Sunkissed, Kasie West [best authors to read TXT] 📗

shot?” Without thinking, I grabbed his arm and flipped it to study the underside. There were no red marks.

“If you bend your extended arm just a bit, it helps.”

I dropped my hand. “Remember when I said tips, tricks, secrets? That would fall under really any of those categories.”

“I’m sorry.” He took my arm this time. “Let me see.” He ran a light finger over the welt that had appeared on my skin. “Does it still hurt?”

A chill ran up my arm and all the way down my spine. Our eyes met. He was waiting for an answer, I realized. “No, it doesn’t.” Lauren’s accusation about me having a crush on him flashed through my mind and I took a step back, breaking our connection. Then, much too loudly, I asked, “Did I hit the target?” I searched the tree in the distance, which only held his arrow.

“Close,” he said.

“Are you lying?”

“Yes.”

I walked the path to the tree and found my arrow on the ground halfway there. I scooped it up and finished the walk, pulling his out of the dark wood. Instead of walking back to him, I sat on our target. A large black ant crawled along the bark by my leg, carrying a tiny rock in its pinchers. I shifted out of its path.

“Where did you learn how to shoot an arrow?” I asked as Brooks walked my way.

“Here, actually. My first summer.”

“I thought you were going to tell me that you belong to a family of hunters or something.”

“No. I’ve only ever shot paper targets. And honestly, not very well.”

“But I was very impressed. Do I need to take it back?”

He nudged at the tree with his foot. “This was a very big target.”

“Obviously not big enough for some of us.” I held out the arrows to him.

“It was your first time. Don’t tell me you’re done.”

“I’m done for a minute.” I rubbed my arm. “I thought you were going to bring your notebook so we could work on lyrics too.” But he hadn’t. The only thing in the clearing were the bows and arrows.

“That would’ve been smart.”

“When is this festival audition anyway?”

He used the arrows as drumsticks and tapped out a beat on a branch. “July eighteenth.”

“That’s in less than four weeks!”

“We have the instruments, the players, and the music. All we need are the lyrics. Easy.”

I laughed. “Except obviously not, because you guys have had, what, three weeks together and have written two lines?”

“But now we have you.”

“You do remember I’ve never done this before, right?”

“We have almost four weeks.”

“No pressure or anything.”

He sank both arrows into a rotting section of wood on the fallen tree and left them there. “If it works, it works. If it doesn’t…”

“It’s a sign?”

“Right.”

Great, Brooks’s entire future was dependent on whether I could help him write the perfect song? “Remind me of the lines Ian kept singing the other night.”

“ ‘What’s tomorrow look like from over there? Because from here it looks a lot like yesterday, and I’m tired of trying to rewrite history.’ ”

My eyes were on the ant traveling the log again while I listened to Brooks. “Did you write that?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it about?”

He seemed surprised by the question, as if nobody had asked him that before. Wasn’t that the kind of thing a band discussed when writing lyrics? “It’s about feeling stuck, I guess, like when your future looks exactly like your past and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

I moved one foot onto the log with me and hugged my knee to my chest. “Is it fiction? Or is that inspired by your life?”

His gaze went out to the lake or at least in that direction. “Inspired is such a funny word. Like my life could be inspiration for anything.”

“Many stories are inspired by tragedy.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“So what’s yours?” I asked.

“What’s mine?”

“Your tragedy. Why all the musical angst? Broken heart? Bitter divorce?”

“I haven’t been married yet,” he said.

I gave a breathy laugh. “You’re running out of time.”

“I know, I’m practically an old maid, a spinster, a cat lady….Wow, all the late to marriage sayings only apply to women, don’t they?”

“Yes, should we write a song about all the misogyny in the world?”

“Because an all-male band performing a song about misogyny is a good look?”

“You’re right, let’s focus on your tragic, tragic backstory and then go from there. So spill.”

“Yes, where do I start? My pathetic life is full of lyrical inspiration.”

I could tell he had started that as a joke, but by the end of the second sentence, his voice had gone so low I almost couldn’t hear it. So I put my chin on my knee and waited to see if he wanted to share.

He was back to staring at the lake. “My dad is sick. He had a stroke several years ago and can hardly function on his own. My mom decided to put him in a home that we really can’t afford. So now she works all the time and all my money goes to the family fund as well and basically I feel like I’m forty when I want to be eighteen for a minute but she needs me and so does my little brother. But most of all, my dad.” He said that all in a breathy rush, like he’d said it a million times and yet hadn’t shared it with anyone.

When I didn’t respond right away, searching for words that didn’t exist, he slowly let his head turn my way. “How’s that for tragedy? Is there some good inspiration in there?”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “About your dad.”

“It’s…” He shrugged. “It’s whatever.”

“I understand why you feel like you need a practical career instead of…”

“Selfishness?”

“What? No. Most teenagers I know wouldn’t contribute any of their paychecks to the family expenses. Brooks, you’re not selfish for also wanting to dream.”

“I guess the universe will let me know.”

Just in case there wasn’t some greater power ready to dole out signs, I wanted to help as much as possible. “Lyrics,” I said.

“You have an idea?”

“ ‘What’s