s best friend. The girl you weren’t supposed to want.

And yet, the older you got, the more impossible it became for her to stop wanting you back.

Your house had been quiet all afternoon, the kind of silence only peaceful when your brother was upstairs. You were stretched across the couch, one leg bent, music thrumming faintly from the speaker on the coffee table. The summer heat clung to your skin, the old fan in the corner doing little to help when the doorbell rang.

Ellie stood there when you opened it.

Older now. Hotter. She wasn’t the lanky fifteen-year-old you’d first met, the one with messy hair and knobby knees trailing after your brother. No—twenty had sharpened her into something else entirely. Her hair was shorter now, cropped above her shoulders, auburn strands catching the light but darker at the roots. 

New ink marked her forearm, black lines of ferns curling around a wide-winged moth, the shading so precise it seemed alive when she moved. The tattoo stretched when she shifted her grip on the comic book in her hand, flexing over muscle that hadn’t been there years ago.

“Thought your brother might kill me if I didn’t give this back,” she said, holding up the old Spider-Man issue with a half-grin.

You stepped aside, the brush of her arm against yours sending heat straight to your chest. She smelled faintly of smoke and cologne, that mix that was always so unmistakably her. She dropped the comic onto the table with a careless flick of her wrist and collapsed onto the couch beside you, spreading out, posture loose and infuriatingly comfortable.

You crouched low between the coffee table and the couch, stretching forward to fish out the remote that had slipped underneath. The cushions pressed against your ribs, shirt falling loose around the neckline as you leaned further. The fabric gaped, collar tugging low enough to bare the soft curve of your tits, nipples brushing faint against the thin cotton with each movement.

You felt the air shift before you even looked up.

Ellie wasn’t watching the television. Her body was still, shoulders rigid, but her eyes—her eyes were locked downward, shameless. Green gone dark, gaze fixed straight into the slip of fabric, drinking in the view like she couldn’t tear herself away. She dragged her bottom lip between her teeth, guilty and greedy all at once.

When you straightened, remote in hand, her head snapped up too late. She cleared her throat and tapped her fingers against her knee as if the nervous rhythm could erase the truth of where her eyes had been.

Your lips curved, satisfied, as you muttered. “So… there’s a party Friday.”

Her brow arched, skeptical but interested. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You tipped your head, letting your hair fall across your cheek. “You should come.”

Ellie leaned back, one arm thrown across the back of the couch, the other resting against her thigh. “Depends, your brother going?”

You sighed, rolling your eyes as if she hadn’t just pinned you with her stare. “Of course he is.”

She hummed, dragging the sound out slowly. “Then yeah... I guess.” 

Her gaze swept over you again, openly this time. Down the slope of your bare legs, the hem of your shorts, the faint outline of your nipples pressing against your shirt. 

The air between you tightened. She wasn’t the girl you’d crushed on at thirteen anymore. Freckles darker, shoulders broader, her tattoo shifting with every movement, and you couldn’t stop looking at it.

Her grin widened when she noticed your attention. She tilted her arm slightly, “Cool, huh?”

You swallowed, keeping your tone even though your pulse betrayed you. “Not bad.”

“Not bad?” she repeated, mock-offended, eyes glinting. She leaned in closer, elbow brushing your thigh, the scent of her shampoo strong in the warm air. “This took hours, hurt like hell, too. At least tell me it’s impressive.”

You grinned, playing with the hem of your shirt, letting the cotton slip lower on your shoulder. “Well… maybe I need a closer look.”

Her tongue pressed into her cheek as she stretched her arm out toward you. “Go ahead, princess. Judge art up close.”

You rolled your eyes at the nickname, but your fingers still found her wrist, thumb brushing against the edge of the ink. The skin was warm, firm under your touch. The moth’s wings curved when you turned her arm, ferns spiraling up toward her elbow. Ellie’s eyes never left your face, feeling the way you traced the lines.

“It’s… better than not bad,” you admitted finally, your voice softer than you meant it to be.

Ellie’s mouth curved slowly, “Thought so.”

You let her arm go, but the weight of it lingered, the heat of her skin burning against your palm even after. 

“See you at the party, then?” you asked, forcing the words to sound light.

“Sure thing,” Ellie leaned back, green eyes still heavy on you. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,”

That was when the thud of footsteps hit—your brother’s heavy stride coming down. You sat up straighter, tugging your shirt into its original place. Ellie only shifted a little, grin sliding off her mouth as his figure appeared at the bottom step.

He landed in the armchair across from you both, eyes darting between you and Ellie. He didn’t say anything at first, just leaned back, arms crossed, mouth set in a flat line. 

“You two good?” he asked finally, flicker of suspicion underneath it.

“Yeah,” Ellie said easily, scratching the back of her neck. “Just returning your comic, thought you’d hunt me down if I kept it any longer.”

He snorted. “Damn right. Don’t trust you with first editions.” His eyes cut toward you briefly, then back to her. “Besides, didn’t think you read that fast.”

Ellie smirked. “Guess I’m smarter than I look.”

“Debatable,” he shot back, though his gaze lingered a beat too long on her position on the couch—on how close she was to you. “Just make sure you don’t start flirting with my sister while you’re at it.”

Ellie’s jaw ticked, the grin still plastered on her lips not quite reaching her eyes now. “She was telling me about the party on Friday."

Your brother leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring her down in that way he always did when he thought he was the authority in the room. “Good. I’m going with her.”

Her eyes flicked to yours before she answered, a quick spark you caught, even if your brother missed it.

“Relax, bro,” she said, casual, too casual. “Your sis’s smarter than that.”

You felt the burn of her gaze linger a second too long before she finally turned on the TV, thumbing at the hem of her sleeve, the black lines of her tattoo stretching as her forearm flexed.

Your brother wasn’t convinced. You could see it in the way his shoulders stayed tense, in the way his eyes kept darting between the two of you—catching things neither of you said out loud.

That friday, the mirror didn’t even look like yours anymore.

It was streaked with steam from the shower you’d taken an hour earlier, but the girl staring back at you now wasn’t the kid who used to hover at the edge of your brother’s room. This was sharpened, intentional.

Your dress was black, cut short, the hem barely grazing the tops of your thighs. The neckline plunged deeper than anything you’d ever dared, clinging in all the right places, whispering with every shift of your body. You’d tugged your hair into perfect waves, gloss shiny on your lips, mascara smudged dark around your lashes. 

The bedroom door creaked open without a knock—your brother, of course. He stepped in halfway, then stopped, eyes sweeping over you with a look that was half-annoyance, half-protection, all older brother.

“Remind me why you’re going to this party again?” 

You rolled your eyes, reaching for the heels at the foot of your bed. “Because I’m eighteen, and I’m allowed to have fun without you policing my life.”

He folded his arms across his chest, leaning against the doorframe. 

“Fun,” he repeated, unimpressed. “That's what we calling it now?” His eyes flicked over your dress again, and his jaw ticked. “Jesus, you’re really wearing that?”

You slipped a heel on, snapped the strap into place with a satisfying click, and looked up at him through your lashes. “Yep. Got a problem?”

He exhaled like he was already exhausted, rubbing a hand over his face. “You know Ellie’s gonna be there, right?”

You smirked, straightening to your full height in the heels, the black dress hugging tighter when you adjusted. “Cool.”

Your brother froze, suspicion flickering across his face. “Cool? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

You just shrugged, gloss catching the light when you bit your lip, voice dripping with mock innocence. “Nothing.”

He stared at you for a beat too long, jaw tight, before finally groaning under his breath and turning for the door. “Grab your damn bag—I’m driving.”

The ride was a blur of streetlights cutting across your window, bass rattling from the stereo, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. He didn’t talk much, just muttered a warning here and there—“don’t get wasted,” “don’t do anything stupid,” “stick with me when we get there.” Every line edged with that older-brother grit, the kind that always came out harsher when he was worried.

When he finally pulled up outside the house—already pulsing with music, people spilling onto the lawn—you pushed open the door before he’d even killed the engine. The night air wrapped around you warm and electric, lights flashing from inside, laughter spilling across the yard.

Your brother caught up quick, locking the car and throwing you a look that was both warning and weary. “Stay where I can see you.”

You rolled your eyes and ignored him, music hitting you first—thick bass that rattled the walls and pressed heavy in your chest, voices spilling over it in waves. The house was packed, bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, heat and perfume and sweat making the air humid. Colored lights strobed across faces, turning everyone into shifting silhouettes.

And then you saw her.

Ellie.

She was leaning against the kitchen counter with a red cup in her hand, surrounded by a cluster of friends—guys from your brother’s soccer team, a couple of girls you vaguely recognized from school. Dressed in black jeans and a faded tee that clung to her shoulders, her new tattoo stark against pale skin as she gestured lazily at whatever story she was telling.

She laughed at something, head tilting back, and you felt your stomach flip.

Your brother caught Ellie’s eye across the room and immediately cut through the crowd toward the group, his hand clapping down on one of the guys’ shoulders. She straightened a little when she saw him, green eyes flicking quick past him—then stopping.

On you.

Her smile faltered when she really looked. Took in the short black dress clinging to you, the way it dipped low on your chest, the glint of gloss on your mouth. Her jaw ticked, and she dragged her gaze away, back to your brother, but not before you caught the heat in it.

You let the corner of your mouth curl, turned on your heel, and slipped through the crowd until you found Rachel.

Rachel—your best friend, your partner-in-crime, the only girl who could match your sharpest edges—leaning against the kitchen counter, eyeliner sharp enough to kill, watching the party unfold with a look that screamed superiority. She spotted you immediately, lips curling into a wicked grin. 

“Jesus christ,” She drawled, grabbing a red cup off the counter and shoving it into your hand before you could even say hi. “You look like a whore.”

You laughed, sharp and unbothered, tilting the cup to your lips as Rachel draped an arm over your shoulder. “Thank you babe.”

Rachel cackled, clinking her drink against yours. “No, like, a hot whore. A rich whore.”

“Better than looking like a poor whore,”

“True.” She adjusted her skirt, kicking her heels against the cabinet door. “Poor whores don’t get their tits done, and yours are giving main character energy tonight.”

“My tits ain’t—” Before you could fully retort, a familiar voice cut in. Warm, teasing, familiar. 

“Wow, this is the most deranged conversation I’ve walked into all night.”

You turned to see Dina weaving her way toward you, curls framing her face, red cup in hand. She was glowing, skin dewy under the kitchen light, already half-buzzed judging by the easy sway of her steps.

“D!” Rachel yelled, nearly knocking over her cup as she reached to grab her arm. “Perfect timing. We were just discussing how hot she looks tonight.” She jabbed a finger at you.

Dina’s eyes swept you up and down, her lips quirking. “Okay, yeah. I see it. Total heartbreaker. Half this party’s about to write sad poems about you.”

“Only half?” you teased, raising a brow.

Rachel scoffed. “The other half’s just gonna try to finger you in the bathroom.”

Dina choked on her drink, laughing. “You’re disgusting.”

“You love me.” Rachel flipped her hair dramatically.

“I tolerate you,” Dina corrected, still laughing, then turned back to you. “Seriously though, you look incredible. Ellie’s here, right?”

Rachel’s grin went wolfish. “Oh, she’s here. And she’s staring so hard she’s about to burn holes in her ass.”

You snorted, hiding behind your cup. Dina leaned in, conspiratorial. “Should we do something about it?”

Rachel gasped theatrically, clutching her chest. “Oh my god, yes. Dance with us.”

Dina grabbed your hand, tugging you away from the counter. “C’mon. We’re not letting you stand here and waste your outfit.”

Rachel hopped down, nearly spilling her drink but saving it with a flourish. “To the dance floor!” she declared, striding into the crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea.

And you followed, laughing so hard your ribs ached, Dina tugging you close, Rachel swaying exaggeratedly to the beat. For the first time all night, you almost forgot about Ellie’s eyes tracking every move you made.

The three of you carved out space on the sticky floor like you owned it, shoving into the crush of bodies until the music wrapped around you. Dina still had your hand, pulling you in closer as she started to move with the beat, curls shining with every sway. Rachel, predictably, went full performance mode—hips swaying, one hand dramatically in the air, mouthing the lyrics like she was headlining Coachella.

“Rachel,” Dina groaned through a laugh, “the hell are you doin'”

Rachel only tossed her hair back, “Still hotter than every person in this room combined.” 

You rolled your eyes but couldn’t stop laughing, hips moving with hers when she grabbed your waist. Your head tipped back in laughter, but your gaze snagged on the table across the room.

Flip cup. Your brother stood there, red cup in hand, cheeks flushed with booze and bravado. He was leaning too heavily on the table, laughing way too loud, clearly already drunk. And right next to him—Ellie.

Her sleeves were shoved up as she smacked the cup onto the edge of the table. Her tongue poked out between her teeth as she flipped it clean on the first try, laughing when your brother cursed and slammed his palm against the wood.

She looked alive there, hair messy, caught up in the heat of competition. Your brother swayed, his words slurred as he shouted something at Ellie, and she just giggled, shoulders shaking, eyes flashing green under the strobe as she glanced at you quickly, but not less piercing.

Dina followed your gaze, then leaned close, voice warm against your ear. “Ohhh. Somebody’s watching her girl.”

Rachel smirked, leaning on your other shoulder. “Correction: Ellie’s the one watching. You’re just giving her a show.”

The night blurred into sweat and bass and laughter, hours collapsing into each other. Dina had you twirling on the dance floor, Rachel stealing sips of every cup she could find and all the while your brother spiraled further into sloppy chaos.

He was gone—head tilted back in wild laughter, arm slung over some guy you didn’t know. Every now and then he’d glance your way, but his eyes were glassy, his grin loose, his focus lost in the haze of booze and noise. He wasn’t watching you anymore.

But Ellie was.

Even when she was shoulder to shoulder with his friends, even when she pretended to be caught up in their drinking games, her gaze cut through the crowd, landing on you again and again. She looked wrecked in the strobe lights—jaw tight, mouth pulled into something halfway between a smirk and a dare.

You let it ride for a while, feeding off the weight of her stare, pretending you didn’t feel it. But when the music shifted to something slower, you leaned into Dina’s ear.

“Bathroom,” you murmured.

She arched a brow. “Need me to guard the door?”

You shook your head, quick. “No—alone. Just for a minute.”

Rachel, overhearing, pouted dramatically, grabbing at your hand. “Abandoning us? Ruuuude.”

“I’ll be fast!” you promised, tugging free with a smile that didn’t quite mask the pulse in your throat.

And before they could press, you slipped away through the crush of bodies, past the kitchen, past the living room where your brother howled with laughter, oblivious.

You glanced over your shoulder just once, long enough to catch Ellie, still at the table, her eyes locking on yours as you moved down the hall. 

You held her gaze, a silent invitation, before disappearing toward the bathroom.

The lock clicked behind you, the hum of the party muffled through the door. You leaned against the sink, breath coming too fast, palms braced against cool porcelain as you tried to steady yourself.

Five minutes. Enough time for anyone else to forget you’d slipped away. Enough time for her to notice. You told yourself not to hope, not to believe she’d actually follow, that maybe it was just your mind, conjuring the fantasy that this plan could finally work. 

You stood there waiting, doubt pooling heavy in your chest.

And then—knock, knock. Sharp. Quick.

“Coming,” you called, your voice pitching higher than you meant, nerves betraying you.

You tugged the handle, half-prepared to meet an empty hallway, half-convinced you’d imagined it all. 

Instead you opened the door into the solid wall of her, right there. 

The sight of Ellie was a shock that cracked through you, as if you hadn’t dared believe she’d really come. Eyes dark, jaw set, she didn’t bother with words. Her hand found your waist, firm, and in the next breath she had you backed up hard against the tiled wall. The door slammed shut behind her, lock snapping.

Now it was just the two of you.

The bathroom felt smaller with her in it, the air thickening, her heat rolling off in waves. The scent of beer clung to her breath, cedar shampoo to her skin, dizzying. She pressed in close, her body caging yours against cold tile, her hands braced hard at your waist so you couldn’t move even if you’d wanted to.

“You think you’re slick, huh?” Her voice was rough, rasping right against your mouth.

Your lips curved, gloss already smudged. “Worked, didn’t it?”

A breathless laugh slipped from her—half disbelieving, half hungry. “You’ve been teasing me for years.”

You tilted your head, lips brushing hers like a dare. “Maybe I have.”

That was all it took. Her mouth crashed onto yours in a bruising kiss, teeth dragging your bottom lip, swallowing the gasp you gave. It was desperate, messy, years of tension collapsing into heat and tongue and want. Her hands roamed with no hesitation, sliding up your thighs, under your dress, thumbs digging into your hips like she meant to brand you there.

She pinned you higher against the wall, your dress riding up as porcelain and tile dug into the backs of your thighs. Her body pressed tight to yours, chest to chest, the air between you nothing but her warmth and the sting of cheap beer.

She leaned in, grin wicked, eyes dark and glazed with something that wasn’t just tipsy.

“Jesus,” she muttered against your mouth, kissing you again before you could answer. “You have any idea what you do to me?”

Your hand fisted in her shirt, pulling her closer, nails digging into her shoulders “Been wanting you to fuck me for years,” you whispered hot against her jaw, kissing down to the corner of her mouth.

Her breath stuttered, her laugh wrecked.

“My best friend’s lil’ sis, huh?” Another kiss, hard enough to steal your air. “This is wrong. You know it.”

Your lips brushed her ear, voice a rasp. “Then stop.”

She froze for a fraction of a heartbeat, just long enough for her eyes to flick to yours—dark, feral, undone—and her mouth crashed back onto yours, harder. The kiss stole your breath, her teeth grazing your lip before her tongue claimed the space between your mouths.

Her hands slid down, gripping your ass hard, fingers digging in. In the next second, she lifted you clean off the ground, setting you down against the sink, porcelain biting into the backs of your thighs.

“Could never stop,” she growled, fingers pressing harder.

The small bathroom shrank around you. Her body pressed tight between your knees, hand sliding higher, under the thin fabric of your dress, cupping you, making you gasp into her mouth.

Your hands were everywhere—threading through her short hair, tugging her closer, slipping under her shirt to feel hot skin, tracing the edge of that tattoo while she groaned into your mouth. She kissed you like she was drowning, like every second wasted was years lost.

Her fingers dragged your panties aside, finding you wet and desperate already, her breath hitching when she felt it.

“Fuck, you’re soaked—” you cut her off with another kiss, swallowing her gasp as she grinded against your knee like she couldn’t help it.

“Shut up and touch me,” you muttered, nails raking her back.

Her laugh broke rough against your lips, but her fingers pushed inside you in the next heartbeat, hot and fast, curling deep as you clenched around her. Your cry echoed off the bathroom tiles, swallowed by her mouth as she kissed you through it.

“Been dreaming of this,” she whispered against your lips, fucking you harder, faster, her free hand gripping the sink behind you for leverage. “Years, baby. Years.”

You clawed at her shirt, legs trembling in her grip, words tumbling out between frantic kisses. “Don’t—stop—Ellie—”

Ellie’s mouth was hot against yours, her fingers driving deeper, curling until your thighs trembled on either side of her. Her forehead pressed to yours, teeth catching your lip before her tongue soothed the sting.

“I won’t,” she rasped and then pulled her hand from between your legs. You barely had time to whine before she was dropping to her knees on the tile, dragging your dress up around your hips as if she’d been dying to do it for years.

“Ellie—” you gasped, but the word cut off in a cry when her tongue parted you, wet and starved. Her hands gripped your thighs hard, spreading you wider, nails biting your skin as she buried her mouth deeper.

