Heartstrings by Sierra Riley Read Free Book Online Page B

soccer field.
    This moment felt almost exactly the same.
    For a fleeting moment, it was easy for Cal to forget. The last five years faded away to his periphery, nothing more than an afterthought. What mattered was the beautiful piece of craftsmanship sitting in front of him, a gift from a dear friend who’d clearly poured his heart and soul into making it.
    If he’d stuck around long enough to spend his twenty-third birthday with Blake, it would have been the most beautiful thing he owned.
    Cal fought the sting of tears in his eyes and gruffly cleared his throat.
    “You uh,” he started to say. He wasn’t sure what words were supposed to come next. Probably some expression of gratitude.
    Instead he looked up, tentatively meeting Blake’s eyes.
    “You wanna take her for a test drive?” he asked.
    Blake’s mouth formed a tiny, wordless circle. He looked side to side, as if afraid someone might catch them together, a stolen moment of reconciliation that wasn’t allowed to happen in real life.
    “Yeah,” Blake said, a little breathless. “Okay.”
    Cal tried to ward himself away, tried to talk himself out of it. Because playing music with Blake again would be the final nail in his coffin. He didn’t want to fall in love again, not with anyone. Falling in love all over again with the guy who broke his heart in the first place seemed so stupid.
    But when Cal brushed his fingers over the guitar’s strings, all he felt was a lightness in him, a glow, a warmth. A little grin tugged at his mouth, infectious and irrepressible.

    * * *
    T he bar wasn’t quite closed , but most of the stage had been dismantled and most of the regulars had cleared out. Still, there was a sparse audience watching as Cal and Blake pulled a couple chairs over into a corner, Blake with his banjo and Cal with his new guitar. Cal didn’t have a tuner handy, but Blake had an app on his phone that did away with that excuse.
    “I don’t even know what to play,” Cal said, running his fingers over the steel strings, enjoying the texture of them. Blake shrugged, plucked a little roll on his banjo that Cal recognized as “Goodnight Ladies,”a warm-up.
    “What’s something easy?”
    “Most of our songs are easy. They weren’t supposed to be hard, just fun.”
    Blake laughed at that, then started to pluck the opening bars of a song Cal recognized. It was one they’d often played together, an old Mississippi John Hurt number.
    “‘Staggerlee’? Really?” Cal snorted, amused.
    “It’s Stack O’Lee, man.”
    “That’s not even true.”
    It was an argument they’d had before. But in the end, the name of the song—or rather, the name of the gentleman featured prominently in the lyrics—didn’t really matter.
    Following along by ear, Cal sat out the first few bars, then gently joined in. He finger-picked in tandem with Blake’s banjo, a few light harmony notes here and there. At first, he was cautious. He hadn’t played guitar much at all since leaving the band. But muscle memory was a powerful thing, because soon enough his fingers were flying.
    Though the tune was a simple bluegrass staple, the warm, resonant tone of Cal’s guitar elevated it to something else. He could hardly believe how good it sounded.
    Once Cal had established his part, Blake took over the vocal melody on his banjo, playing along rather than singing. The standard was a simple one, but the banjo was a bright, jangling counterpart to the warmth of Cal’s chords.
    Not once did Cal even have to look over at Blake. They just riffed off one another like nothing had changed, like whatever wordless communication between them hadn’t taken a single day off, let alone five years. Because that was how it had always been between them: easy, natural. There was nothing forced about it.
    Cal wasn’t sure he was thinking about the music anymore.
    But then again, was it so bad? To indulge in a little nostalgia, to explore his feelings through the lens of a few years’