Say it Louder by Heidi Joy Tretheway Read Free Book Online

to Willa, my arm brushing hers as we sit side by side, feet dangling.
    “Also, when you’re up high, you’re close to invisible.”  
    I raise my brow in a question.
    Willa continues, “You ever see someone just walking down the sidewalk, looking up?”
    I shake my head.
    “Plenty of people look down, but hardly anyone looks up. Plus, cops’ hats have that brim, so stuff up high is hidden from their peripheral vision.” She shrugs. “Learn something new every day, don’t you, Dave?”
    I nod, a smile on my lips. For the last hour, I’ve forgotten what could be waiting for me at home, forgotten about the filth that Kristina could shovel to the media about my band, forgotten my tickets on the pity train, the Poor-Me Express.
    Willa let me live in her world for an hour. And it was magical.

CHAPTER NINE

    I don’t date. There’s work, there’s art, and there’s sleep.
    That doesn’t leave time to swoon over boys. But the time I spent on that rail bridge with Dave is the most date-like thing that’s ever happened to me.
    Ask me to replay tonight and I can’t tell you much of what we talked about. It was just … stuff. Stuff we like. Funny shit that happened to us. Embarrassing stuff.
    I talked about Nancy, how she and Ivy planned a trip to Paris after Ivy’s diagnosis. Ivy died before they could make the trip, so Nancy gave me a ticket. It was the first amazing thing anyone’s done for me since Thomas hired me, I told Dave.
    Dave didn’t volunteer much about himself. When I asked about how he grew up, he shut it down.
    “My parents are gone,” he said simply.
    “Gone where?” Then I got his meaning and I mentally kicked myself. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
    “Heart attack for my dad. While I was in college. Mom passed a couple of years before that, my senior year in high school. Lung cancer.” Dave said it like he was reading a report, blank and emotionless.
    “You miss them?” I knew I was on shaky ground, but curiosity was winning.
    “Yeah. But the band and Tyler’s mom took me in like family. And if I’m being really honest, they’re a lot more like family than my parents were. Growing up, it always felt like we were just trying to get by.”
    “I know that feeling.”
    We were quiet for a long while, just watching the traffic zoom below us, but my heart squeezed with a strange feeling.
    The small pieces Dave revealed started shaping a bigger picture that I could almost see come together. It was like staring at a half-done canvas and being struck by a sense of where the next brush strokes needed to be, but not sure if I could trust myself to make them right.  
    I’m starting to get him, and that understanding comes with a whole boatload of feelings that make my stomach squirm.
    Dave’s got this cloud hanging over him, the fear of what’s next, but there’s something inside him that’s seeking light.
    Some of my crunchy clients talk about auras and chakras and energy fields, and while I don’t buy all of that, I get what they mean. When I’m inking someone, I have a sense of their light or darkness. My needle bites into their skin, I blot their blood as I work, and maybe it’s the smell of them or the feeling that ghosts across my skin when I meet their eyes as they lay back in my chair.
    Blood and needles, ink and paint. Take all of humanity and you can boil down our motivations, our light and dark, into these essential elements. Murder, drugs, stories, art. They all come from blood and needles, ink and paint.
    I come from this place.
    Dave comes from another world. A world of rhythm—he taps out a beat without realizing it, his fingertips patting his jeans as I was painting tonight. He doesn’t know blood and needles the way I do. And yet, the way he’s hinted around the edges of a problem, I know there’s a darkness haunting him.
    As I led us back to my apartment, Dave’s silence was strung taut with what he left unsaid on the bridge. It’s like he wants to say it, but admitting it