You clutched the sink behind you, head tipping back against the mirror with a dull thud. “Fuck—fuck!”

She groaned against you, low and guttural, the sound vibrating straight through your core. Her tongue was relentless, licking into you, sucking your clit with the same fierce concentration she used to give those endless video games on your brother’s floor.

She pulled back just long enough to drag her mouth across your inner thigh, lips wet, smirk curling though her breath came ragged.

“Fuck, you taste even better than I thought,” she rasped, eyes glazed, jaw slick. “Been thinking about this for so fucking long.”

Your thighs trembled, fingers locked tight in her short hair. You stared down at her, chest heaving, unable to catch your breath. “This isn’t—this can’t be real—” The words tore out of you between gasps, half-moan, half-disbelief.

Ellie grinned against you. “Oh, it’s real, baby. You’re dripping all over my tongue.” She pressed in harder, mouthing at your clit, groaning like she couldn’t get enough. “Dreamt about it, fuck, yeah—but nothing ever came close.”

You whimpered, grinding against her mouth helplessly and yanking her head deeper between your thighs. “Ellie—Ellie, please—”

She only growled in return, dragging her tongue through your folds like she meant to ruin you, sucking you down until you were thrashing against the counter

Your head tipped back, eyes squeezing shut, knuckles white where you clutched the sink. You couldn’t stop the sounds spilling out, couldn’t stop the frantic chant of her name breaking from your throat. The sight of her burned itself into your mind, filthy and impossible.

When you came, it tore out of you sharp and fast, muffled against your own arm as you tried to hold back the scream. Ellie didn’t let up, licking you through it, swallowing every drop, her moans vibrating against your skin like she’d been starving for you all along.

She stood then, breathless, lips slick, eyes dark with want. She dragged you into another kiss, forcing you to taste yourself on her tongue, her hands already tugging a strap from the waistband of her jeans, the plastic glinting under the bathroom light.

Your eyes widened, pulse snapping into overdrive. “Ellie—holy shit—”

Her smirk was wicked, already pressing the strap against you, grinding just enough to make you gasp. “What?”

You barely had time to answer before she shoved your dress down, fabric tearing against her impatience until your tits spilled free. She groaned low, mouth wrapping around one nipple, sucking hard while her hand shoved the strap against your cunt.

“Jesus—” you cried, half in shock, half in want, nails scrambling at the mirror behind you for balance. “This—this is insane—”

Her laugh was muffled against your skin, tongue flicking over your nipple before she bit down gently, enough to make you jolt.

And then she pushed inside.

Your cry echoed sharp in the cramped bathroom, echoing off tile and mirror. The stretch tore through you, hot and overwhelming, and you couldn’t stop the broken “Oh my god—! spilling from your lips. Ellie’s grip on your hips was bruising, anchoring you in place as she drove into you, rough and desperate, the slap of skin against skin barely audible over the bass pounding through the walls.

Her mouth dragged back up, teeth scraping your jaw, words rasped against your ear. “Look at you—can’t believe I’m finally inside you. You take it so fucking good, baby.”

Your heel slipped, clattering to the tile floor, legs tightening around her waist instinctively, dragging her deeper, harder. She kissed you again, swallowing your gasps like she couldn’t bear to let anyone else hear them. 

“Say it,” she demanded between kisses, voice jagged, her hand sliding up your throat, thumb pressing against your pulse. “Say you’ve wanted me too.”

“Ellie—fuck—always,” you cried, nails digging into her shoulders, tears stinging the corners of your eyes from how good it felt. “Always.”

Her smirk broke into a groan, hips pistoning faster, the strap hitting that perfect spot again and again until you shattered around her, clutching at her like you’d never let go. She bit into your shoulder, muffling her own ragged moan, body trembling with the force of it.

The bathroom felt too small to hold it—Ellie’s pace turned brutal, every thrust rattling the porcelain beneath you, the mirror behind your back fogging over from your ragged breaths. Her grip on your hips was iron, dragging you flush against her with every snap of her hips until you were nothing but nerve endings and need.

Her forehead pressed to yours, sweat dampening her locks, her green eyes blown frantic. “God, you feel—fuck, you feel unreal,” she choked, cutting herself off with a kiss so desperate it hurt, her tongue tangling with yours.

And then—knock, knock.

“Bathroom’s free?” 

Your brother’s voice slurred through the door, drunk and oblivious.

You froze, your whole body seizing, panic jolting through you like a live wire. But Ellie didn’t stop. Her hips only slowed, grinding in deeper instead of pulling away, eyes gleaming with something reckless. She clapped a hand over your mouth, pressing your head back against the mirror with a quiet thud.

“Occupied, bro,” Ellie called, her voice casual like she wasn’t buried inside you, fucking you against the sink. She thrust once, deliberately, making your muffled moan vibrate against her palm. Her lips brushed your ear, smirk curling. 

“Quiet.” she whispered, breath hot against your lobe.

"Ellie?" Your brother chuckled lazily through the door. “Where’s my sister? I can’t find the brat.”

Ellie’s smirk only widened, her hips rolling slow and deep, dragging the strap over that spot that made your thighs spasm around her waist. 

“Me? Mmmm... Haven’t seen her,” she drawled, hand still clamped tight over your mouth as you whimpered under it. She met your frantic eyes, a flash of panic flickering in hers for just a heartbeat before she buried it under that cocky grin. “Maybe she’s… busy.”

You thrashed a little, nails clawing her shoulder, begging her with your eyes, but she just pressed her hand harder over your lips, grinding into you with a snap of her hips that knocked a choked sound out of you.

“Busy?” your brother repeated, like he was leaning on the door now, words slurring.

Ellie bit back a laugh, her voice steady. 

“Yeah. With her friends, I meant.” Her tone was smooth as if nothing about the situation was wrong, even as her hips pressed forward again, making your muffled cry vibrate against her palm. Her smirk twisted as her eyes bored into yours, watching you fall apart silently beneath her. “Think I saw her in the kitchen last time.”

You felt your pulse hammering everywhere at once, the terror of being caught clashing with the unbearable heat of Ellie’s relentless thrusts.

There was a pause, long enough you thought you’d both be finished.

Then God finally had mercy for the sinners: 

“Kay. I’ll… look for her in the kitchen.” His footsteps staggered away down the hall.

You ripped a muffled sob against Ellie’s hand, thighs trembling, every nerve fried. She waited until the footsteps faded, then peeled her palm away from your lips, only to shove her tongue into your mouth, swallowing the broken sounds spilling out of you.

“Fuck,” she hissed, rutting into you harder now, reckless, chasing the high of nearly being caught. “That was close, huh?”

Your breath came in sharp, desperate gasps, tears prickling your eyes as you clung to her. “Ellie—oh my god, I can’t believe—”

“Believe it,” she growled, teeth dragging along your jaw. “Your brother just asked me where you were,” She thrust hard, sharp, making you cry out. “And you’re still fucking taking it.”

The heat coiled too fast, too sharp, panic and arousal tangling until you broke again, your body convulsing around her as you came with a strangled sob. Ellie groaned loud against your neck, thrusting through it, voice raw and guttural in your ear.

Ellie never broke her gaze. She pushed into you one last time, slow and devastating, her mouth brushing your ear.

“Thaat's it. You did so good,” she whispered, lips curling against your skin.

By the time you both finally stilled, your thighs were trembling against the porcelain, your gloss smeared across her mouth. The music from the party pulsed through the walls like nothing in the world had shifted, even as everything between you had.

Ellie eased out, hands steadying you when your legs tried to give. She tugged her strap free, tucking it back into the waistband of her jeans like she’d done it a hundred times before. You gawked, dress still hiked high around your hips, tits still out, hair a mess.

“You always carry that thing around?” you hissed in disbelief, tugging your hem back down and the straps into place, trying to make yourself look remotely presentable.

Ellie’s dimples flashed as she zipped her fly. “Only ‘cause I knew this was gonna happen.”

Your jaw dropped. “You’re insane.”

She leaned in, kissed you quick and dirty, a press of lips that still tasted of you.

You shoved at her chest, whispering sharp. “Kitchen. Right now. Or we’re dead as fuck if he figures it out.”

Ellie only laughed under her breath, stealing one last kiss before pulling back, eyes glinting wicked. “So… you wanna make this a regular thing?”

Your face burned, heart hammering, but you still rolled your eyes, muttering, “Oh, you wanna be dead so bad.”

Her smirk only widened. Her hand slid down to smack your ass hard enough to make you jolt, a muffled yelp catching in your throat. Then she leaned back against the sink, giving you the nod to go first.

Separate exits. Five minutes apart.

You slipped out first, dress tugged back into place, pulse still thrumming like you’d run miles. The hallway spun with music and smoke, laughter from the living room spilling through the walls. By the time you reached the kitchen, you’d almost convinced yourself no one noticed. Almost.

Your brother was leaning against the counter, red-eyed and drunk as hell, a red cup dangling loosely in his hand. He squinted when he saw you. “Where the fuck were you?” he slurred, head lolling like he could barely keep it up.

You forced a smile, pulse still erratic. “Outside,” you said quickly, reaching for a bottle of beer on the counter just to keep your hands busy. “Went for air.”

He nodded, buying it instantly, attention already flicking back toward the table where someone was shouting about another round of flip cup. “Kay. Don’t disappear again.”

You exhaled, tension flooding out of your chest. Out of the corner of your eye, you caught movement—Ellie, slipping into the room behind you, shirt adjusted, casual as hell. She didn’t even look at you, just drifted toward the couch, shoulder to shoulder with your brother like nothing had happened at all.

You exhaled, forcing your breath steady as you slipped back into the current of bodies, the swell of music and laughter threatening to swallow you whole. You tried to blend in, but you didn’t make it three steps before Rachel and Dina materialized out of the crowd like hawks circling prey.

“Girl, where the fuck were you?!” Dina shrieked, voice slicing over the music as she clamped onto your wrist like she was dragging you into court. Her eyes were wide, as if you’d committed some unspeakable crime by slipping away.

Rachel blinked at you, her gaze sweeping slow from head to toe, taking in every detail—your flushed cheeks, your swollen lips, the way your hair was mussed in a way no amount of dancing could explain, the tremble of your legs, and the cling of your dress rumpled crooked on your hips. Her brows shot up, and then narrowed like she was lining up the pieces of a puzzle she hadn’t thought she’d ever get to solve.

Her jaw dropped, face lighting up with vindication. She smacked Dina’s arm so hard the other girl sputtered beer down her chin. “Oh my god. She fucked Ellie.”

Dina covered her mouth, laughing in disbelief, muffled behind her hand. “No. No way. Did you—”

“Shut up,” you groaned, dragging both hands up to cover your face, praying the floor would swallow you whole. But the heat blooming across your skin betrayed you instantly.

Rachel was already spinning in a delirious circle, her cup sloshing dangerously close to the carpet. “Bitch, I knew it! I knew it! You disappeared, she disappeared, and you come back looking like you just got out of a damn car wash—holy shit.”

Dina was still laughing, head shaking like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Her voice was low but cutting, eyes glinting with mischief. “Your brother’s gonna kill her.”

Rachel clinked her cup against yours with a wicked little flourish, eyes gleaming. “Worth it though, huh?”

You didn’t answer—didn’t dare. You didn’t have to. Not when your body still hummed with the phantom echo of Ellie inside you, not with the taste of her still ghosting your tongue.

Across the room, you caught her. Ellie, leaning casual against the couch like she’d been there all night, a beer dangling from her fingers. But that carved, dangerous little curl of her lips was aimed straight at you. 

A mark, a brand, like she owned the night, owned you, and owned the secret pulsing between you and your brother’s laughter.

And in a way, you both did.

𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐌 𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓— @talyaisvalslutsoldier @miajooz @andieprincessofpower @isabelckl @sunflowerwinds @coastalwilliams @thinkingabtellie @ssijht @pariiissssssss @liddy333 @sewithinsouls @beeisscaredofbees @d1catwhisperer @the-sick-habit @elliescoquettegirl @elliewilliams-wife @yueluv3rrrr @your-eternal-muse @ellies-real-wife @katherinesmirnova @ellies-moth-to-a-flame @thxtmarvelchick @natscloset @lesbiansreverywhere @satellitespinner @yunaversalluv @wwefan2002 @ilahrawr @harmonib @piastorys @azteriarizz @starincarnated @natssgf @ukissmyfaceinacrowdedroom @iadorefineshyt @claudiajacobs @urmomssideh0e @kingofeyeliner @womenlover0 @ferxanda @marscardigan @elliewilliamsloverrrrrrrr @bambi-luvs @maru0uu @mikellie @gold-dustwomxn @nramv @liztreez @eriiwaiii2 @les4elliewilliams @elliewilliamskisser2000 @azxteria @elliecoochieeater @doodl3b3ans @savagestarlight28 ࿐

Three years.

Three years since the night you left—after Ellie left you.

She had walked onto that stage, guitar slung over her shoulder, the spotlight slicing through smoke like a blade, and felt no fire in her blood. No rhythm in her chest. Not even the familiar hum of adrenaline. Just a numbness so thick it dulled the lights, the sound, the meaning of it all.

She stood there, frozen, dizzy, staring out at a sea of faces—thousands of people screaming her name, mouths wide with adoration, hands lifted in praise—and she felt absolutely nothing.

No tether to a world that used to love her back.

And that was the moment Ellie Williams sank into the grave she’d dug with her own hands. Not with shovels, but with choices, with every drug consumed, every bottle drained and every lie wrapped in a grin. 

The moment her mind finally screamed what her heart had always known, whispering it over and over like a curse.

You lost everything.

Music had been her one constant—the first love of her life, her refuge, her weapon, the only thing that made sense before anything else did. The only thing that made fame worth it. The only reason she ever agreed to sell herself to the world. The only thing that made the screaming fans, the sleepless nights, the tour buses and interviews and headlines and all-consuming spotlight even remotely bearable. 

The stage had always been where she bled and where she bloomed.

But that night, it felt like a sentence. The lights, a cruel interrogation. The mic, a noose tightening with every breath. The guitar strapped across her body—once an extension of her soul—now hung like dead weight she could no longer connect with.

And after ending the show by walking offstage with not even two songs played, after spending hours destroying the green room where she had already shattered everything, both material and not, after screaming until her throat tore ragged, after bleeding from her knuckles, after collapsing to the floor and crawling back to her feet, she finally opened the door.

And didn’t explain a single thing.

She walked past the crew like a ghost draped in her own skin—eyes hollow, shoulders tight, jaw clenched so hard it could’ve cracked. No one spoke. No one reached out. Not Dina. Not even Jesse. Because whatever was left of her in that moment wasn’t someone they recognized. Wasn’t someone they could save.

She disappeared into the night. Into the elevator. Into the hallway. Into herself. She locked the door of the hotel suite behind her and let the shadows devour what little was left.

The only instinct she had left was to isolate—an animal curling around their wound. To pretend that the world could go quiet inside four walls. That if she was still enough, small enough, nothing else could hurt her. 

She drank. She snorted. She swallowed. She poked. 

Anything to feel something. Or nothing. 

Anything to make the voices in her head shut up. Anything to blur the faces in the crowd, frozen in time behind her eyelids. Anything to dim the stage lights that still flickered in her skin. Anything to blur the headlines, to wash them down with whatever would make them sting less.

Anything to make the truth easier to swallow—because it was terrifyingly simple: she had proven them all right. Everyone who had whispered that she was a beeline for wreckage, a walking collapse in slow motion. She had become the prophecy.

Anything to drown out your voice, broken, aching, too real, from echoing through the hollow corridors of her mind. To stop your hands from reaching through the dark, from pulling her back to the soul buried beneath pills and powder and needles and lies and manipulation. 

Anything to erase the image of your eyes, glassy and heartbroken, staring at the version of herself she had fought as hard as she could to keep hidden from you. The truth she couldn’t bear to see reflected in someone who had once—and still—loved her like a saint. Blind to her chaos, faithful through her sins, willing to forgive everything. Even what she couldn’t name.

And anything rather than admitting her addiction had burned through everything she once was—until nothing was left but smoke and the shape of what she once had.

It had started as a party trick. A little edge-taker. A backstage secret. A shortcut to invincibility. 

Then it became a way to slip into the version of herself that people adored—louder, cooler, untouchable. The version everyone lusted over, cheered for, posted about. The version the world wanted onstage every night, no matter what it cost her offstage. The version she thought she had to become just to be enough.

And now, it became a thing she couldn’t live without—slipped into her bloodstream, settled into her bones, made itself at home. It filled every corner of her, inch by inch, cell by cell, until there was no room left for anything or anyone else.

The hands that used to tear through solos with a precision that made her legendary now trembled uncontrollably—shaking from regret, from the weight of everything she did and couldn’t undo. Her once unforgettable voice, the same powerful roars that had sold out stadiums and started riots, crumbled into hoarse whispers and dry, broken coughing.

She didn’t sleep. Didn’t dream. Didn’t eat. Just drifted from one blackout to the next. Convinced herself it was the only thing she still knew how to do.

But when Joel stepped through the glass doors of the hotel, everything slowed.

Every single soul there knew who he was. And he wasn't what they expected. Not a bodyguard. Not a manager. Not some industry suit sent to clean up the mess. He didn’t wear a lanyard or carry a clipboard. He wasn’t holding coffee or flowers or excuses. He wore worn jeans, a weathered jacket, and a stare that could gut a man in silence.

The staff went quiet. The concierge froze mid-sentence. Someone from the Fireflies’ touring crew, a kid barely out of college, stood up too fast and knocked over a coffee cup. Even the elevator dinged like it was afraid to make too much noise.

Because he wasn’t just her father.

He was Joel Miller.

The legend. The one she never talked about. The man sewed into the fabric of the music industry and into every song she wrote, whether she knew it or not. The reason her fingers knew how to play guitar before she knew how to name the chords. 

The man who raised a storm and let the world believe it had come from nothing.

He walked through the lobby without looking at anyone until he spotted Jesse, standing halfway down the hallway. A walkie gripped tight in one hand, speaking into static—fast, clipped, the kind of voice reserved for damage control. But the moment he turned and saw him, he stopped mid-sentence. His whole body went still. The color drained from his face like someone had flipped a switch.

Jesse looked wrecked. His eyes were bloodshot, his jaw clenched so tight it looked painful. The exhaustion hung off him like he’d been carrying something for so long it was too heavy to set down.

Behind him, Dina stepped out from the room next to Ellie’s. Her hair was in a messy braid that hadn’t been redone in days. Her eyes were rimmed red, cheeks blotched. She looked exhausted too—pale and drawn and older than twenty-two should ever look. 

They froze when they saw Joel. Tried to pull themselves together. Straightened their backs. Lifted their chins.

But Joel saw all of it. Every crack in their armor. Every inch of what his daughter had left behind.

“Where is she?” 

No greeting. No explanation. Straight to the wreckage.

Jesse blinked. “You—wait, are you—how even—?”

“Where,” Joel repeated, slower now, voice rough but low, “is she?”

Dina stepped forward. She studied him for a moment, like she was trying to reconcile the legend in front of her with the silence Ellie wrapped around him like a bandage.

“She’s here,” she finally said. “Hasn’t left her room since the last show.”

Joel’s eyes darkened, but his mouth didn’t move.

“She hasn’t eaten. Barely spoken a word. We know she’s alive—we hear her pacing—but she won’t come out. We tried sending medics, tried knocking, pleading, threatening. Nothing works. She won’t open the door for anyone.”

Jesse glanced towards the suite at the end, and finally spoke too.

