Aiden’s POV
I made it three blocks before the liquor store found me. Or I found it. The distinction doesn't matter when you're walking through Vegas with a woman's voice ringing in your ears — go drown in a ditch — and the neon is bleeding across the sidewalk and your hands won't stop shaking and every cell in your body is screaming for the one thing you promised her you'd stop needing.
The store was the kind of place where nobody recognizes you and the transaction takes eleven seconds. I stood in the aisle staring at a bottle of Maker's Mark and having the conversation I'd been having with myself for six years — one voice says don't and the other says you're already here and the second voice always wins because the second voice knows your real name. I bought it. Didn't open it for two more blocks, which I told myself counted as restraint.
By the time I found the park — man-made, engineered green wedged between two casinos, fake lake, hired-looking ducks — the bottle was two-thirds gone and the world had softened into that whiskey blur where everything hurts less and you can pretend the warmth in your chest is something other than poison. I sat on a bench by the water. A duck waddled up and stared at me with the flat focus of a therapist waiting for you to say the thing you're avoiding.
"Ron," I said, because he seemed like a Ron and because I was drunk enough to name a duck and sober enough to know that meant I'd crossed a line I wasn't coming back from tonight. "Let me tell you something."
Ron tilted his head. I took another drink.
"My mom cleaned rich people's houses." The whiskey burned and I welcomed it because the burning was a thing I could feel that wasn't the green room, wasn't her voice cracking on same, wasn't Jude's face when the door slammed. "Twelve hours a day, on her knees scrubbing floors that cost more than our rent. She'd bring me when she couldn't find a sitter and I'd sit in their kitchens doing homework at marble countertops, smelling food I couldn't eat. Same shoes for two years, holes stuffed with newspaper. The smell followed me to school and the kids knew."
Ron quacked. I appreciated his input.
"They shoved me into lockers. Called my mom the cleaning lady. Every day, for years." I took another drink. "And what I decided, too young to know it was a decision, was that if I couldn't stop being the kid they laughed at, I could become the kid who laughed at someone else. Make them look at her so they'd stop looking at me."
"There was a girl in my new school. She had a notebook." I stared at the lake — flat, still, reflecting neon. "She wrote poems that made you feel like someone reached into your chest and described what they found. And I read one aloud behind the groundskeeper's shed because boys were watching and if they laughed at her words they wouldn't look at my shoes."
My throat closed. I pushed through. "Then I took the notebook from dirt when nobody watched. Every page. And what I felt — what I couldn't name at seventeen — was that this girl could create from nothing. Words from air. I was so terrified of that gap that the only way to survive it was to steal it."
Ron had settled onto the grass near my feet, his head tucked under one wing like a man who'd heard enough but wasn't leaving.
"Three albums, Ron. Platinum records. Awards I can't look at. And when the words ran out I started drinking because a drunk man has an excuse for being empty."
I finished the bottle. Set it on the bench. The park was quiet except for the ducks and the distant thrum of a city designed to keep people from being alone with themselves.
"I was bullied my whole childhood. And now I've turned into exactly what I hated because I'm angry at myself for not being able to create anything of my own. That's the punchline, Ron." I looked at him. "Laugh if you want."
"Sounds sad." The voice came from behind me — female, flat, familiar in a way that made my whole body go cold and then hot.
I didn't turn around, still half-convinced for a second that Ron had actually learned to talk. "Tell me about it, buddy." Then it landed and I turned.
Allison. Arms crossed. Standing on the path behind the bench with her hair pulled back and her eyes — not angry. Not the green-room fury from an hour ago. Something else. The exhaustion that comes after you've burned everything down and you're standing in the ashes deciding what to save.
"What are you doing here?"
"I'm your sitter, after all." She walked around the bench and sat on the other end — not close, not far. "And judging by that bottle, I deserve a fine for failing at mine."
I looked at the empty Maker's Mark between us. "You're not failing."
"You're drunk on a park bench talking to a duck. The bar for failure is lower than you think."
Something in my chest cracked — not the breaking kind. The kind where something sealed too tight finally lets air in. She'd said go drown in a ditch and then she'd come to find me. Both things were true.
"His name is Ron," I said. She looked at the duck. The duck looked at her. "He's a good listener."
"He's a duck, Aiden." She said it the way you'd explain gravity to someone who'd decided to argue with it.
"Don't be rude. He's been very supportive." I scratched Ron's head. He tolerated it with the dignity of a creature who'd never once lied about what he was.
She didn't smile. But something in her jaw loosened, just slightly, the way a fist unclenches when the fight is over and the body hasn't caught up to the decision yet.
We sat. The strip glowed. Ron settled between us like a chaperone, and for a while nobody spoke.
"You know what happens when one of my songs comes on the radio?" I wasn't looking at her. I was looking at the lake. "I feel sick. Physically sick. Because the voice is mine but the soul of it isn't. Every word, every metaphor — I know exactly where it came from. And it wasn't from me."
She didn't say anything. The silence had a shape to it — not empty, not hostile. Waiting.
"Awards ceremonies are the worst. Standing at a podium thanking producers and label heads and the whole time thinking — the girl who actually wrote this is working doubles at a coffee shop she can't afford to quit." I rubbed my face. "And the drinking. You want to know why the water bottles? Why the air vents, the guitar case, the hiding?"
"Tell me." Two words, no performance in them. Just the quiet demand of a woman who'd decided to stay.
"Because performing sobriety is easier than sitting in silence. Because if I'm sober I have to be in my own head and my head is a room full of evidence that I'm nothing. So I pour vodka into Dasani bottles and pretend the shaking is just nerves and hope nobody looks close enough to see that the water doesn't move right."
She listened. Didn't interrupt. Didn't comfort. I could feel her listening the way you feel weather — a shift in pressure, a stillness that had weight.
She already knew all of this — I could see it in the way nothing I said surprised her. She'd figured it out herself, piece by piece, from weeks of watching me too closely. But it didn't matter. Knowing the shape of a wound from the outside is different from hearing the person bleed. What I was giving her now was the feeling underneath.
"Every time I sing your words," I said, and the pronoun slipped out before I could catch it — your, not the, a confession tucked inside a sentence I hadn't planned. She went very still. "Every time I sing on that stage, I think: she should be here. This should be hers. And then I sing anyway because the silence would kill me faster than the drinking."
Ron quacked. Neither of us laughed. Neither of us left.
The strip pulsed. The man-made lake reflected neon. Two people who'd gutted each other an hour ago sat on a bench by a fake lake in a city made of lies, and for the first time since I stole a notebook from a girl I was too stupid to love properly, I felt something that wasn't performance or guilt or whiskey filling the space where talent should have been.
I felt seen. And it was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to me.