Every Breath After: Part 1 (Lost Boys, #3)

by Jessie Walker

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT Abandoning my guitar against the wall, I ignore the voices calling out to me as I hop down from the stage, and shoulder my way through the crowd. He’s here, he’s here, he’s here. It’s an incessant chant in my head. One I try to tamper with, It might not be him. Relax. Be cool. But…it is. It is him. I know it is. I know it as certainly as I know that I just fucking killed that song. It’s way more vocal heavy than most of what we play, but hell if I wasn’t determined to nail it. Roughen it up a bit. Make it mine. Ours. My heart pounds with the familiar rush of performing—of singing and playing music I actually enjoy, for a crowd of people who are just as infected by the music pouring out of me as I am, and aren’t just sitting about with placid looks of judgement on their faces. It’s a fucking high I never realized I craved, not until these last couple months as Shawn, Waylon, and I went from hiding and jamming out in my mom’s basement, to making a little studio of our own beneath this bar, to actually playing for people. Handfuls at first—lingering regulars. Then slowly, slowly, and all at once, to playing for wall to wall crowds as word got out about us—the Lost Boys. A name that started as a sort of dark humored joke, prompted by Waylon—a call back to his obsession as a kid, before I moved to town—and eventually just…stuck.