“It’s been a week. We thought—fuck, we don’t know what to do.”

A silence passed between them, thick with the weight of everything.

Then Joel looked down the hallway. Walked towards the door.

And knocked once.

Then again. Louder this time, but still steady. The kind of knock that didn’t come with threats or questions. The kind that simply said I’m here.

He stood with his hand still hovering, knuckles grazing the wood. Breathing quiet. Deep. Preparing himself.

Preparing himself to finally see with his own eyes everything he hadn’t been strong enough to acknowledge. Everything he’d kept at bay with stubbornness, with denial dressed up as distance. What the world had done. What the spotlight had done. What he had done—with his silence, with his absence, with every word unspoken. What all of it had carved into the girl who was his flesh and blood.

But behind the door: silence. No footsteps. No movement. No reply.

Just the kind of thick, unnatural stillness that only comes from the kind of room that hasn’t seen sunlight in days, were nothing is truly alive.

So he leaned his head in slightly. Lowered his unmistakable voice.

“…Ellie.”

A name he hadn’t let himself say out loud in years. Her name.

And from the other side of the door—a sound. The scrape of a heel against carpet. The faint drag of limbs too tired to move. The slight creak of bedsprings shifting under someone sitting up.

Another beat passed, longer than it should have, heavy enough to age him.

Then, the faint clack of a deadbolt turning.

The door cracked open fully and the hallway light poured through, slicing the shadows in half.

Ellie.

Or what was left of Ellie.

Joel didn’t move. Couldn’t.

It felt like the floor dropped out beneath him, like every bone in his body went hollow. If he hadn’t known her—the way you only know someone when you’ve built their childhood with your own hands—he wouldn’t have recognized the girl standing in front of him. 

Because the girl standing there wasn’t Ellie. She was the ghost of her. The remains. A flickering echo.

Her skin was the color of sickness. Pale in some places, blotched in others, faintly green where it wasn’t feverish pink. Her cheeks were hollowed out, sharp angles where softness used to live. The sharp, raw jut of bone beneath the skin made her look like a sketch of herself, hastily erased and redrawn in shaking lines. Her eyes were sunken, bruised with fatigue. The purple beneath them looked like it had been there for ages. 

Her lips were cracked, chewed raw—not just bitten, but torn, as if she’d been trying to silence herself from the inside out from pure self hatred. Her shirt was stained and damp around the collar. It clung to her frame in desperate patches, sagging everywhere else. 

She had lost so much weight it made Joel’s stomach drop even further. Her collarbones cut through her like knives. Her arms looked like they didn’t belong to her. Her tattoos, once bright declarations of defiance, had faded beneath grime and bruises. Some fresh. Some healing. All painful. 

But it was the look on her face that truly broke him.

Not pain. Not shame. Not surprise. Vacancy.

Her expression wasn’t empty. It was abandoned. Her irises, once so fiercely alive, had dulled to become cloudy and dim, like a storm had taken root behind them and never passed. Like the soul that had once lived behind those eyes had packed up and fled, leaving only a faint trace behind. 

The last time he saw her, she was still a teenager—hard edges wrapped in defiance, all spitfire and sharp laughter. Too much fire for one body, too much hunger in her bones. Reckless with hope. Starved to make the entire world hers.

Desperate to outrun the weight of the name before her and etch her own into history with nothing but a Les Paul, a voice full of thunder, and the loyalty of two high school best friends who followed her into that path like religion.

This wasn’t the daughter he’d raised. This wasn’t the stubborn, brilliant, furious and rebellious soul who had once held her heart out like a weapon and her music like a revolution. 

This was the ashes left after that blaze.

Joel couldn’t breathe. Could barely keep his knees under him.

Ellie’s lips parted. The sound that came out wasn’t speech. It was a dry, rasping exhale, like it hurt just to exist. She coughed—deep and wet and awful—and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The same hand that used to write songs like magic. The same hand that had held his with quiet, childlike trust.

Her eyes flickered over his face with disbelief—like he was just another trap her mind had set, another hallucination conjured by a body begging her to stop before it gave out entirely. 

"You're not real."

Her voice cracked as it came out, barely a thread of sound.

Joel stood frozen in the doorway. His hands didn’t move. His face didn’t change. But his heart split open in his chest, a soundless rupture he felt in his ribs and behind his eyes.

“I’m real. I’m right here.”

Ellie stared at him, blinking too fast, too hard, as if trying to reset her vision. To erase him. Then she took one staggering step back, as if his presence had struck her.

“What…” she croaked, eyes wide. “What is this?”

Her body started moving backwards, deeper into the room, like retreating might make him vanish. 

“They sent me,” Joel said softly.

“Who the fuck is they?”

He swallowed. The answer was already there, caught behind his teeth. He knew exactly who called. Who had begged him to go.

But he also knew he couldn’t say your name. Not now. Not like this.

“Didn’t ask for names,” he lied quietly. “Didn’t need to.”

She scanned the hallway behind him, frantic, sharp-eyed—like she expected flashbulbs to burst, a microphone to be shoved in her face, interviewers to question her. A trap. A punishment. Maybe even you.

She hadn’t slept in days. Reality had become slippery, warped at the edges. Paranoia threaded through every thought, tugging at the last shreds of her sanity. Her gaze skittered from shadow to shadow like something might leap out of them.

“You can’t be here,” she murmured. Her voice was sharper now, edged in fear. “You can’t just show up.”

“I’m not asking permission.” 

“So this is it?” she muttered. “Some fucked-up intervention? You think you can walk back in here after three fucking years and what—fix me?”

He didn't respond. He knew, deep down, that she was right. 

So he just watched her vanish into the dim corners of the suite, pacing like something caged for too long. Her hands dragged down her face. Her breath hitched. She didn’t cry. She had run out of tears long ago.

But the door remained open.

He stepped inside—slowly, carefully, crossing into a nightmare he knew he wasn’t welcomed in—and closed it shut behind him with a soft click.

The room was a graveyard. Everything looked tired of existing. A cave of rot and ruin, thick with the scent of everything that had decayed and nothing that had ever lived. No light dared to enter. The curtains, sealed with tape and stained with smoke, refused to let the world in. Day or night—it didn’t matter. Time had lost meaning. The only thing cutting through the gloom was the weak, flickering glow of a single bedside lamp. It cast a sickly yellow halo over the ruins, illuminating just enough to make it even worse.

The coffee table was buried beneath a chaotic sprawl of liquor bottles, half-empty and sweating glass. Prescription vials rolled into corners, labels smudged beyond reading. Rolled-up bills, limp and damp. A small pile of crushed cigarettes and half-melted lighters. Bent spoons blackened at their base. Scattered syringes. Fine dust of residue clinging to every surface.

The stench—alcohol, cigarettes, vomit, sweat, blood, melting plastic, something sour and sharp and sickeningly sweet—coated the air like paint.

Ellie’s voice came again, thinner this time.

“Why didn’t you just let me die?”

Joel turned slowly.

She was barely standing—shoulders slumped, arms hanging at her sides. Her head was tilted back against the wall, as if it was the only thing holding her up. Her eyes weren’t on him, they were fixed on a water stain spreading like rot across the ceiling.

She looked so small. So young. So far away.

He walked to her, slow but steady, like any sudden movement might shatter whatever fragile and divine force still held her upright. 

He didn’t tell her she was wrong. Didn’t tell her she was a disgrace or a failure or disgusting or a junkie.

He just stepped forward and pulled her into his arms.

And her body—rigid at first—slowly folded into his like paper softening in the rain. The soft weight of her breath stuttered against his chest. He felt his own heart breaking again between them.

It wasn’t the kind of hug you saw in movies. It wasn’t tidy or heroic. It wasn’t a triumphant moment. It was ruin, quiet and total. The kind of embrace that carries years of silence and every word left unsaid. The kind you only give to someone you thought you’d lost forever. 

Her arms didn’t lift, didn’t curl around him. They just hung there, slack at her sides. But she didn’t pull away either. And God, that was enough. That was all he needed to stay right there, holding her like the only thing anchoring them both to the world was the space they were occupying together.

Joel could feel the bones of her back through the thin cotton of her shirt—sharp, wrong, exposed. Her heartbeat thudded against his chest, frantic and fragile, an uneven rhythm struggling to hold itself together. It didn’t feel alive. It felt mechanical—like a rusted engine. 

But it was still beating. And in that moment, it meant everything.

“I didn’t ask you to come,” Ellie murmured into his shoulder, voice muffled, brittle as dry leaves. “I didn’t want this.”

“I know,” Joel said quietly.

“I’m not going back.”

“You’re not staying here.”

“I don’t need you.”

“You need something,” he said. “And I’m here now.”

“But why now?” she whispered, so quietly it nearly vanished.

“They said you were disappearing,” his voice was thick, low, heavy with something he hadn’t let himself feel in years. “Said if someone didn’t come find you soon… there might not be anything left to find.”

“You’re late.” 

Joel tightened his arms around her. “Still here,” he said. A vow in two words.

Her palms lifted—slow, uncertain—and pressed flat against his chest. Not quite pushing. Not quite holding. Just there, as if trying to decide what he was. Real or not. Ghost or grave.

And then, without warning—she shoved him.

Joel took a step back. Not from the force, but from the feeling. Her palms left a ghostprint on his chest. He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t reach for her again. He just looked at her as if seeing everything clearly for the first time.

Ellie’s shoulders were heaving now. Her eyes were glassy, stretched too wide, too alert, the way animals look right before they bolt.

“Go!” she rasped. “Fucking go. I don’t want this. I don’t need this. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t—I didn’t ask for you to come!”

“I don’t care,” he said, “You’re coming with me.”

“To what?” she spat. Her voice pitched higher, sharp and spiraling. “Some padded room full of people with name tags who hand me coloring books? Spare me, Joel.”

He flinched. Barely, but there.

Joel. Not Dad. Not even old man. Just a hard, flat syllable thrown like a stone between them. A line in the sand.

He nodded once. Took it in like a bullet.

“You’re going to rehab. Whether you want it or not.”

“No!” The word came fast. Violent. Like it had been living in her throat, waiting to escape. “No. No, no, no—you don’t get to do this! You don’t get to show up after three fucking years and act like you can drag me off somewhere. I’m not twelve anymore!”

“No,” he said. “You’re not.”

He took a step forward. 

“But you’re not anything right now. You’re not living. You’re surviving in a place that’s rotting you and calling it freedom.”

Her jaw clenched. Her body was shaking, not just with rage, but with something underneath it. Sickness.

“Fuck you!” Her voice cracked again. “You don’t know me. Not anymore!”

“You’re right,” he never once raised his voice. “I don’t. But I remember the girl who would’ve ripped the sky open just to feel something. I remember the kid who made music like it was oxygen. I remember the look on your face when you loved something truly.”

“Well, she’s fucking dead.” 

“Then let me help bring her back.”

She exhaled, too fast, like air hurt her lungs. 

“I didn’t want to be saved,” she choked. “I still don’t. You should’ve let me fucking die!”

“I couldn’t, Ellie.”

“Then why now?” she asked, her voice barely audible. “Why not when it still mattered? Why not when I still wanted to live?”

“Because I couldn’t live with myself if I stayed away again. Not this time."

The silence stretched. And then, softer, almost afraid: 

“I know you’re not gonna heal overnight. I know this isn’t gonna fix anything. But I also know what happens if you stay here. And I can’t let that happen. Please, Ellie. I'm begging you.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then I’ll stay. I’ll stay in this shithole suite and I’ll sit on that goddamn carpet and wait until you’re ready. But I’m not leaving without you.”

She stood there, silent. Frozen in place.

“Please,” 

His voice broke on the word. His eyes were glassy and wet. She had never seen him like that. Not Joel. Not the man who never bent.

Something cracked then. Not a sob. Not a word. Just a sound, low and raw, torn from somewhere deep in her chest. A breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. A surrender she didn’t mean to give.

And then, she moved.

Not towards him—but towards the corner. Towards the suitcase half-zipped and slumped against the wall, still full of clothes that smelled like sweat and cigarettes and days she couldn’t remember.

Because she knew Joel.

There were no more speeches left. No more mercy dressed up as choice. He hadn’t come to bargain. He hadn’t come to reason. He had come to claim what the world hadn’t yet finished killing. He had come to take her.

And she could feel it—time unraveling, slipping like sand between her fingers. Breath stretched too long beneath the surface. A match burning down to the quick. The edge of the edge. The final flicker before everything turned black.

Time had run out.

She crouched. Her hands shook as she zipped the suitcase closed. The sound was louder than it should’ve been, like a coffin lid snapping shut.

She picked up a hoodie from the chair. Oversized. Gray. A gift from Jesse. Two birthdays ago, back when birthdays still meant something. She tried to zip it up. The zipper jammed halfway. Her hands trembled too badly to fix it, so she gave up and let it hang open like a wound.

She pulled the hood up. Then down. Up again. Her fingers twitched at the edge of it. She didn't know if it was better to hide or be seen. Neither felt safe.

Joel didn’t say another word.

He just stepped forward. Picked up the suitcase and her guitar case. And without looking back, he opened the door and stepped into the hallway.

And Ellie followed. Not because she wanted to. Not because she was ready. But because she understood there were no other exits.

She either stepped through that door—or died. Simple as that. Final as that.

Jesse and Dina were already there. Waiting. Trying not to look like they’d been standing right outside the whole time. But Ellie saw the way Dina's face was blotchy, and how Jesse's hands were clenched too tight. A kind of expression you can only get from listening to that conversation.

Joel gave them a nod. Something between a farewell and a thank you. Then walked down the hall and without looking back.

And suddenly, they were alone.

No instruments. No cameras. No crowd roaring.

Just three kids in the hallway of a hotel that had seen too much—their silence louder than fate and the stadiums they used to fill. The kind of silence that doesn’t come from peace, but from aftermath. 

Three teenagers who once built a dream so big it swallowed countries. Who bled into microphones and howled into smoke machines. Who dropped school and poured their youth into amplifiers and rode adrenaline like it was enough to outrun consequence. They had stood shoulder to shoulder beneath lights so blinding, they mistook the heat for forever. Mistook the noise for safety. Mistook each other for unbreakable.

And for a while, they had it all in the palm of their hands. The fame. The critics. The awards. The fans. The world.

But then came the cracks —late arrivals, quiet fights, bruises hidden by sunglasses and lies. Then came the screaming matches. The missed rehearsals. The broken things. The insults. The lies. 

And now here they were. Not The Fireflies. Not legends. Just kids standing in a hallway, breaking beneath the weight of everything they lost. The tour was over. The music had stopped.

And the dream—that impossible, holy, feral dream—had burned to ashes.

Ellie could barely look at them. Could barely breathe through the guilt.

She was the one who lit the match. The one who crumbled first. And in crumbling, she had taken it all down with her.

And still, they stood with her. Not because they weren’t angry. Not because they didn’t hurt.

Because even when the dream died, something in them didn’t.

Jesse broke first.

His breath hitched, and in the next second he was moving, crossing the space between them in three long strides before Ellie had the chance to run away. He pulled her in, hard, arms locking around her like he was afraid she might shatter through his fingers if he hesitated longer. 

She stiffened at first—out of habit, out of shame, out of the muscle memory that told her she didn’t deserve forgiveness—but then her body gave in.

Dina followed without a word, her arms wrapping around them both, closing the circle, anchoring them together like she could hold what was left of the band in her embrace. 

“I’m sorry…” Ellie said, “God, I’m so fucking sorry. For everything, for every single thing I did to both of you. I…I wanted this to work. I did. With everything I had. I wanted to be better for you.”

Dina shook her head as tears spilled freely down her face. “We know,” she choked. “We know, Ellie.”

Jesse was crying too now, barely holding himself together. He pressed his face into Ellie’s shoulder and wept for the version of her that was gone—for that best friend who had vanished long before she ever left.

“We tried,” he said. “We tried so fucking hard, El. But you kept shutting the door. We didn’t know how to reach you anymore. We didn’t know how to help you. And we are so, so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said. Her throat burned like she’d swallowed a thousand unsaid things. “It’s not your fault I couldn’t find my way back… I did this to myself.”

“I’m gonna try,” she continued. “But I don’t know who I’ll be after this. I don’t even know if I'm still worth saving. But I’ll try. I’ll try to come back.”

Dina sobbed into her other shoulder, loud and broken. “You better,” she said. “You better come back. I swear to God, Williams, if you don’t come back—”

“I will,” Ellie said. Her voice cracked so badly the words nearly fell apart. “I don’t know when. I don’t know how. But I will.”

She pulled back enough to meet both of their eyes.

“But if I can’t reach you… if it takes longer than it should… just keep going. Please. Move on. Do what you have to do. Don’t wait for me.”

Jesse wiped his face with the back of his sleeve. “We built something together, El. Something that was ours. And maybe it fell apart, but it was the best fucking dream I ever lived.”

“Me too,” Ellie whispered. “It was the happiest I’ve ever been. We really made it. And I was never alone until I made myself alone.”

Dina cupped her face gently, and her breath hitched the moment her hands touched her skin. Her thumbs tried to wipe her tears but froze mid-motion, eyes scanning every angle like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing—what was left.

“Oh, El…” she whispered, barely audible, like saying it louder might make it worse. She then swallowed, trying to keep herself together, “It was a dream. But now we woke up. You go get better, you go find your way. And when you’re ready to come back… we’ll still be here.”

Ellie nodded, once. Then again. Her whole body trembling. Her fingers clutched the hem of her sleeve like she was trying to hold onto something, anything, that still belonged to her.

She took a breath that sliced her open on the way down. 

“I love you both.”

“We love you more.”

And that was the end of it.

She turned. Walked down the hallway. Too long, too quiet.

And didn’t look back.

They didn’t talk on the jet.

Joel sat across from her, arms crossed, jaw set tight. He didn’t stare. Didn’t sigh. He let the silence hold. Let her sit in whatever she needed to sit in.

They didn’t talk in the truck, either.

The driveway was long. Joel drove with both hands on the wheel, steady and silent. The only sounds were the low growl of the engine and the faint hum of classic rock murmuring from the speakers—some band from the '70s Joel probably used to get drunk with in some Texas bar.

Outside, the world blurred by. Rain dragged its fingers across the windshield in thin, trembling lines. The sky was the color of steel wool, heavy and low, like it might collapse under its own weight. Trees passed in smears—tall, dark, skeletal things that looked more like memories than landmarks, clawing their way out of the earth and stretching towards a sky that wouldn’t bend.

Ellie didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Didn’t think.

She just watched the road disappear beneath them, mile after mile, like maybe if she looked hard enough, she’d disappear somewhere in the rearview.

When they pulled up to the gates, Joel rolled down the window. Told them her name. Told them she was here for long-term. He didn’t need to say a last name to make the gates open.

Rehab didn’t look like what Ellie expected. It wasn’t padded walls and flickering fluorescents. It wasn’t people screaming into the void or nurses in white coats pushing pills like candy. But then, she wasn’t even sure if that’s what she expected.

All she really knew was the feeling—that hollow, leaden silence that settles in your bones when you’ve run out of fight. The numb acceptance that came when you had nothing left to bargain with. 

When all the bridges were already ash. When even feeling became too much weight to carry. The moment you stop running. Stop asking. Stop pretending that you know what comes next. It was letting them take you by the arm and lead you wherever they thought you belonged—because you didn’t believe you belonged anywhere anymore.

