I watch in complete stillness as his fingertips lift up and down over the fret board of his guitar, I had always known he had come from a musical background, but I never realised just how perfect the sounds he could create from scratch really were. 

“What song is that? Is it it yours?”

“Yeah, I thought of calling it ‘Sunlight’.” His thumb rolls down across the steel strings over the sound chamber.

“But it sounds so cold.” I can still feel it in my bones.

“You can’t know something without knowing the absence of it as well." 

We sit for a moment and I let that sink in. I remember a lesson from school about there being no such thing as cold, just the absence of heat. 

For a split second I think of Zac’s chest pressed to my back, the warmth I felt emanate from him, the way it spread like wild fire to my fingers and toes. 

I shut my eyes tight, trying my hardest to shake him off me. 

Isaac packs his guitar away and slides the case back under the bed like something to be ashamed of.

"You never told me what happened, why you stopped playing.” I look to him, trying to read if I have upset him in any way by asking. His hands are curled over the edge of the bed, shoulders up around his ears. He continues to stare at his bare feet. 

“We just weren’t getting along. Zac said some pretty heartless things to me, Taylor sided with him, as always… And we decided if the three of us wanted to remain brothers we would have to stop being bandmates.”

“Oh.” I feel sick all of a sudden. I had never known or thought Zac to be heartless; I wondered what else I didn’t know about him. “Do you think it’s capable of being repaired?”

“He said sorry,” Isaac shrugs, “They both did.”

“But that doesn’t mean it hurt any less.” I finish for him, I realise I’d seen this inadvertently whenever it had just been the three of them together. I had taken it for introversion, but now I see it is defeat; a feeling that almost always comes when you have no choice but to love someone in spite of the way they make you feel about yourself. 

He turns to me, sliding a bent knee on to the mattress, his foot still hanging over the edge. He smiles, “It’s ancient history.”

I raise an eyebrow, “You know, whenever someone says that, it’s never ancient history.”

“They’re my brothers. I love them.” He settles back in to himself.

I give him a look, “Sweeping things under the rug just gives you more things to trip over.”

Laughing, he leans forward to plant a kiss on my forehead, “I’m clumsy anyway, so it won’t make a difference.”

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