The place was quiet. Almost unnaturally so. Rich, suffocating silence wrapped in beige walls and throw blankets that smelled like lavender and wood polish. The walls were cream and soft brown. Plants lined the windowsills. The kind of place designed to make broken people feel like they were healing simply by being somewhere expensive. Like grief could be curated. Like pain could be dimmed with scented candles and soft jazz.

She could feel the recognition hit the staff before they even got inside.

The receptionist looked up, froze, and blinked too many times. She didn’t say a word. Just stood. Just nodded. Just ushered them forward like they were checking into a hotel that only accepted the severely wounded.

Joel did the talking. Ellie kept her head down. She let them take her phone. Her lighter. Her blades. Her pens. Her pills. Her past.

Then it was time. They were taking her upstairs. One of the counselors stood to the side, smiling with polite detachment, ready to walk her to her new room.

Joel didn’t say anything at first. Just stood there. Looking at her like he was memorizing the shape of her shoulders. The way her hair tucked behind her ears. The way her green eyes were so hollow they couldn't even reflect the soft light. 

And then he stepped forward. Reached for her shoulders, and pulled her in.

At first, she resisted—only in that way where her body had forgotten what it meant to be held. But then, slowly, she leaned in. Folded into him. And then, just above her ear:

“You be strong, kiddo.”

Ellie didn’t respond. Her lower lip trembled.

Joel pulled back. Just enough to look at her. There was one single tear tracking down his cheek. He wiped it before she could see, but she’d already seen.

“You’re gonna be okay,” he said. “This place—it’s real help. Not noise. Not punishment. Help. Let it help you.”

Ellie nodded, just once. It was all she could do.

“Try, that’s all I’m asking.” He touched the side of her face, warm and rough. “I love you, Ellie.”

She nodded again. A little firmer.

And then he let her go.

Three months.

She spent the first five days in bed.

Not resting. Not healing. Barely surviving.

Her body had become a war zone—bone against nerve, memory against muscle, pain crashing through her like a wave with no shore. 

She didn’t eat. Couldn’t. Every attempt to swallow felt like dragging glass down her throat—jagged, raw, unforgiving. Her stomach rejected everything. Her body, so used to poison, couldn’t recognize nourishment without recoiling. She vomited every bite. In the sink, in the trash, in towels. It came up bile-yellow, bitter and acidic, her throat left scorched and trembling after every gag.

She didn’t shower. Couldn’t stand the pressure of the water or the sound of it against the tiles. Couldn’t bear the sight of her own body in the mirror—shrinking, hollowing out, unfamiliar. The frame of a stranger she no longer recognized.

The nurses tried. Gentle voices, gentle hands. They moved like white ghosts through the room, soft-footed and full of mercy. They brought small trays with bland food she never touched. Offered medication—anti-nausea pills, muscle relaxants, sleep aids, things that might take the edge off the screaming inside her skin.

She acted like she did. But she never swallowed them.

You don’t deserve relief. This is the price. This is what you earned. This is what you get.

That was what her brain told her. That was the drumbeat in her ears. 

The few things she couldn't refuse to came through needles. IVs slid into the bend of her arm, saline dripping slow, cold, quiet. A half-measure of mercy.

But nothing touched it. The pain didn’t dull—it roared.

Every cell in her body screamed for the god she once worshiped—in backstage stalls, hotel bathtubs, and the hands of plugs who never asked questions, only offered more.

Coke, heroin, pills—they had rewritten her wiring, turned her nerves into a radio tuned to the wrong frequency. Without them, she was a body on fire with nothing left to burn.

The drugs had silenced her grief. Had numbed her fear. Had made her feel like she could float above the noise. That she was above everything living and not living. But now that they were gone, it was all crashing in. The noise was inside her now. Under her skin. Screaming through her bloodstream. Now she was beneath it all. 

She shook like something feral. Burned with fever. Her skin felt like it was blistering from the inside. Her bones felt too big for her body. Her mouth bled from clenching her jaw too tight.

She sweated through her sheets twice a night. They stuck to her back like it was her real skin. She stared at the ceiling for hours, the whites of her eyes stinging. The whole world slipped sideways. The corners of the room stretched and curved. The shadows grew bigger and darker, swallowed her and spitted her out. 

She sat for hours on the cool tile of the bathroom floor, arms around her middle, forehead pressed to her knees, rocking back and forth. Wondering if maybe she could choke on her own breath. Wondering if maybe that would be enough to make it stop.

And the nightmares didn’t come in dreams.

They came when she blinked. 

A hand she couldn’t see at her throat. Faces at the edge of her bed. The crowd, always the crowd, roaring with empty mouths and red eyes, thousands of phones raised, all pointed at her, all flashing, all recording, all screaming her name over and over again.

Jesse. Yelling behind her. His voice cracked and distant. Dina. Standing in the corner. Her mouth moving but the only sound Ellie could hear was liar. Liar. Liar. Liar. Liar.

Joel. Sometimes he stood in the other corner, silent and blurry, holding her guitar like a corpse. Sometimes he was on his knees on the side of the bed, younger and smaller than she remembered, whispering, I did everything I could, over and over again until he turned to ash.

But there was something worse—something that came after sleep, but before waking. That trembling, liminal state where the line between memory and madness blurs. The room around her was real—she could still smell the antiseptic, still feel the scratch of the rehab sheets against her clammy skin—but you stood at the foot of the bed like a phantom carved from guilt and need. Like her mind had conjured you out of the very air she was choking on.

You were lit from behind by a spotlight that didn’t exist, too bright to come from any lamp. It seared her vision, turned your edges soft and glowing, like you were holy. Your chest heaved. You were crying—openly, messily, the kind of crying that had no dignity left in it.

She blinked. You didn’t vanish. You were still there. Still weeping. Still looking right at her.

You are a fucking liar. You promised. I believed you.

She tried to move. Tried to sit up. But her limbs were heavy, pinned to the bed like they’d been nailed in place. Her breath turned jagged. The light behind you pulsed, then flickered, like a dying star.

You said you wouldn’t disappear on me.

The floor stretched. The bed tilted. The room distorted into angles that didn’t make sense. You were getting further away—not by walking, not by moving—but by some cruel force in her own head warping space and time and regret.

You told me you were going to fight. For you. For me. For this. For us.

Your voice cracked on the last word. It sounded like the green room. Like the final night. Like goodbye.

She whimpered. Just once. Just enough. Then reached toward you with a hand that didn’t move.

And then you disappeared into smoke. To light. To silence. 

And Ellie, drenched in sweat and trembling like a leaf caught in a storm, curled into herself and wept like she had that night—quiet, slow, full of the kind of pain that doesn't want to be heard. 

She bit the pillow until the fabric tore. Scratched her own arms until they bled. Her biceps were covered in raw, red claw marks for weeks. She didn’t remember making them. But the blood under her nails said otherwise.

Withdrawal wasn’t linear.

It was war. No other word for it.

Every nerve begged for a hit. Just one. Just something to dull the noise. Just a second of silence.

But there was no silence.

Only guilt. Only the knowledge that this was her fault. 

She convinced herself she deserved it. All of it. Every second. Every scream. Every sting. Every shard of herself breaking off, one by one.

That she had done this. To herself. To you. To Jesse. To Dina. To Joel. To her music. To her career. To the people who believed in her. To the girl she used to be.

She didn’t pray. Didn’t believe in redemption. 

She believed in nothing at all.

Day eight. 

Group therapy. She didn’t want to go. Said she wouldn’t. Said it over and over. Two staff members came anyway. Sat on the edge of her bed.

One of them—a woman named Hope, which felt like the universe was spitting in her face once again—talked in a voice so soft it made Ellie want to scream at her to shut the fuck up. She spoke to her like she was a toddler. For so long that Ellie finally stood, not out of agreement, but because that irritating ass tone was drilling holes in her skull. Her legs buckled the second she put weight on them. She nearly went down in the hallway. 

They whispered when she walked in. They knew who she was. Of course they did. 

She kept her hoodie up. Eyes down. Didn’t speak.

But a man across from her did.

Buzzcut. Sixty, maybe. Skin like creased paper and hands that shook even when they weren’t moving. His voice didn’t tremble from nerves. It trembled from memory. He didn’t sit tall in his chair. He sank into it like the story was too heavy to carry and the act of telling it required surrender.

"She was the love of my life," he said. "God, she was everything. Beautiful. Funny. Loud. Too smart for me. And I loved her more than anything I ever held in my hands."

"But I couldn’t stop. Not for her. Not even when our lights got shut off. Not even when I sold her record collection for a hit. Not even when our kid asked why mommy cried at night." He pressed a trembling palm to his chest. "I wanted to stop. I swore I’d stop. I meant it, every time. But meaning something isn’t the same as doing it."

A long breath. A broken one.

"She left me the morning I sold her wedding ring. Didn’t yell. Didn’t cry. Just packed a bag and told me she loved me, but she couldn’t die beside me." His voice cracked. "I hated her for that. I hated her for a long time. But now that I'm clean I realize… she saved me. By walking away. She saved my life."

He looked up, eyes glassy and faraway.

"She never came back. But she saved me anyway."

Ellie didn’t cry. But her jaw locked so tight it sounded like bone on bone. Her throat swelled. She gripped the edge of the chair like it was the only thing holding her to the earth.

That night, she didn’t sleep.

Her mind spun a film reel of every second she ever spent with you—backwards, forward, in slow motion, in loop. Your voice in her ears. Your laugh in her neck. Your tears in that green room. The last I love you you said to her. And somewhere, under it all, the question she couldn’t silence:

What would I have done if she had left me first?

Day twenty.

She still couldn’t cry in front of anyone else. Mostly, she sat in therapy and stared at the floor. Gave short answers. Shrugged a lot. Refused to talk about fame. Refused to talk about the band. Refused to talk about music. That one felt like a bone still broken beneath the skin. Refused to talk about you. Especially you.

But they let her smoke.

In designated areas, away from the main building, near a cluster of thin trees that always looked half-dead. She went there every morning before breakfast. Eyes red. Hands still a little shaky. She’d stand on the cold patio and stare at the fog that drifted low between the trees, like the earth was still deciding whether to exhale.

That was where she met Thomas.

He was already there when she arrived that day. Leaning against the railing. A cigarette between his lips. Thin but sturdy. Soft-spoken. Big eyes. Twenty-five.

"I know who you are,” he said. Quiet. Almost an apology. “I’m a fan."

Ellie didn’t answer. Didn’t even look at him. She was one second from walking away.

"But I also know what you’re feeling," he added. "So... I won’t ask for a selfie."

She snorted. Just once. A dry, surprised sound. It startled her.

The next day, he was there again.

They shared silence like it was holy. A language neither of them had to translate. They talked, eventually—not about anything real. About sci-fi. The new Dune movie. Favorite comics. A band she loved before she ever picked up a guitar. They argued about Batman. Laughed, sometimes, in short bursts that felt foreign to her mouth.

He never asked about her music or the band. Never asked about what happened. Never asked who she had written all those songs about.

He just smoked with her. Talked to her. Breathed beside her.

And something shifted. Not all at once, but slowly. Like light seeping in beneath a door.

Her appetite didn’t come back overnight, but she started eating half her tray instead of none. She started taking her meds. Let the nurse check her vitals without flinching. She showered every other day. Then every day. Let the water hit her neck. Let the steam open something tight in her chest.

She slept, sometimes. Still haunted, still twitching, but not as violently. Not as often.

And she wrote. God, she wrote.

They’d given her journals. Cream-colored covers and blank inside. She filled at night the same they handed her in the morning. Her handwriting looked like someone fighting their own hand. Crooked lines. Crossed-out verses. Scribbled lyrics. Poems that not even herself dared to read out loud. Pages torn, then taped back in. Fragments of thought. Lines that didn’t rhyme. 

Doodles of your hands. The shape of your mouth. Your smile. The soft space between your brows. The way your hands looked when they curled on a mic.

One day, she tried to draw your eyes from memory and couldn’t get it right. Couldn’t remember the exact curve, the shape of them, their glint. She sat on her bed for an hour staring at the half-finished sketch, then ripped the page out and tore it to pieces. 

But she wrote more after that.

Wrote letters she’d never send. Wrote songs she couldn’t sing yet. Wrote apologies that were too late and memories that hurt too much.

One afternoon, with trembling fingers and graphite-stained sleeves, she sketched the soft curve of your back from memory—every line tentative, reverent. Her hand slowed as it reached your shoulder. She drew the tiny mole there, exactly where it had always been. A landmark on a map she could still trace with her eyes closed.

And in the bottom corner of the page, almost too small to notice, she wrote:

A kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder.

Day forty.

In private therapy, the counselor asked: "What do you think your addiction was hiding?"

And something inside her finally caved.

"I don’t know. I think… that the crowd got bigger than the music. That I had to be brilliant even when I was empty. That no one noticed the difference between real and performance. Not even me."

And once she started, she couldn’t stop. She talked for hours.

About the band. About the noise. About the interviews and the eyes and the pressure to be a genius all the time. About the fear of being ordinary, of not being enough, of not even being a fraction of what Joel was—of what he built, of what he carried, of what he sacrificed. About how the drugs made her louder, bolder, brighter, filling a hole she didn’t know existed.

“It wasn’t about getting high,” she admitted. “It was about being who they needed me to be. And then about forgetting who I really was. And then… about surviving not being anything at all.”

She swallowed air like it might steady her.

"I thought they made me more. But really they just made me disappear."

The therapist didn’t speak. Just let her keep going.

"And I lost everything. The band. The sound. The one I loved the most. My fucking voice. I lost me." Her voice cracked. But she didn’t cry. "And I know I did it to myself. That’s the worst part."

That night, she touched the guitar.

Didn’t play it. Just held it.

She sat on the floor of her room with the lights off, cradling the body of it against her ribs like it was something living. She didn’t strum. Didn’t sing.

She just breathed.

And while Ellie fought her way back from the edge, Joel took the rest into his own hands.

Jesse and Dina left quietly a few days after Ellie checked into rehab. No press release. No airport sighting. Just quiet nods and long hugs. They were young, and they were tired, and they had families back home who’d been waiting—worried—since the night the final Fireflies show imploded into nothing. They boarded separate flights with sunglasses on and hearts shattered, stepping away from the spotlight and going back to their roots to mourn what they'd built together.

There was nothing more they could do.

The announcement of the Fireflies' indefinite hiatus hit the world like a meteor. It wasn’t just music news. It wasn’t just another headline. It was cultural collapse.

The biggest band of a generation, the revival of rock, the ones who had made stages burn again—gone. Not a break. Not a rest. A disappearance. One statement, stripped of detail, cold and final.

The entire planet had never seen anything like it. Cities paused. Billboards went dark. Fans lit candles outside arenas that would never hear them play. People cried on livestreams. Talk shows froze mid-sentence. 

And Joel made the kind of calls people don't forget. Not the kind you scroll for in your phone. The kind stored in memory, in blood. The kind reserved for debts owed from decades ago. For favors etched into silence. For names you only speak once.

He didn’t care about the cost. Within weeks, he moved more money than most people saw in ten lifetimes. But the result was total.

The headlines stopped. The paparazzi photos vanished. The rumors about the cause of The Fireflies’ disappearance shriveled into dust. Blogs were erased. Video uploads failed mid-buffer. Search results redirected to blank pages. Social media accounts were flagged, suspended, dismantled. Journalists were warned. Managers were paid off. Former assistants silenced. Every whisper turned into static. Whatever he couldn’t bury with money, he buried with power.

And you—on the other hand—got buried with it too.

The world didn’t go quiet for you. It got sharper. Meaner. Colder. Crueler. They turned on you like wolves. Blamed you. Made you the cautionary tale. As if loving her too loudly had lit the match. As if the fire was your fault.

And Joel didn’t think about that. Didn’t think about the tour you cancelled. The silence that wrapped around your penthouse like a second skin. He didn’t see the weight of being the only one left behind—visible, bleeding, blamed.

But we already saw that part of the story.

The girl left behind. The silence, the spotlight, the ruin. The way she took her own broken heart, stitched it back together with shaking hands, and conquered the world all over again—crowned not in gold, but in scar tissue. A phoenix with no flame left to borrow, so she built her own fire.

Now it’s time for the other side.

The girl who vanished. The wreckage she dragged behind her like a second skin. The addiction that gutted her slowly, quietly, while the world kept spinning. The spiral no camera caught, the withdrawal no headline wrote. The one who left, but never stopped loving. The one who got away.

Joel wasn’t looking for justice. He was looking for her. And so, he burned the world to the ground to shield what was left of his daughter—never once turning to see what the smoke did to you.

And then he packed up everything she owned. Her clothes. Her guitars. Her amps. Her notebooks. A copy of every Fireflies album, still shrink-wrapped.

And then he left, too.

He went back to Jackson. Back to the outskirts of the only place that had ever felt like his hands could rest. And there, at the edge of the woods where the air tasted like pine and the birds still sang in the morning, he found a cabin. Small. Weathered. No TV. No Wi-Fi. Not even signal. Nothing like the world Ellie had been eaten alive by.

He bought it in cash. Tore down half the walls. Brought in contractors who didn’t ask questions. Insulated the attic. Reinforced the windows. Built a fireplace from scratch. Laid new floors himself, every board smoothed with his own calloused hands. Planted rosemary outside the front door because she liked the smell when she was a kid. Painted the walls soft, lived-in colors—muted greens and warm browns and the kind of blue the sky only makes after the storm passes.

And built her a studio.

Not the kind she used to record hits in. No glass wall separating her from a producer. No overpriced espresso machines or assistants on call. No executives pacing with Bluetooth headsets. No stylists fixing her collar between takes. 

Just a room. Perfect soundproofing. A mixing board that hummed like it had a soul. Three guitars mounted on the wall—one of them chipped from a stage dive in Berlin. A bass. A drum kit with fingerprints still on the cymbals.

A place she could make music in. If she ever wanted to again.

He stocked the shelves with vinyls. Filled the kitchen with real food. Bought a fireplace grate shaped like a wolf. Found a lamp shaped like a crescent moon. A home, not a hotel. Quiet, but not empty. A place you could come back to and not feel like you’d failed the world.

He didn’t call it a new beginning. He called it waiting. Because he knew what Ellie needed wasn’t a rescue.

She needed a place to land.

Day ninety.

The last day.

She woke before sunrise, not from a nightmare, not from withdrawal, not from the weight of everything she had lost—but from something quieter. A strange stillness in her chest. Like her body had finally stopped bracing for impact.

She stood at the window for a long time, then reached up and opened the blinds without thinking. The sky was soft with early blue, mist rising like smoke. 

And for the first time since arriving, the light touched her skin and didn’t flinch.

She showered. Ate a full breakfast. Took her medication. Laughed at a joke Thomas made over oatmeal, something stupid about a dinosaur president and a war for Mars. She told him he was an idiot. He said she was the meanest person he’d ever called his friend. She called him a loser. They high-fived.

She walked the long hallway to group therapy and sat in her usual seat, but this time, she didn’t fold into herself. She didn’t stare at the floor. She looked up. And when they asked if she wanted to share something on her last day, she said yes. And her voice didn’t shake.

She told them what it felt like to lose everything. Her band. Her friends Her music. Her persona. Herself. About the stage that felt like home until it didn’t. About craving the applause and hating the attention and then hating and craving all of it at the same time. About the slow death of becoming everything people wanted and nothing she could survive being.

She told them about her experience with addiction. Not as a spiral, but as a silence. A quiet gnawing. A disappearing. She said it felt like becoming a ghost with good lighting. Said it felt like sleepwalking into your own funeral.

She then told them about the girl with the voice like velvet—the one she loved more than anyone, and losing her hurt worse than anything. She spoke about what it meant to break something that had once felt unbreakable. 

How it felt to love someone while the world was trying to swallow them both. How they had stood side by side, each unraveling in their own way, watching the other fade like breath on a mirror.

She talked about how your first love being your greatest loss wasn’t just something that happened to her—it happened to both. What it meant to be taught how to love by the very person she had to unlearn. How letting go of her wasn’t a decision, but a mercy. 

She didn’t say a name. She didn’t have to.

The shape of her sorrow carved it into the silence. And everyone in the room knew exactly who she was talking about.

The glitter-drenched popstar. The girl in the front row of every headline, every stage, every magazine. The other half of the spectacle. The one they photographed beside her, draped in designer dresses and smiles, always camera-ready, always polished, always posed, always perfect.

They’d seen you everywhere—billboards, red carpets, award shows, airport lobbies. But they never really looked. Never stopped to wonder if those smiles held. If your fingers trembled under the table. If your voices cracked when the microphones were off. 

If the two girls who lit up the industry like a supernova had ever been allowed to just love each other without the world clawing at their edges. The worst part was that, in the end, it got what it came for. It tore them apart. 

When Ellie cried, she didn’t hide it. And when she looked up, everyone else was crying too.

She then packed in silence. Folded her clothes slowly. Asked to keep all the journals, even the ones filled with illegible scribbles and coffee stains and blacked-out pages. Especially those.

The guitar Joel brought still leaned in the corner. Still never strummed. She didn’t mind. Not yet. Not today. It would still be there tomorrow.

She wasn’t whole.

There were still wounds inside her that hadn’t fully healed. Ghosts that would ride with her wherever she went. She knew the moment she stepped out of those gates, the world would be waiting. Joel would be waiting. And whatever came next was still terrifying.

But for the first time in years, Ellie didn’t want to disappear.

And for now, that was enough.

The sky was gray when she stepped through the front doors of the facility. Not stormy. Not bright. Just muted, like the weather had softened itself in reverence for this exact moment. Her face was fuller. Her steps were sure. Her hands didn't tremble.

Joel was leaning against the hood of his truck.

He hadn’t changed. Same flannel, same boots, same belt buckle weathered from decades of grit. But he looked older. Or maybe just more human. There were new lines around his mouth, his eyes. A kind of soft tension in his shoulders that wasn’t there before. A quiet sorrow that never said its name.

Their eyes met.

And then Joel opened his arms.

It was slow. Gentle. He didn’t step forward, didn’t call her closer. Just waited.

And Ellie—God, Ellie walked into them like they were the only thing left on earth. Her face buried into his shoulder. Her arms wrapped around him with more desperation than grace. A breath caught between her ribs and stayed there.

He held her back like he hadn’t let himself hope for this moment. Like it broke something inside him to finally touch her again.

One tear slipped down his face. He didn’t wipe it this time.

"You did it," he murmured. "You're here."

Ellie said nothing. But she didn’t pull away.

"We’ll go slow," Joel said softly. "Whatever you need. Whatever it takes. Just take the next breath, alright?"

Ellie didn’t ask where they were going. She didn’t need to. She knew he’d pick a place. Somewhere off the grid. Somewhere no one would find her unless she was the one that wanted to be found. The kind of quiet only Joel Miller could make safe.

They pulled up to the cabin just before dusk.

It wasn’t big. Not modern. No white marble countertops or cold glass walls. Just a low-roofed wooden house with ivy crawling along the porch and a chimney puffing soft smoke like it had been waiting for her all this time.

She walked inside.

It smelled like rosemary. The floors creaked. A fireplace cracked low in the corner. Vinyls lined a shelf in the living room. An owl mug sat clean beside the sink. A blanket was folded on the couch.

And in the back corner—a room made of music. Soundproof panels. A mixing board. Three guitars on the wall. Her old amp. A drum kit. 

She didn’t go to it, but she almost cried when she saw it.

She set her suitcase down in the bedroom. Looked at the bed. Sat on the edge of it like it might vanish beneath her. Like this was all too peaceful, too good to be true.

"You can stay as long as you want," Joel said. "And if you want to go—you say the word. No questions. No fight."

"You don’t owe me anything," he added. "Not one damn thing. But I’m so proud of you. I hope you know that, kiddo."

Ellie looked at him then. Her eyes rimmed red, but dry.

"Thanks for not giving up on me."

"Couldn’t. You’re my daughter."

She looked away, biting the inside of her cheek.

That night, she slept. Really slept. Her body surrendered without a fight—no twitching limbs, no cold sweats, no ghosts dragging her down into dreams she couldn’t escape. Just sleep. Heavy and whole.

And when the morning came, soft and slow, when sunlight spilled like honey through the cracked window, when a birdsong threaded its way through pine needles tapping gently at the glass—Ellie breathed.

Not a gasp. Not a fight. Just a breath. Steady.

Alive.

Twelve months bled into one another like watercolors—soft, pale, undemanding. In the quiet corner of a three-covered stretch outside Jackson, the house Joel had bought felt more like a memory than a place. There were no city lights. No interviews. No sold-out shows. Just the creak of old wood under her feet and the scent of firewood lingering on everything they owned.

Ellie woke with the sun. Not to vomit or sweat or claw at invisible ghosts. She simply… woke. She’d blink at the ceiling and listen to the silence for a while. Let it wrap around her like a second blanket. 

Most mornings, Joel would already be up. Coffee brewed. A single mug left steaming on the counter with her name scrawled in permanent marker across the ceramic. They sat together on the porch and watched deers move through the trees. 

They didn’t talk much. But it wasn’t awkward. It was restful. The kind of silence that never demanded to be filled.

She wrote and drew in the mornings. Scribbles and stream-of-consciousness poetry. Things she remembered. Things she didn’t want to forget. The exact placement of Dina’s freckles. The curve of Jesse’s laugh. The way your voice sounded in the morning and how your legs looked when crossed. What her own name looked like when she wrote it in red ink.

Afternoons were for painting. Joel cleared out the back shed and gave her the whole thing. She painted on cardboard, on loose wood, on the back of half-rotted cabinet doors. Portraits. Shadows. Skies that didn’t exist. A girl that always ended up looking like you. 

She ate. Three times a day. Joel made sure of it. Sometimes it was good—herbs from the garden, toast burnt just right. Other times it was just food. Fuel. But she ate. Slowly. Quietly. With gratitude. 

Her body began to remember itself. The bones softened. Her hair grew longer. Her eyes lost that yellow tint.

And Joel… Joel never pushed. He didn’t ask questions he didn’t need answers to. But he was always there. Always nearby. Fixing the porch steps. Sharpening tools. Sometimes he’d sit beside her while she painted and said nothing for hours. Sometimes he’d hand her a book and mutter something about it being “not too bad.” 

And sometimes—on those rare, quiet nights when the fire cracked just right and her chest didn’t feel like it was splitting in half—she’d lay her head against his shoulder and close her eyes.

Their bond grew back the way moss grows. Slow, delicate, unspoken. 

She would catch him looking at her sometimes with that ache in his eyes, the kind of sorrow only fathers can carry. And she would nod. Just a little. Just enough to say, “I’m still here.”

But the guitar stayed untouched.

He’d placed it on a stand in the studio—lovingly built and filled with warmth and light— but Ellie never stepped inside. She passed by sometimes, paused at the doorframe. Looked at it like a wound that hadn’t scabbed. But couldn’t even touch the doorknob.

Because music didn’t belong to her anymore.

It belonged to the version of her that had died under a spotlight. To the girl who collapsed in a green room with your voice in her head and heroin in her veins. It belonged to the wreckage and the worst version of herself.

And every time she tried to remember what it felt like to strum, she tasted blood and bile and screaming.

So she let it stay behind glass.

Sometimes—on the rarest nights—when the sky went purple and the pine trees whispered things that almost sounded like forgiveness, she wondered if this was real. 

If this house, this life, this quiet was just a hallucination her dying mind had conjured in a hotel room somewhere. If she was really just dead already, and this was what came after.

But then Joel would call her name, soft and simple. The way he used to when she was a kid. She’d look over her shoulder and see him leaning against the kitchen doorway with a flicker of warmth in his eyes.  And the air would return to her lungs.

The night air settled over Jackson like a held breath. Just cold enough to bite at the edges of skin. The porch creaked gently beneath them as they sat—Joel with his elbows on his knees, a cigarette burning low between his fingers. Ellie beside him, hoodie up, one foot tucked under the other.

The sky above was clear. Stars sharp. The kind of sky that reminded her how far away she was from the world. How far away she was from Jesse and Dina. How far away she was from you.

Joel exhaled smoke, watching it twist into the dark.

“You sleepin’ alright?” he asked finally.

Ellie shrugged. “Sometimes.”

He nodded, like he expected that. Crushed the cigarette into the ashtray on the railing. Another long silence.

Then—quiet, almost too quiet to catch:

“Ellie…”

She turned to him slightly. His face was shadowed by the porch light, but she saw the way his jaw clenched before he spoke again.

“You don’t have to answer this, but…” A pause. A breath. “Why didn’t you do it?”

She blinked. He didn’t look at her when he said it.

“Those nights you spent locked in that hotel room.” His voice was gentle, but firm. “You could’ve. God knows you had enough reason. Enough pain. But you didn’t.”

Ellie looked back out toward the trees. Her hands were in her sleeves, fingers curled into fists.

“Every day I thank whatever’s up there that you didn’t.” He continued, his voice rough and bare. “But I still… I still think about it. Wonder what gave you the strength.”

Her throat felt like sandpaper. But the words came anyway.

“I wanted to,” she said. “I thought about it all the time”

“And I tried.” She swallowed. “A couple times.”

The wind shifted. The trees rustled like they were listening.

“But every time I got close…” 

Her voice caught. 

“Her face came back.”

Joel turned then. Really looked at her. Ellie was staring down at her knees. Eyes glassy. Mouth tight.

“I kept seeing her, I kept hearing her voice,” she whispered. “The last time. Crying. Begging. And I thought—I can’t do that to her again. I can’t be the reason she breaks twice.”

Joel didn’t speak. Couldn’t.

“I didn’t survive for me. I survived for her.”

Her voice cracked on that last word. 

Joel felt it like a punch to the chest.

He thought—God. He’d seen a lot in his life. Too much for only one person. Wars waged in cities and kitchens, grief stitched into the fabric of every year. Love that rotted under pressure. Love that left. Love that wasn’t really love at all. 

But this?

This kind of love—this raw, surviving thing that crawled its way through wreckage and blood and spotlight and distance, and still had enough breath to whisper her name—undid him.

He had never seen anything like it. Not in his youth. Not in the world. Hadn’t even believed it could exist—something so unwilling to die, blooming out of the kind of ruin most people never crawl out from.

He looked at her. Really looked.

And there she was. This kid—his kid, not only by blood, but by fire and stubbornness—wrapped in bruises and a kind of aching devotion that still burned in her chest.

She hadn’t made it out unburned. But she’d made it. And it wasn’t faith or hope that had kept her alive.

It was love. Not the clean kind. Not the kind with fairy tales and forgiveness. The kind that shattered you and still refused to let go. The kind that whispered through inside her mind and said don’t. The kind that looked like her.

And for the first time in his life, Joel Miller believed in something he didn’t have a word for. He only knew that it looked like Ellie. And that it sounded like a girl who still loved her, even after everything.

His voice was thick when he finally said, 

“You’re stronger than anyone I’ve ever known.”

Ellie didn’t answer. Just lit her own cigarette and took a slow drag.

It started to become a kind of ritual.

Not planned. Not spoken. Just something that happened—every few nights, when the moon was sharp and the woods were quiet, Ellie and Joel would sit outside on the porch. Two chairs. A pack of smokes. Coffee gone cold.

And then they’d talk.

Not always about the heavy things. Sometimes it was about the deer tracks Joel had spotted near the tree line. Sometimes Ellie would mutter something dry about the government, and Joel would scoff like he hadn’t been the government at some point. Sometimes they’d sit in silence for an hour before a single word was said.

But when the heavy came, it always came honest.

“You ever think about music again?”

Ellie didn’t look at him. She was staring out at the trees. Smoking slowly, the cigarette cupped in her hand like it was sacred.

“Sometimes,” she said. A beat passed. “And then I stop thinking real quick.”

Joel learned, over these months, that Ellie didn’t move for pressure. She moved when she was ready. And sometimes, when the dark was soft enough, she was.

“It just… it brings me back,” she admitted, eyes still fixed forward. “To everything. The tour. The blood in my mouth. The drugs. The lights that felt like they were trying to kill me. The silence that came after.”

Joel didn’t speak.

“And also, she…she was my muse,” Ellie said, quieter now. “She was in the best things I wrote. The songs that people liked the most… every chord I played right. She was there. And now it’s like… I don’t know how to do it anymore. Like I forgot the language.”

Joel breathed in through his nose. Nodded.

“I read some of your journals,” he said gently.

Ellie stiffened.

“Only the ones you left open,” he added. “Didn’t go snooping.”

“You’ve still got it in you, kiddo. You’ve just buried it under the grief.”

Her throat clicked as she swallowed. Still wouldn’t look at him.

“Music’s a way out,” Joel said. “And a way through. It’s how you’ve always spoken. Even when you didn’t have words, you had that.”

Ellie closed her eyes.

“That girl you loved? I think she’d want you to make music again. For her. For you.”

That broke something. Not enough to collapse her. But enough to shift the weight.

She glanced at him. Eyes tired. Voice like gravel.

“I don’t remember how.”

Joel didn’t speak. He stood instead. Went inside. When he came back, he had it in his hands—her acoustic.

He held it out.

“Then we remember together.”

Ellie looked at it like it might bite her. Her breath caught.

“I can’t,”

“I’ll start,”

And he sat down, resting the guitar on his knee like it weighed less than memory. His fingers moved slowly, stiff from age, but so familiar. He strummed a slow, soft chord. Then another. The air shifted.

He played the opening notes of Wayfaring Stranger—old, worn, rooted in some deep Appalachian ache. Ellie’s breath hitched.

He nodded toward the space beside him. It was quiet.

Then she moved. Sat down. And her voice came.

Shaky at first. Rusted from silence. But real. Raw.

“I am just a poor… wayfaring stranger…”

Ellie didn’t cry. But when they finished—when the last note dissolved into pine trees and wind—she leaned her head on Joel’s shoulder.

Because in that moment, a piece of her soul returned.

A flicker. A chord. A bridge. A breath.

That night, Joel had gone to bed early.

He’d kissed her temple in passing, ruffled her hair like she was still thirteen, said something about needing to catch the sunrise. She smiled without answering, waited until his door clicked shut. Waited another twenty minutes, maybe thirty, counting the creaks in the old floorboards and the rhythm of his footsteps fading into sleep.

Then—quietly, carefully—she got up.

Her socks barely made a sound on the wood as she moved through the darkened house. The kitchen light above the stove still glowed like a nightlight. Outside, a late snow had started falling, brushing the windows with flurries that looked like static on a screen.

Ellie finally opened the door. Because tonight, something had shifted like thaw after a long, bitter winter.

The studio was still warm from the afternoon sun. The insulation held the heat. Her breath didn’t cloud the air. The soundproof panels still clung to the walls, dark and padded. The guitars hung where Joel had mounted them. The desk lamp was on, casting a low golden glow across the mixing board. And there, on the shelf, were her journals.

She walked to them.

Chose the one she hadn’t touched since she closed it, worn soft at the corners. The one with the sketch she’d done on day twenty-eight. Your back, your shoulders, that mole. The one she’d captioned with a line she didn’t even remember writing until she saw it the day before:

A kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder.

She sat. Flipped through pages of grief and ink-blotted apologies.

And she let herself feel it this time. The ache. The missing. The love.

And it wasn’t kind. It was raw. She remembered the way your voice cracked when you told her she was a liar. The way your hands trembled when you let her go. The last kiss.

Tears streaked down her face in silence. Her shoulders shook. Her chest cracked open, soundless and shaking, and she let the pages in her lap blur with salt.

Then—slowly—she pulled the guitar down from the wall. The acoustic one. Her first. The one Joel had taught her to play on.

Her fingers hovered for a beat. Then she strummed.

The sound came out warped, soft, imperfect.

But it came out.

She flipped through the pages. Pieced together verses from scribbled corners, from margins, from half-abandoned choruses. A line about her being hungry for your love with no way to feed it. A line about being too young to hold on and too old to break free and run. A line about you being the tear that will hang inside of her forever.

She built a melody. And when it felt right—when the bones of the song finally locked into place—she turned on the mic. The red light blinked once. Twice. Then held.

Her voice wasn’t what it used to be. It trembled. It cracked. It wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t powerful.

But it was honest.

And when she finished—when the last note hung in the air like smoke from a blown-out candle—she didn’t say anything. She just sat there. Breathing.

Then she saved the file.

lover_you_shouldve_come_over.wav

And after that, Ellie didn’t stop.

She lived in the studio like it was a second body—unwashed coffee mugs on the desk, blanketed in flannel shirts and cables. She slept on the floor most nights, curled up in half-buttoned clothes, a pencil still tucked behind her ear, dried ink smudged across her cheekbone like warpaint. She dreamed in melodies. Woke with her fingers still curled in phantom chords.

Sometimes she forgot to eat. Sometimes she forgot what month it was. Joel started leaving sticky notes on the fridge with things like Eat today or It’s Wednesday, dumbass.

All the songs were acoustic at first. Bare. Unadorned. Like bones washed up on a beach.

She wrote them from the wreckage—pages torn from old notebooks, grief tucked into the margins of rehab journals, fragments of lyrics she scrawled years ago when her hands still smelled like blood, whiskey, stage smoke and the perfume of five different groupies.

The studio felt wrong without Jesse and Dina.

Once, it had been chaotic—Jesse cracking jokes while playing the drums way too loud, Dina blasting bass lines over vodka-fueled all-nighters, all three of them arguing about reverb like it was life or death.

Now it was just Ellie.

Well. Ellie and Joel.

He sat in when she needed him. Plucked chords while she rewrote verses. Nodded or shrugged when she looked for approval. Sometimes he’d grunt out a melody while tuning and it would always be perfect, and she would curse him out like it wasn’t the best thing that happened to her all week.

They recorded Wayfaring Stranger together one night.

It was storming hard—rain on the roof like applause from ghosts. The cabin lights flickered once. Joel didn’t flinch. They sat with two old mics hissing soft static, the smell of rosemary in the air, guitars balanced in their laps.

Joel’s voice was cracked and low, worn-in like a denim jacket. Ellie’s was thinner, rawer, but sharp—cutting through the quiet like a blade through fog.

After the last verse, she lowered her headphones and frowned.

“That mic sounds like it’s dying, man.”

Joel kept tuning, didn’t look up. “It’s vintage.”

“It makes me sound like I’m stuck in the ‘70s.”

“You are.”

“I’m not! I’m—” She stopped. Tilted her head. “Actually… yeah. Yeah, maybe.”

She didn’t fight it anymore.

Joel’s music—his bare-bones honesty, his refusal to dress things up just to make them easier to swallow—it started to seep into her own. The way he played. The way he said something real and didn’t care if it sounded pretty.

She used to resent that. Spent years trying to polish the edges of his influence off herself. Now she understood. Now it sounded like home.

Then one morning, Joel walked in and said, “Happy birthday, kiddo.”

She blinked. “What?”

“It’s your birthday. You're twenty-five now.”

She’d forgotten.

She hadn’t left the cabin in over two years. Hadn’t seen anyone but Joel. Her hair was longer now, almost reaching her shoulders, uneven at the ends from the times she hacked at it with kitchen scissors. She never let it all the way down, always tied it up in a bun or a half updo. It wasn’t the messy mullet from before—it was softer now. Grown in. Like it had survived something.

Joel dragged her out. Said they were going for coffee in Jackson.

Incognito. Baseball caps, oversized jackets, sunglasses too big for their faces. He called her “Josh” the whole time. She scowled but didn’t correct him.

She clutched something in her coat pocket the whole time. A folded, yellowing page. It had phone numbers scrawled across it—names and addresses she’d written down when she was sixteen. Just in case she ever needed to reach someone. A page she never thought would matter again. 

But now, it felt like a compass.

“Can we stop at a payphone?” she asked quietly, her voice raw from too many takes and not enough talking.

Joel raised an eyebrow but didn’t ask questions. Just handed her some quarters.

The booth was cracked and rusty. It smelled like old pennies and rain. She shoved the page flat against the glass and started dialing.

She called Jesse first.

He picked up on the second ring. “Hello?”

She almost hung up.

“...Hey,” she whispered. “It’s me.”

A silence. Then: “…Ellie?”

And then: “Holy shit—Ellie? Are you okay? Are you—”

“I’m alright.” She smiled, just a little. “I’m doing good, actually.”

“Jesus. Jesus, we thought you—Dina said—fuck, Ellie—”

She heard the shudder in his breath. The tears. She told him she was alive. That she was sorry. That she didn’t call because she didn’t know if she ever could.

He told her he’d been working with a few bands—nothing major, nothing that stuck, but enough to keep his hands busy and his heart half-healed. The Fireflies name still opened all the doors, even if it felt weird saying it out loud without her there.

"People still talk about you, you know. All the damn time."

Ellie didn’t know what to say to that.

“Sometimes,” he admitted, voice cracking, “I think about that show. The one where your amp blew out mid-set and you didn’t even flinch. Just screamed the whole damn chorus ‘til the crowd lost their minds.”

They cried together. Quietly. Like people who’d already cried a lot in private and didn’t need to explain why anymore. Then laughed about how fucked up everything was.

Then Dina. She picked up on the third ring.

She didn’t even said hello. She didn’t have to. Her gut feeling told her who called.

“…Ellie?”

Ellie nodded before realizing that it didn't translate through a payphone. “Yeah. Hey.”

The silence stretched for a second—then snapped.

“You asshole!” Dina was already crying. “You selfish, unbelievable—fuck. I missed you so much!”

Ellie laughed through her own tears. “I missed you too, D.”

Dina told her she’d been in Europe for months—spinning records in sweaty clubs, working late-night DJ sets in little places where no one knew her name or history. “I dyed my hair pink. I ate shit on a Vespa. I’ve been healing, I guess. Or fucking around. Same thing.”

Ellie grinned. Of course Dina was the one who turned grief into glitter.

“Sometimes I play Fireflies tracks,” Dina added, softer now. “Not full sets. Just… when it feels right. And every time I do, Ellie—” She stopped, breathed in. “The crowd goes still. Then they go wild. Like they’re remembering something holy. I’ve never seen anything like it, not even in our shows. Tears. Screaming. People grabbing strangers just to scream the lyrics together.”

That made Ellie’s stomach drop. Not because she wasn’t proud. But because it felt like looking in a mirror at someone who didn’t exist anymore.

The world hadn’t let go of her. But she didn’t know if she could ever go back to it.

“You still mean something to them,” Dina whispered. “You still mean something to me.”

Then—Ellie pulled in a breath. Deep and jagged, like it might get stuck on the way out. Her fingers found the last quarter in her pocket.

She didn’t need the crumpled page for this one.

Your number had never left her. Not when she was bleeding backstage. Not in the grey mornings in rehab when her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Not when Joel found her slumped against the studio wall, whispering lyrics like prayers to a God that couldn't even listen to them.

She could’ve dialed it blindfolded.

The rotary clicked under her fingers.

She pressed the receiver to her ear like it might hurt. Like maybe hearing you would split her open in a way she would never recover from.

It rang. Once. Twice. Then—

“The number you have dialed no longer exists.”

Static. Dead air. A silence so absolute it felt like the biggest punishment she had ever received.

Her hand hovered over the receiver. Then she slammed it down hard and tried again. Faster this time. Desperate.

“The number you have dialed—”

No. No, no, no.  

Her stomach caved in. Her lungs forgot what to do.

She didn’t move. Not for a full minute. Just stood there in the booth, wind pushing against the glass, her face slack and still. The receiver hung in her hand.

Her heart didn’t break loud. It didn’t explode. It sank. And when the tears came, they didn’t fall like before—not in storms, not in grief, not in the animal sobs of withdrawal.

A single tear at the edge of her cheekbone. Another clinging to her jaw. She didn’t wipe them away. She just let them slide, slow and steady, as if maybe they carried part of you. As if maybe they could make up for all the words she didn’t say.

She just wanted one second.

Just one second where she could hear your voice again.

She wanted to know if your hair was still the softest thing she had ever touched. If your laugh still cracked in the middle. If you still sang harmonies under your breath without realizing.

If you hated her. If you missed her. If you ever thought of her. If she haunted your music the way you haunted hers. If you still love her the same way she does.

She wanted to tell you she made it. That she didn’t die. She almost did, but she didn’t. That she didn’t want to anymore. Not since she started writing again. Not since she remembered who she was underneath the noise.

She wanted to tell you that you saved her.

Even if you didn’t mean to. Even if you wouldn’t care anymore.

She left the booth with her hands trembling from everything she did and could no longer undo.

Joel was waiting by the truck. He looked up when she approached, coffee gone cold in his gloved hands. He didn’t ask why she spent hours on that payphone or why she was crying.

When they reached the cabin, Ellie didn’t take off her coat. She didn’t speak. She just dropped her bag by the door, kicked her boots off half-heartedly, and went straight into the studio.

She sat down at the console and opened a fresh journal. Not one of the old ones—the wrecked ones with pages water-warped from blood and tears. A new one. Clean. Blank. Terrifying.

And she wrote pages and pages of lyrics.

She picked up the bass for the first time in over a year. The strings felt foreign beneath her callouses. Still, the weight of it grounded her—solid, real, unyielding.

She let it hum beneath her fingers. Slow at first. Then louder. Then louder still.

She played until her fingertips ached and stung raw, until the studio felt full again. Then she turned to the drum kit in the corner—still coated in a layer of dust like no one had dared touch it.

She didn’t know what she was doing. Didn’t care.

She wasn’t chasing perfection. She was chasing pulse.

She needed noise. She needed proof she was still here. She needed to fill the space before it swallowed her.

By morning, she had added basslines and makeshift drums to nearly every track. They were rough. Unpolished. Nowhere near what Jesse or Dina could’ve done.

But they were hers.

Joel found her in the studio one evening, back turned, sleeves rolled, headphones slung around her neck, mouth gently moving with the melody in her head. The soft glow of the monitors bathed her in blue, and he stood in the doorway for a moment too long, just watching. She didn't look twenty-five.

She looked twelve and thirty and ageless all at once.

He cleared his throat.

“You done?”

Ellie blinked, startled out of whatever place she'd been floating in, then nodded slowly. “Yeah. Think so.”

Joel stepped in, boots thudding against the wood. The place smelled like dust and coffee and burned wires—the scent of something born too fast and too bright.

“Mind if I—” He gestured toward the speakers.

She hesitated. Just a beat. Then reached over and hit play.

The room filled with her voice—unmistakable. Still raspy in places, sharp in others, but deeper now. Weathered. Like a field after fire. Still growing, but forever changed.

The first tracks bled in gently, acoustic at its core, but layered—drums like a distant storm, a bassline humming beneath it like a heartbeat.

And then—

Guitar.

Electric. Clean, furious, aching.

It slid in like it had been waiting all this time.

And Joel froze. Because that guitar wasn’t just good. Wasn’t just decent. It was her.

Not the kid who used to play for him on porch steps in Jackson. Not even the version of her who’d burned up on stages, who'd screamed into microphones like it could keep her alive and made magazines call her one of the greatest.

This was something else. This was someone who had crawled through ash and come out holding fire in her hands.

Some song sounded like heartbreak wrapped in honey. Others punched like fists through drywall. Others had violins and beats and sounds she found on the mixing board. And then came some solos—raw, wild, effortless. Like those fingertips still held the meaning of that second language she spoke when her lyrics didn’t find the right words.

She was holding the Les Paul again. The black one. The one she used to sleep next to during tour season, always afraid someone would steal it. It looked heavier now, older, like it had waited too. The final and most important piece of herself finally came back.

When the last song ended, Ellie exhaled like she’d been holding her breath the entire time.

Joel didn’t look at her. He just stared at the speaker, then shook his head a little.

“Jesus, kiddo.”

She glanced up, uncertain. “What?”

He turned to her. His voice cracked just once. “That’s the most heartbreakingly beautiful goddamn thing I’ve ever heard.”

She blinked.

“It’s so… you. Not you tryna be what people expect. Not you tryna prove anything. Just... you. In every chord. Every line. Your voice—hell, it sounds like it grew up with you. Got scarred with you. Got clean with you.”

“You don’t have to say that just ‘cause I’m your kid.”

“Ellie.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not sayin’ this ‘cause I’m your dad. I’m sayin’ it ‘cause I’ve heard a hell of a lotta music in my life, and none of it comes close to this. You got lightning in your blood. I ain’t just proud. I’m lucky. I got to watch a genius figure herself out.”

Ellie let out a short, incredulous laugh. “Genius, huh?”

Joel smirked. “Yeah. Turns out I gave birth to one.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works.”

They both laughed. And then she stepped into him, forehead against his chest, arms curling around his waist.

“Thank you, Dad.”

He hugged her back, tightly. Like he’d been waiting for this moment longer than she had.

They stood there for a long time. No music playing. No words. Just the hum of everything that hadn’t been said over the years.

“So… what now?”

Ellie chewed her lip. Looked at the floor. Then finally back at him.

“I wanna come back.” Her voice was soft, but steady. “I wanna release the album. Independently. I mean, I doubt the label would touch me again. Not after everything.”

Joel tilted his head. “You let me worry about the label.”

“What?”

“I’ll handle it. When you’re ready.” He squeezed her shoulder. “You just keep doin’ what you do. Finish the tracks. Wrap it up right. When the time comes, we’ll put it out on your terms.”

“You’d do that?”

Joel shrugged like it was nothing. “Damn right. You think I’m gonna let the best thing I’ve ever heard rot on a hard drive in this cabin?” 

Something in her face cracked open. Not sadness. Relief.

“They will hear it, El. One way or another.”

And for the first time in years, future didn’t feel like a threat. It felt like a door. She looked back toward the Les Paul, still slung against the chair like it belonged there.

Like it had been waiting.

But now, she was ready.

It was early, just after nine. The air still smelled like frost and wet asphalt. Ellie stood in the cereal aisle of the Jackson general store, her hoodie pulled low over her brow, fingers wrapped around the handle of a red plastic basket. She had a list Joel made folded in her back pocket: milk, eggs, bread, apples if they had the good kind. 

Joel had said it like a reward, “You’re ready. Just keep your head down.”

So she did. Josh. Quiet. Hoodie, sunglasses, sleeves pulled low over the tattoos that might give her away. Nobody recognized her. It felt kind of surreal, like pretending to be someone else was easier than being who she was.

The checkout line was slow, but Ellie didn’t mind. She liked watching people. A mom trying to control a sugar-high toddler. An old man counting coins like they were magic. The soft beep of the scanner. Life in motion. Life that wasn’t hers.

Then the cashier glanced up at the small, dust-covered TV mounted above the register. Volume low. A red banner on the bottom of the screen.

BREAKING: Eight-Time GRAMMY Winner Y/N Confirms Romance with Star Quarterback Abby Anderson

The cashier smiled, bagging a box of cereal. “I’m so glad that girl went through all that and still came out on top,” she said. “Good for her.”

Ellie turned to look. Just a glance. 

A mistake.

She had never felt her stomach drop like that in her entire life.

Not when the tour got canceled. Not when the pills ran out. Not even when she first realized she was in love with you.

This was different.

This was a freefall. No warning. No parachute. Just gravity dragging her heart straight to hell.

You.

You in a long velvet gown the color of midnight, standing beside Abby Anderson in a black suit with her hand on the small of your back. A camera caught you mid-laugh—head thrown back, eyes closed, glowing. The kind of laugh she used to get out of you when she whispered something filthy in your ear or caught you stealing her hoodie in the middle of a shoot.

But now—you looked different.

God, you looked different.

Your hair was darker. Longer. You stood taller, somehow. Not in heels, but in presence. Like the world didn’t get to touch you anymore unless you said so. There was something else too—an energy she couldn’t name. A kind of light that used to come from her. From the songs. From the love.

Now it came from somewhere else. Someone else.

The basket dropped itself from Ellie's hands.

It hit the ground with a clatter—milk carton bursting open, Cheerios rolling across the floor like gold coins. The cashier called something after her, but Ellie was already outside.

She barely made it to the truck. Door open. Head between her knees.

And then she threw up.

Right there in the parking lot gravel. Acid and coffee and guilt.

She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and tried to breathe, but her chest was caving in. Not fast, but slow—like it had been waiting for this collapse.

She sat behind the wheel for twenty minutes before she could stop shaking.

Then she cried. Not loud. Not violent. A quiet, stunned kind of weeping—like the body trying to process a pain it didn’t see coming.

She couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe the way you looked. Couldn’t believe the world had been spinning like that without her. That you had became even more radiant and beautiful than she remembered—and she'd always remembered you like a wildfire.

She couldn’t believe she’d missed all of it. That while she was drowning in rehab and hollowing herself out into songs, you had survived. You had won eight grammys. You had become someone new. Someone braver. Someone who laughed like that with someone else’s hand on your back.

She leaned her head against the steering wheel.

She remembered how she used to trace every freckle on your shoulder like it was scripture. How you used to mouth the words to her songs before they were even finished. How you used to ask her what she saw in the stars when she couldn’t sleep.

And now she didn’t even know what time zone you lived in.

Ellie didn’t even park the truck properly. Gravel spit behind her tires as she slammed it into gear and killed the engine outside the cabin. She didn’t bother locking it. Didn’t bother breathing.

She threw the door open so hard it bounced back. The screen creaked, the wood groaned, and there was Joel—sitting at the kitchen table, tuning his old acoustic like nothing had happened. Like the entire goddamn universe hadn’t just exploded. Or at least, that's how ellie reacted.

“WHAT THE FUCK!” she hissed. “What the actual fuck,—why didn’t you tell me?!”

He didn’t look up. Just kept turning the peg. Calm. Steady. “Tell you what?”

“Don’t play fucking dumb with me!” she snapped. “She’s with someone. You didn’t think that was something I should fucking know before I threw up outside the fucking grocery store?!”

Joel let out a long breath, one of those fatherly ones that said I’ve been waiting for this. He finally met her eyes.

“Ellie, don’t blame me for something you didn’t wanna see.”

She flinched.

“I’ve been just as disconnected from the world as you. We’ve both been ghosts in this cabin. You haven’t asked about her. Not once. You think that’s coincidence?”

Her fists clenched at her sides. Her jaw was ticking.

“You had months! You could have—”

“What?” he interrupted, his voice calm but firm. “Ripped the Band-Aid off for you? Showed you the picture and held your hand while you cried?”

Joel softened, his shoulders sagging. He wasn’t trying to hurt her. He never was.

“I didn’t keep it from you, kiddo. I just... didn’t go looking. Same way you didn’t. ‘Cause we both knew it’d hurt like hell when you saw it.”

Her throat was closing again.

“You don’t have drugs to drown it anymore,” Joel said gently. “Now you just have to feel it. Go to that studio. and don’t come out ‘til your voice is hoarse and your fingers are bleeding and you feel even a little bit better.”

Then added:

“You’ve got to learn how to go through your feelings. Not around them. Not under them. Through.”

Ellie didn’t say anything else. Just nodded once—sharply—and turned away.

The studio door slammed behind her like a warning shot.

She didn’t hesitate. Walked straight to the mic stand, flipped on the switch, and yanked the pop filter off like it insulted her.

She took a breath. One, two, three.

And then—

“ABBY ANDERSON YOU FUCKING BLONDE BITCH—”

The mic popped from the force of it.

“I’M GONNA FUCK YOU UP! I’M GONNA RIP YOUR STUPIDLY BIG FUCKING ARMS OFF AND USE THEM TO PLAY GUITAR BETTER THAN YOU EVER COULD—”

“I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU AND THEN TEAR YOU APART AND VOMIT YOUR GUTS AND THEN SHOVE ‘EM BACK DOWN YOUR THROAT— YOU STUPID FUCKING QUARTERBACK BITCH—YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO THROW A BALL—”

Her voice cracked. She coughed. Then screamed again.

“YOU THINK JUST ‘CAUSE YOU HAVE A FUCKING JAWLINE AND A PANTSUIT AND AN ARM AROUND HER WAIST THAT MAKES YOU WORTHY? SHE WAS MINE, YOU FUCKING JOCK STRAP, SHE STILL FUCKING IS AND YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW—”

Her knuckles were white on the mic stand. Her voice went hoarse halfway through the next sentence.

“You don’t even know her,” she gasped. “You don’t know what she sounds like at 3 a.m. when she can’t sleep. You don’t know how she takes her fucking coffee. You don’t know that she sings when she’s nervous and cries when she’s mad and tucks her hair behind her ear when she’s about to lie and—”

And for the first time in almost three years, Ellie let herself mourn.

Not just you. Not just Abby. Not just what she saw. But all of it.

The missed years. The songs she never sang to you. The poems she burned. The way she’d clutched her sobriety like a gift she didn’t know what to do with. The way she thought maybe—just maybe—you were still holding her somewhere in your heart.

Joel didn’t sleep that night.

He heard everything through the studio wall—every scream, every screech of distorted guitar, every thundering kick drum and rattling snare. The bass bled through the floors like an earthquake held at bay. It wasn’t music, not at first. It was fury in waveform.

Ellie had started with a scream. He heard it cut the silence like a blade—sharp, ragged, gut-deep. And then came the noise.

Something harder than anything Joel had ever known. Harder than Slipknot. More brutal than Judas Priest. Louder, darker, filthier than anything she’d played before. Like metal had swallowed electronic and spit it back out in flames. There were no lyrics for a while. Just shrieking static, guttural breaths, beats that hit like punches, and one hellstorm of a guitar that sounded like the devil himself was grinding his teeth.

Then silence. Long, unsettling silence.

Then it started again. A different track. This one still metal—but now it was a song. A real song. Drums and guitars and layered vocals screaming over themselves, a wall of sound so thick Joel could barely tell where Ellie’s voice ended and the instruments began.

She had to go through it. And this—this was her going through it.

He made coffee at midnight and sat by the window with the lights off, listening. Hours passed like waves.

Around 4 a.m., the tone shifted.

The third track started and Joel didn’t need lyrics to feel the grief in it. Her voice was still screaming, but it was breaking, too—splintered and raw, almost childlike in its desperation. There was no rhythm. Just pain.

The fourth was slower. Quiet. A heartbeat on bass, distant guitar like wind through broken glass. And Ellie’s voice—barely a whisper now—singing something that sounded more like an apology than a song.

The fifth was melancholic. But still powerful. It had piano, brittle and off-key. And one line that sounded like it had been wept into the mic:

I know someday you'll have a beautiful life. I know you'll be the star in somebody else's sky. But why, why, why can't it be—

Why can't it be mine?

That last word stretched long, then the note broke in a painful scream.

Joel waited another hour, just to be sure. Then he stood, stretched his aching back, and walked to the studio.

Inside, Ellie was sitting on the floor, knees tucked to her chest, fingers resting on the neck of her black Les Paul like it was a lifeline. Her face was blank. She hadn’t slept. She didn’t look up when he entered.

“What did you do?” Joel asked gently, voice low.

She didn’t answer at first. Just stared at the wall. Then, after a long pause, her lips parted.

“I made five songs.”

“That makes thirty. Album’s supposed to release in two months, right?”

She nodded.

He reached over, gently took the flash drive from the interface, and plugged it into the old studio computer. The screen flickered, files loading.

Custer. A Match Into Water. Twilight. Undressed. Black.

He listened to them all. Quietly. No commentary. No judgment. When the last track ended, he leaned back in the chair and exhaled.

“Did I just listen to the five stages of grief?

“Yeah. They’re in order.”

He looked at her, not as her mentor, not even as her father—but as someone who knew what it meant to be broken and still build something out of it.

“You made it.”

"Yeah." She scoffed bitterly. “But do I look like I feel better?”

Joel shrugged, the corner of his mouth lifting. “No. But you made it through your feelings. And that’s what matters.”

Another pause. Then—

“I’m proud of that.”

Ellie looked at him for the first time. Her eyes were bloodshot, her skin pale, but there was something behind it—something still alive.

“Are you gonna add them to the album?”

“Yeah. They’re going in.”

Two months after the studio lights in Jackson dimmed, after Joel made the calls and opened the doors she thought had rusted shut, Ellie flew to New York .

It was strange being back—the metallic taste of smog, the haunted trace of fame hanging in the air like a perfume she didn’t want to wear anymore. But the studio Joel had found for her was perfect. Private. No flashing lights. No label execs breathing down her neck.

Just a producer who’d been given the raw files and said, after the first track, “This doesn’t need much. It’s already bleeding.”

They touched the recordings gently—leveled the vocals, pulled back the fuzz, let the breath between words stay. They didn’t try to smooth her edges. They let her sound jagged. Real.

And then one morning, without a countdown or a photo or a press release, without so much as a tweet from her long-dead accounts, Ellie Williams released her first single. With her own name. The name she wasn’t afraid of, not anymore.

It dropped into the world like a bomb in a library.

No promo. No interviews. Just one link. One song. No explanation.

And the world collapsed.

Within twelve hours it was number one in sixteen countries. Within twenty-four, it was the top-streamed track on every platform. People played it in clubs and churches and funeral homes. They called it sacred. They called it the second coming of Jesus.

And all of it takes us here.

To you.

Your breath left your body like a blade had been driven straight through your sternum—slow, silent, clean. No gasp. No warning. Just the kind of pain that doesn’t scream because it’s too old, too deep, too familiar.

You stared at the screen in Rachel’s hand.

#1: Lover, You Should’ve Come Over – Ellie Williams

And your world cracked open.

Your fingers—those same fingers that once traced the shape of her spine like it was sheet music—trembled violently as you handed the phone back. Not a word. Not a whisper. You didn’t wait for Rachel’s face to fold into sympathy, didn’t hear her call your name, didn’t care how loud the room suddenly felt.

You walked through it like a ghost already halfway gone. Past the laughter. Past the questions. Past the life you had rebuilt with such careful and wounded hands.

You made it to the car before you could shatter.

The door slammed shut behind you and the silence inside rang louder than any applause you’d ever received. Louder than the Grammys. Louder than the sold-out stadiums. Louder than Ellie's voice at its prime.

The keys slipped into the ignition with muscle memory. The city rushed around you, its usual chaos blurring at the edges—streetlights dripping gold down your windshield, a world still spinning like it hadn’t just gutted you. Again.

You took the stairs instead of the private elevator because you needed the punishment.

Each step a question you couldn’t answer. Why didn’t she call? Why now? Why? When? How? Why? When? How? Why? When? How? Why? Why? Why?

You unlocked the penthouse like you’d done a thousand times. Like you hadn’t spent the last three years turning it into a mausoleum. You opened your bedroom door with hands that had once held her. Locked it behind you with the kind of finality that made silence gasp.

Everything was exactly the same. The bed still made the way she used to do it—crumpled, uneven, like someone had loved and left in a hurry. The chipped mug still sat on the desk. Her hoodie was still in the drawer. You told Abby it was just an old favorite.

But you were a liar.

You sank down onto the bed, and the mattress sighed under you like it had been waiting a lifetime to catch you in this moment.

Three years of silence. Three years of holding your breath. Three years of wondering if she was dead in a hotel bathtub or recovering or in a deserted island or lying on some stranger’s floor with a smile that wasn’t yours. Three years of clawing your way through grief while the world watched and speculated and fed on the pieces.

And now she was just here. No context. No warning. No apology.

And all the feelings you thought you had buried—beneath Abby’s calmness, beneath champagne and shows, beneath the chaos of returning to the spotlight—came crawling back like they’d been living under your skin this whole time.

You didn’t leave your room for a week.

The curtains stayed drawn. The phone stayed off. The only thing you ate was a handful of grapes you didn’t remember buying and some cereal, and the only time you spoke was to whisper “Ellie” in your sleep like a secret your soul never stopped keeping.

Everything felt exactly like those weeks after she left—when the world went mute for her and louder for you and every morning felt like a nightmare you couldn't wake up from. You thought you’d moved on, that you had grown, that you had gotten better. That no sorrow would ever be bad enough to keep you in bed again. But grief doesn’t age. It just waits.

The days passed like a open, bleeding again wound. And then it was Friday.

And you had dinner with Abby.

Because you always had fucking dinner with fucking Abby.

So you got up. Got in the shower. Tried not to cry. Failed. Got out. Tried not to look in the mirror. Failed. Tried to do your makeup like nothing had happened. Cried. Removed it. Started again. Cried again. Removed it. Started again. Until it stayed, barely, through the trembling of your hands.

You wore the black dress she liked. The one that fit too well and showed too much cleavage and said too little. You showed up on time. You smiled. You pecked her lips. You laughed at her jokes—too loud, too long, too late.

When she slid the velvet box across the table, you already knew. Diamond tennis bracelet. Flawless cut. Another gift you didn’t ask for and couldn’t wear without thinking this doesn’t belong to me. But you said thank you. Let her put it on. Let her beam like she’d won something. 

Later, at the hotel, you let her undress you. Let her kiss you. Let her believe your moans are real. Let her fill the silence where your soul used to be. Let her touch your body while your heart sat elsewhere.

And before you knew it—

Her strap was buried deep inside you. Abby’s breath was hot against your throat, shallow and frantic, like she was trying to chase something she didn’t realize had never been hers to chase. Her hands gripped your hips tight—anchoring, claiming, desperate—like if she held on hard enough, she could keep you here.

And for a single second, you closed your eyes.

And she was there.

Not a thought. Not a memory. A presence. Immediate. Intimate. Crushing.

Her face flashed behind your eyelids like lightning. 

Her eyes—green and wild and sharp, burning like fire. Her hands—calloused and careful, etching into your skin like they’d carved your body from the inside out. Her voice—all smoke and wreckage, echoing through your chest like a song you will never stop humming.

She filled the dark like a storm surge, rising fast, drowning everything else. 

Ellie. Ellie. Ellie. Ellie.

And then Abby moved. Shifted just enough. Angled herself in a way that once used to make you see stars—back then, back with her.

And your body betrayed you.

A single wrecked, loud enough word.

It rose from somewhere deep—below thought, below shame, below breath.

It wasn't your mouth who said it.

It was your heart calling out the name of the only one who ever owned it.

“Ellie!”

Time didn’t slow—it stopped.

You froze.

Abby stilled.

The air turned solid. Heavy. Like the word had cracked through the drywall, the ceiling, the night. Like the word had struck both of your spines, straight and sharp, paralyzing something deep inside.

Then, without saying anything, she pulled out.

Rose to her feet like she was finally waking from a dream she didn’t want to admit was never hers.

And started getting dressed.

Like this—you—had always been temporary. Because you moaning that name—Ellie—wasn’t just a slip. It was the last drop. And the glass was already overflowing.

“Abby—fuck, fuck, I’m sorry! I didn’t—I didn’t mean to—”

“Didn’t mean to what?” she snapped, but her broad back stayed turned. “To moan your ex’s name while I was inside you? Fucking spare me.”

“I’m just—” you sat up, reaching for the sheet like it could save you “I’m going through a lot lately, and I—”

She spun around.

“Stop lying!”

You froze.

“You think I don’t hear you whisper her name when you sleep?” Abby’s voice trembled now, edged with a hurt so sharp it cut through the air between you like broken glass. “You think I don’t hear you crying in the shower? That I don’t see how you stare at the gifts she gave you like they are relics?”

Her eyes burned into yours, “You think I haven’t caught you reading her letters at three in the morning, fingertips tracing every fucking word? Or replaying your old videos together when you thought I was asleep?”

Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper, each word laced with accusation. “You think I don’t see how you choke up and cry on stage when you sing the songs you wrote for her?”

Every sentence landed like a blow, striking harder each time, the truth cutting deep into your bones.

And that's when it hit you: Abby had always known. Every single moment, every quiet sob, every desperate memory. She had just been waiting for this moment. For you to slip and finally say Ellie’s name out loud in front of her face.

“Look, I don’t know what the fuck happened between you two,” she said, anger rising up like bile, “But I am so goddamn done being treated like I’m stupid.”

“I care about you,” you whispered. “I really do.”

She stepped forward.

“But do you love me?” she asked. Her voice didn’t rise. It dropped. “Because I do love you. And you never once said it back.”

“I...I feel the same way.”

She stared.

“Say it.”

“Abby…”

“Say that you love me.”

“I—I care—”

“Say. That you. Love me.”

And then, brokenly—

“I… I can’t.”

The silence after was worse than screaming. Abby’s jaw clenched. Her nostrils flared. And for a second—just a second—she looked like she might cry. But she didn’t. She blinked too quickly, like she was trying to trap them before they reached the surface.

“You are so fucking pathetic,” she said, barely louder than a breath—but it hit like a punch straight to your chest. “Biggest popstar in the world, and you still can’t get over your ex.”

She let out a dry, humorless laugh that didn’t reach her eyes. “We are so fucking done. Go and write a damn stupid song about it.”

You swallowed hard. Met her eyes with a calm that didn’t come from peace—it came from truth.

“Oh, Abby.” You almost smiled. Almost.

“I will never write a single song about you.”

And that was the kill shot.

Without another word, she grabbed her coat. Walked to the door. And slammed it shut behind her. The sound echoed through the room like an aftershock.

You didn't flinch. Just stood there in the wreckage—still naked, the bracelet still gleaming mockingly on your wrist, the name Ellie still burning in your throat like acid you couldn't swallow.

The sheets beneath you were soaked in sweat and guilt and the ghosts of everything you had tried to bury. The air in the room felt thick, sour, heavy with everything left unsaid, unhealed, undone.

And then it cracked. The numbness. The performance. The lie. A tremble in your shoulders. A shallow inhale. The whisper of something fragile beginning to splinter.

Then it broke wide open.

You collapsed back onto the bed like your spine couldn’t hold the truth anymore. Your knees curled into your chest, arms wrapped around yourself like maybe you could contain it—but there was no containing this.

You cried.

Not for Abby. You barely thought about her now. Her voice, her touch, her anger—all of it already evaporating, disappearing into the static.

You cried for Ellie. For your Ellie.

The one who held you like her life depended on it. The one who touched you like you were the last song she’d ever play. The one who called you baby in the dark, who kissed you with apologies on her tongue, who broke and rebuilt you with the same pair of hands a million different times.

You sobbed for every second you spent convincing yourself you were fine. You weren’t. You never were.

Because you still loved her. With every part of you. With every scar she left. With every lyric you wrote, and every lyric you never dared to write.

And no matter how many cities you conquered, no matter how many stages screamed your name, no matter how many diamond gifts Abby clasped around your body—you never moved on.

And now she was back. Back.

Her name trending in every country. Her voice spilling from every speaker like a memory you never asked to remember.

And she hadn’t called. She hadn’t written. She hadn’t even fucking tried. Maybe she never would.

That was what broke you most. Not her silence. But the fear that it might last forever.

That she had healed. That she had closed the door you kept propped open with grief.

You screamed into the pillow. Bit down so hard you tasted blood. “Fuck you, Ellie!” “Fuck you for coming back and still staying gone.” “Fuck you for writing a song and not sending it to me.” “Fuck you for loving me and ruining me and leaving me.”

You cursed her. And then you cursed yourself. “Fuck me for waiting.” “Fuck me for still loving you.” “Fuck me for pretending I ever stopped.”

Tears soaked the pillow. Your wrists shook. Your breath came ragged.

You wanted her to disappear again. You wanted her to knock on your door. You wanted her to scream your name back.

You hadn’t listened to the song. 

Because if it was about you— If her voice cracked in that familiar way, if she said the things you never stopped needing to hear, if the guitar curled up into that shape only she knew how to play when her fingers were on your skin—It would kill you. Utterly. Unforgivably. Like the day she left.

And if it wasn’t about you? If she had given that voice, that intimacy, that love and pain to someone else? That would kill you in an even slower, impossibly more merciless way.

So you cried until your body gave out. Until your limbs went numb. Until your voice went hoarse from whispering the name that wouldn’t stop haunting your lips and your soul.

And a week later, Ellie released the album.

No warning. No press tour. No album rollout meticulously planned by agents in pastel offices. No teaser posts, no pre-saves, no comeback photoshoots in designer jackets that never felt like her. No features. No thank-yous.Just a thirty tracks posted at midnight.

The Shape Of What I Lost — Ellie Williams

The title alone was enough to break the internet.

No one had heard from her in three years. Just speculation, whispers, one single grainy shot of her walking into Joel’s truck with her hood up. Some thought she’d quit music. Others thought she was dead. Some hoped she was. Fame was like that. Fickle. Devouring.

But the truth was simpler. She hadn’t vanished. She had been bleeding. Recovering. Building something unbearable and beautiful out of everything she could no longer say out loud.

When the album dropped, the planet collapsed. Twitter imploded. TikTok went silent for a full hour. Journalists pulled all-nighters trying to write about something they didn’t understand. Critics used words like “devastating,” “seismic,” “a once-in-a-generation exorcism.” People stayed up all night listening. And crying. And relistening. And crying again.

But Ellie didn’t care.

She didn’t care that it was number one in thirty-two countries by sunrise. Didn’t care that it broke records previously held by people she used to idolize. Didn’t care that everyone was calling it a masterpiece. Because the only thing she cared about—the only number she was waiting for—was one. One stream.

Yours.

She didn’t care if the album was played a billion times. If that billion didn’t include you, it meant nothing. Because it was for you. Every bridge and breakdown and backmasked lyric. She didn’t even try to be subtle. She wanted everyone to know. She wanted you to know. 

That she had never stopped thinking about you. That she had never stopped writing about you. That she had never stopped loving you.

But she hadn’t listened to your album either.

She knew it existed. Joel told her over coffee a week ago, voice low like it might hurt to say out loud. He said it was called Supernova. Said you dropped it two years after her disappearance. Said it was brutal. Brilliant. Said it sounded like someone trying to build a cathedral out of ash. She never asked to hear it.

Because the thought of you pouring your voice into songs she would never be able to respond to—of hearing her name in a melody meant for closure, or worse, not hearing it at all—was something she didn’t think she could survive. 

So she stayed away from it. The same way you stayed away from hers. Two people too afraid to open the door, even when the key had always been each other.

Until one night.

You couldn’t sleep. The air in your LA penthouse felt sharp, like memory had a scent and it was everywhere. You lay on the floor of your bedroom, the same room that had held your rebirth and your ruin, clutching your phone like it was going to detonate.

In the same hour, across the country, Ellie was parked in Joel’s old truck. The windows fogged. The night holding its breath. The city lights flickering like your name spelled out in Morse code.

You both pressed play. At the same time. Without knowing. Without planning.

Thirty songs each. Thirty lifelines cast into the dark.

You listened to The Shape of What I Lost alone, in the dark, your body curled under the weight of the silence you had built around her name. The moment the first track started, something inside you snapped—not cleanly, not even loudly. It broke in slow, silent fractures, like a mirror spidering beneath a fist.

And then there she was.

Her voice was raw, unfiltered, unfinished in the most intimate way. It wasn’t studio-perfect. It was real. It was midnight and sweat-soaked sheets and breathless arguments and love too big to name. You heard her unravel in real time—angry, apologetic, addicted to you and terrified of hers. She didn’t hide behind metaphors. She let the truth bleed straight through the verses.

She sang about the way she left. The way she never stopped dreaming about you even when the drugs made dreaming unbearable. The night she almost didn’t wake up. The days she didn’t want to. The guilt that wrapped around her ribs like wire. The things she never said, and the way it ruined her voice when she tried to say them too late.

She sang about what addiction took from her: the music, the meaning, the way she could no longer hear a melody without seeing your face at the edge of the stage. She sang about you. In screams, in whispers, in sounds that didn’t even feel like language anymore.

And across the country, she was sitting in the dark, too.

And when she finally pressed play on Supernova, she exhaled like someone about to break a lifelong silence.

You came back in pieces. Your voice, your breath, the way you used to talk in the morning before you remembered the pain. She heard her own name buried in the harmonies—disguised, bent into rhyme, tucked inside the melody like a secret you still weren’t ready to say aloud. But she knew it. She recognized the shape of it. The ache of it. And she realized: every song you had released since her had been a love letter you were too proud, too shattered, too human to send.

And now, hearing it, she wept.

In the truck. One hand on the wheel. The other pressed to her mouth like she could hold the sound in, like crying out loud might summon you by accident. Each lyric was a wound she’d forgotten she had. Each chorus a reminder of the love she once held like a match between her fingers.

But what was the point? you were with someone else now.

Meanwhile, you were falling apart in your bed. Your face buried in your hands, the sheets damp with tears that had waited years to be cried. Your body curled like it had been struck. You weren’t just crying—you were keening, the kind of sound that only comes from love that was never buried properly.

Every line she sang brought you closer to the edge of yourself. Because now you knew. She had never stopped loving you. She had never stopped writing about you.

But what was the point? she never reached out.

You had both lived in silence, and that silence had been filled with thirty songs. Each.

Two albums, born in isolation. Two solitudes. Two hearts that beat like they were trying to find their way back through lyrics alone. Sixty tracks total. Composed in built in studios. Written in grief, carved out of silence. Sung through cracked voices and saltwater lungs.

Released not with fanfare, but into a void. At a time when the world had stopped looking for your faces. When the lights had dimmed on stages you once ruled. When both of you believed—quietly, privately, bitterly,  that the world had already moved on.

Forgotten you. Forgotten her. Forgotten both of you. Forgotten what you were together.

But the songs remembered, and they never stopped waiting. And for the first time in three years—you were both listening. To the truth. To each other. To what was never lost.

And maybe it was too late. Maybe too much had happened. Too many years. Too much silence.

But for those sacred, fragile two hours, you were both listening

To each other.

And to the love that never died, only waited to be heard.

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࿐♡ ˚.*ೃ Damn… Collide Nation, are y’all.......breathing...? I’m not exaggerating when I say this was the hardest chapter I've ever written; I immersed myself in documentaries, interviews, and extensive research because I desperately wanted to portray how genuinely heartbreaking and devastating addiction truly is. know this chapter was intense—maybe even shocking, painfully raw.

To anyone sensitive to these themes: please know I approached this with absolute care and respect, ensuring it remained realistic, grounded, and never exploitative. Your well-being matters most to me, so my DMs and inbox are always open if you need someone to talk to. I’m here for you. ♡

Azzi’s condo, San Francisco. October 2025. 

Azzi woke up first. The room was still, and the curtains pulled against the early sun. Paige’s arm was wrapped across her waist like it had been welded there overnight. She lay curled forward with Azzi tucked neatly into the space she made.  

Little spoon.  

It almost made Azzi laugh. How natural it felt to fit there. How ridiculous it was that she’d gone years without letting herself sink into something this simple. 

Her body ached in the best way. Muscles stretched, skin tender, and hair tangled beyond repair. She had been stripped down, armor and all. And for once she hadn’t rushed to rebuild it before morning.  

Paige’s breath brushed against the back of her neck with a rhythm that told her the girl was nowhere near waking up. 

Azzi pressed her hand over Paige’s arm, tugging it closer. She let herself sink into the warmth behind her. She could already imagine her brothers’ and best friend’s smug looks if they ever guessed how much she wanted this. How easy it was.  

Paige had a habit of throwing her entire self into everything, and last night was proof of that. 

Her eyes grew heavy again. For once she let herself drift.  

Paige was wrapped around her, breathing like she had nothing better to do in the world, and Azzi allowed herself to fall back into it. 

- 

The next time Azzi woke up, Paige was nowhere to be found.  

For a heartbeat she felt her chest tighten, a ripple of panic that pushed her upright before she caught the faint sound of a sizzle and the unmistakable smell of bacon cooked into oblivion.  

Relief spread through her, tangled with a sigh she almost laughed at. 

She tied her robe and padded out of the bedroom. The kitchen came into view first. There was smoke curling faintly from the pan, and then Paige, caught mid-turn with a face that was half guilty and half smug. 

“Good morning, babe,” Paige said with a grin that looked entirely too proud for the crime scene behind her. “Before you say anything else... Yes, I burned your toast and yes, I made the bacon so crispy it qualifies as charcoal. But... I figured out your new fancy coffee machine, which means I get points for making your coffee exactly the way you like it.” 

Azzi stood there. Her brain was still climbing out of sleep, trying to process the stream of words Paige fired at her. The short version was clear enough. The girl couldn’t cook even if her life depended on it. 

Still, the effort tugged at her. There was something endearing about the mess, even with her pristine kitchen nearly sacrificed in the process.  

An A for effort, maybe an F for execution, but she found herself smiling all the same. 

Azzi closed the distance and kissed Paige, catching her off guard the grin froze on her lips. She whispered a soft Thank you to the blonde, then trailed small kisses across her face.  

Paige broke into laughter, head tipping back, relieved she wasn’t being thrown out for nearly torching the condo. 

“Don’t know what you’re thanking me for. But hey, I got my girl happy,” Paige smirked. 

“Your girl, huh?” Azzi teased, her arm stayed hooked around Paige’s neck. 

“Your niece already blessed us as girlfriends. Do you wanna level up and be wives instead?” 

Azzi rolled her eyes but refused to let go. “Leave it to you to ruin something romantic.” 

“Getting married is romantic, babe. Watch me propose to you.” 

“You don’t even have a ring.” 

Paige smiled wider, the kind of grin that made Azzi’s stomach twist. It looked less like a joke and more like Paige had a secret she planned to spring on her later. The possibility sparked panic before Azzi could tamp it down. 

“Do you?” she asked, eyes narrowing. 

Paige shrugged with an innocence that was anything but. She slipped out of Azzi's hold to scrape the charred bacon into the trash. 

“How about we go get some real breakfast?” She winked at Azzi. 

- 

In a strange kind of magic that sportswriters would be talking about for years, the Valkyries became the first expansion team to reach the WNBA Finals in their inaugural season.  

Although, the first game ended in a mess of turnovers, missed shots, and a home crowd forced into stunned applause for the Liberty’s win. 

Paige sulked at Azzi’s dining table like a kid grounded on Christmas. Her knee rested awkwardly beneath the chair, her whole body buzzing with unused energy. She rattled off every adjustment the team should have made. From better ball movement to smarter rotations.  

By the time she slumped back with a defeated sigh, Azzi had worked her way through half a cup of tea, quiet as Paige’s storm. 

“I shouldn’t have gotten this injury,” Paige muttered, glaring at the table as if it had wronged her. “I could’ve helped them.” 

Azzi set her cup down, finally choosing to interrupt the self-pity spiral. “Darling, you’re not allowed to go there.” 

Paige blinked, as if only just realizing she’d had an audience. 

“I know it feels unbearable to watch them without you. But the team doesn’t need you blaming yourself or dragging them down with regrets. They need you as the teammate who believes in them, even now.” Azzi said. 

Her words cut through Paige’s sulking more effectively than any talk Geno could deliver when she was at UConn. Paige’s jaw worked, stubborn pride wrestling with the truth in Azzi’s eyes. 

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to win. I wanted us to win,” Paige sighed. 

Azzi softened, her hand sliding across the table until it found Paige’s fingers. “I know you’ve been used to winning from the moment you first touched a basketball. But losing isn’t the end. It only gives us another reason to grow stronger.” 

Paige’s lips curved, slow and reluctant at first, then full of warmth. “I had no idea my girlfriend was this wise.” 

Azzi pulled her hand back with exaggerated flair and leaned into her chair. “Please. This relationship wouldn’t last a week without me.” 

That set Paige off completely. A full smile spread across her face.  

“Look at us. Conversing like mature adults. Talking about our relationship like it’s the easiest thing in the world.” 

Heat rose in Azzi’s cheeks before she could stop it. Paige was right. It did feel easier. Freeing, even. Sitting across the table without walls between them, letting their relationship exist without fear of who might find out. The truth made her lighter, almost giddy. 

And in that moment, she knew she had Paige to thank.  

Thank her for refusing to walk away, for fighting through the awkward starts and the stubborn edges, and for giving her another chance to believe in something real. 

- 

Fudd Holdings, San Francisco. October 2025. 

Nika swept into the office balancing a stack of takeout boxes like she had just raided half the fast-food chains in San Francisco. 

Azzi raised an eyebrow from behind her desk. “I didn’t know you loved me enough to sabotage my diet with this much fast food.” 

Nika dropped the boxes onto the coffee table with a flourish. “Lucky for you, I’m not out to clog your arteries with a million calories. But apparently your girlfriend does.” 

Azzi shot upright. “Paige ordered all this?” 

“Front desk says yes.” Nika plucked a card from one of the bags and read aloud, “To Azzi Fudd, the love of my life.”  

Azzi snatched it before she could get another word out, cheeks warming far faster than she would have liked. 

“From non-girlfriend girlfriend to love of my life, huh?” Nika teased. 

“Shut up.” Azzi shoved her shoulder, retreating to the couch with the note clutched in hand. She sat down, trying and failing to erase the grin tugging at her mouth. “Come sit and have lunch with me.” 

Nika shrugged and dropped beside her. “I could never say no to free food.” 

Azzi opened one of the boxes and shook her head at the ridiculousness of it all. Paige, with her reckless charm, had managed to turn a corporate office into an impromptu picnic. And Azzi, against her better judgment, felt herself melting into it. 

“So, how’s it going in Fudd Love Island?” 

Azzi stopped unwrapping her chicken burger as she raised her eyebrow. “That is such a cringey way to put it.” 

“Well, since you’re in the honeymoon stage, I figured you’d appreciate cringe.” Nika popped a fry into her mouth, chewing with exaggerated delight. 

“You’re just inventing new ways to tease me.” 

“That I do.” Nika winked. “But seriously, how are you and the rookie?” 

Azzi smirked, tempted to throw the jab right back. “Well, she’s definitely not a rookie in bed.” 

Nika fake choked, clutching her throat. “Eww. Oh my god, I did not need that mental image.” 

“You’re the one who asked.” 

“I meant in a normal, human way,” Nika rolled her eyes. “Still, props to the rookie for getting you to joke about your sex life. Where did my reserved, demure friend go?” 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

Nika’s grin softened. “But seriously, Az. Happy and in love looks good on you.” 

Azzi put her food down and tugged her best friend into a hug. “Thank you. And thank you for always talking my ear off about what makes me happy.” 

“Anything for my sister from another mother.” Nika patted her back. 

Azzi laughed as she pulled away. “You need to stop hanging out with Trey. His influence on your vocabulary is alarming.” 

“Please. Your brothers are relentless when it comes to business paperwork. I’ve lost more sleep working with them than I ever lost working with you.” 

Azzi frowned. “I’ll talk to them.” 

“It’s fine, Az. We’re getting through it.” Nika smiled before shifting gears. “Does Paige know?” 

“I haven’t told her yet.” 

“She’ll either be pissed or relieved. But she loves you enough to understand.” 

“I hope so. I might have to bribe her so she doesn’t sulk for days. You know how childish she gets.” 

“Her birthday gift won’t cover that?” 

“I also haven’t told her about that yet.” 

Nika gasped so loudly it echoed in the office, hand flying to her chest. “You what?” 

- 

Paige’s apartment, Oakland. October 2025. 

“Babe, have you seen my white Nike shirt?” Paige yelled from the bedroom. 

Azzi sighed, saving her file before shutting the laptop. She padded down the hall and found Paige on the floor surrounded by enough cotton blends to launch a resale business. 

“You have a hundred white Nike shirts. Which one is this about?” 

“The one you wore when we went grocery shopping the other day.” 

“That’s in the laundry. At my place.” 

Paige groaned. “But I wanted to wear it in New York.” 

Azzi folded her arms, voice slipping into corporate boardroom mode. “Okay, Paige Madison Bueckers, what is going on with your attitude tonight?” 

Hearing her government name was like being smacked with a ruler in Catholic school. Paige straightened. “Sorry. I’m just nervous about the next couple of games.” 

Azzi softened, sinking down beside her on the carpet. “Okay. Tell me what’s really bothering you.” 

“I don’t know.” Paige picked at a hoodie string. “What if we lose? Both games. What if New York takes everything?” 

In a miracle finish that had Chase Center shaking, the Valkyries pulled off Game 2. The series was tied, one apiece, sending games 3 and 4 to Barclays. 

Azzi brushed Paige’s hair off her forehead. “Paige, have faith in your team.” 

“Is that how you run your businesses? Because I might not know how to handle one company, let alone the empire you’re juggling, but you make it look easy.” 

Azzi snorted. “It’s never easy. I aim for results, not perfection. I hire the best people, then trust them to do their jobs. When something fails, we regroup, figure out why, and try again. I may own the company, but I’m never the company alone.” 

Paige leaned into her touch, soaking up every word like it was oxygen. 

“Just like how you’re not the Golden State Valkyries alone. You’re part of them. You have coaches, teammates, and an entire system. Trust them the way they trust you.” 

Paige’s throat went tight. She kissed Azzi before she could say anything stupid to ruin her moment. 

“You’re amazing, you know that?” she whispered. 

“Yeah. Unfortunately, I’ve been hearing that my whole life.” Azzi chuckled as her fingers gliding along Paige's cheek. “But coming from you, it feels new.”    Paige leaned in for another kiss. When they broke apart, Azzi kept her forehead on Paige’s. 

“Do what you can to support and trust your team,” Azzi whispered. “Whatever the results, know that I’ll always be proud of everyone. Of you.” 

“I can’t believe I’m really dating the Azzi Fudd and I’m getting free consultation on being mature with my feelings.” 

Azzi laughed, then knocked Paige’s head lightly as she sank back into the carpet. 

“Sorry for stressing you out with me stressing myself out,” Paige whispered. “I just want to give you a championship.” 

Azzi looked away and Paige caught the change of mood immediately. 

“Babe?” 

Azzi sighed as she focused her gaze back at the blonde. “Do you still want to get traded?” 

Paige froze. She had forgotten all about the request she filed before her injury, back when life felt like a different situation entirely. 

“Uhm, no,” Paige said, voice quick. “Like I told you, I only asked because I wanted to be with you. But we’re here now, together, trying this out. I’m not chasing that anymore.” 

Azzi nodded, slow and thoughtful. 

Paige narrowed her eyes. “Az, what’s wrong? Are you trading me?” 

Azzi shook her head and exhaled. “No. I’m selling the team to my brothers and Nika.” 

Paige’s mouth fell open. “Wait, what?” 

“As much as I love the team, I want to try with you. Really try. I don’t want rumors about favoritism or ownership hanging over your career. I don’t want you carrying that pressure.” Azzi’s voice softened, her hand reaching for Paige’s. “I love you, Paige.” 

The words cracked Paige open. She felt the tears before she could process them, tugging Azzi against her and burying her face in her curls.  

“I’m sorry you had to choose,” she whispered, voice shaking. “You had to give your team up for me.” 

“Then win me a championship next season. Make it up to me that way.” 

Paige pulled back, searching Azzi's face. “You still have one more year?” 

Azzi nodded, brushing her thumb across Paige’s wet cheek. “At most. Paperwork takes forever. Besides, I want one more year to boss you around.” 

Paige laughed through the mess of emotions, kissing her girlfriend like it was the easiest answer in the world.  

“I love you too. And yes, I’ll give you a ring and a trophy next season.” Then her grin turned into teasing. “In fact, I might give you two rings next year.”    “Paige!” 

- 

Six Flags, Vallejo. October 2025. 

Paige still couldn’t wrap her head around it.  

One second she was blowing out candles at a team breakfast in the Valkyries Headquarters, and now she was staring at an entire Six Flags that looked like the Valkyries had bought stock in it. 

Every ride roped off. Every snack stand was manned like it was opening day. Every staff on the payroll smiling at them like it was just another Saturday shift.  

Paige didn’t want to know the phone calls or bank transfers it took to pull this off. She didn’t want to picture Azzi casually saying, Yeah, I’ll take the whole park for twenty-four hours. Can you throw in extra churros? 

The corndog stand felt like a checkpoint. Paige squinted up at the neon menu, then turned to the woman standing beside her, who was absolutely the reason this birthday now came with a seven-figure price tag. 

“How the fuck did you do this?” She groaned, shutting her eyes before Azzi could even think about answering. “Actually, you know what, don’t tell me. Keep your billionaire witchcraft to yourself.” 

That made Azzi laughed. “Happy Birthday, baby!” 

Paige blew out a theatrical breath and opened her eyes again, already rolling them. “I love you, Azzi Fudd. But next time, can you do something normal? Something that doesn’t involve giving park managers headaches.”  

She kissed Azzi’s cheek and sauntered off toward her teammates, who were yelling at each other about who was brave enough to ride the SkyScreamer first. 

Azzi heard Paige mutter on the way, “Stupid billionaire sexy girlfriend.” 

It only made her laugh harder.  

She turned just in time to see her brother and niece coming through the gates. Zuri ran full speed, curls bouncing, arms wide. Azzi bent down and scooped her up, pressing a kiss to her cheek. 

“Hey there, little munchkin.” 

“Hi, Auntie Azzi! Where’s Paigey?” 

Azzi nodded toward the group of tall women arguing about the rides. “She’s with her teammates. You’ll get her later. She’ll probably need someone to drag her to the cotton candy cart.” 

“Can I give her my present today?” 

Azzi lifted a brow. “What did you get her?” 

Zuri pointed toward James, who was holding a small Cartier bag like it was a happy meal toy. 

“She had Cartier’s designer on a chokehold,” James explained, as if this was perfectly normal kid behavior. 

Azzi shook her head. “Paige is going to break up with the entire family when she sees how ridiculous we are with gifts.” 

James grinned, clearly enjoying himself. “Is this a bad time to mention Dad and Trey may or may not have visited Porsche last week?” 

Azzi stared at him, then tipped her head back with a laugh she didn’t bother to suppress. “You’re all insane. She’s going to think we’re auditioning for Succession.” 

- 

The air smelled like funnel cake and sunscreen, and the sound of roller coasters roared somewhere in the background. Paige had her hair slicked back with a cheap carnival headband Zuri had shoved on her. 

She dribbled the first ball from the rack, preparing to start the three-point challenge. 

“Loser treats everyone to hot dogs,” Kiki called out. 

Kate waved her off immediately and pointed toward the wristbands they were all wearing. “Food was already paid by Miss Fudd. Try again.” 

“Fine!” Paige sighed. “Loser gets to ride Medusa alone.” 

Aziaha groaned dramatically. “That’s actual torture. I just ate chili fries.” 

“Better start stretching your stomach then,” Paige teased, letting the ball fly. It bricked so badly it bounced into the other end of the court. 

“Hall of Fame shot right there,” Kate said, clapping slow and sarcastic. 

“Shup up! I’m just out of practice.”    “Whatever you say birthday girl.” Kiki laughed. 

- 

Paige slouched against the hard plastic seat of the Seaport Railway, trying to look like someone who was perfectly fine with being benched at her own birthday party.  

Timeout. She could practically hear the ref’s whistle in her head.  

Azzi had found out about the three-point challenge stunt and locked her out of the game faster than any defensive switch.  

Fine. Totally fine. Who wouldn’t want to ride a kiddie train in slow motion around fake rocks and half-baked pirate scenery? 

The thing was, she actually didn’t mind.  

Zuri was perched on her lap, little arms wound tight around Paige’sneck like she was afraid her Paigey might vanish into the air if she let go.  

Her curls tickled Paige’s jaw as she talked at full kindergarten volume about her teacher, her best friend, and a class pet rabbit that Paige was ninety percent sure was either imaginary or dead.  

Paige listened as if this was the most important post-game press conference she’d ever been part of. She tipped her nose against Zuri’s cheek and rained soft kisses across her face. 

Zuri squealed and tightened her grip. Her laughter was spilling out like it had its own rhythm section. Then, in the smallest voice possible, she whispered, “Happy birthday, Paigey!” 

Paige felt her chest melt into something warm and embarrassingly sentimental. Her arms circled Zuri in a squeeze she wasn’t planning to end anytime soon.  

“Thank you, Lil Z,” she murmured against the kid’s hair. 

She caught a glimpse of her teammates a few rows up, watching the scene unfold with those knowing looks that said they’d never let her live it down. Paige didn’t care. She was suspended in the kind of happiness no stat sheet could measure. 

Benched from park activities, yes.  

But wrapped up in the affection of her favorite kid, all worth Azzi’s scolding. 

- 

Azzi’s condo, San Francisco. October 2025. 

Paige had melted into the couch, blonde hair sticking up in weird roller-coaster angles. She was muttering something that sounded vaguely like best birthday ever before her eyes slid shut.  

Azzi, on the other hand, refused to let the grand finale of Paige’s birthday end with snoring and drool stains on the cushions.  

“Paige,” Azzi said softly, crouching down beside her. “Come on. Couch time is over.” 

Paige cracked one eye open. “What if I live here now? Couch is my new apartment. I’ll pay rent in Hot Cheetos.” 

Azzi rolled her eyes, but her heart warmed at the lazy smile Paige gave her. She tugged at Paige’s hands until the blonde groaned but finally sat up. Paige looked like she had just completed a survival challenge. 

Azzi guided her toward the bathroom, both of them bumping shoulders like they were tipsy even though they were only high on adrenaline and sugar. The tub was already filling with warm water and a swirl of bubbles, faint lavender rising in the air. 

Paige blinked at it and muttered, “You’re too good. Honestly. Too good for me.” 

Azzi shrugged like it was nothing, though inside she felt ridiculously pleased. “Birthday perks.”