The Upside of Falling Back To You

chapter forty two | summer long

remember to read/vote/comment on chapter forty one first!

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"OKAY, WAIT-" I stop Ronan as he messed with his guitar strings. He looked up, wondering what I wanted. "Can you play that again?"

He nods. He positions his fingers on the fret board again, replaying the last few notes he plucked on the strings. Ronan looked back up again, making sure that was the part I wanted to hear again.

I sit back at the piano. There was a pile of work I was ignoring but frankly I didn't care as much now. I play something on the piano, the notes of his guitar still ringing in my head. When I find the right progression, Ronan jumps back in.

"That sounds good," he comments. "You think we can work with that?"

I ignore him for a split second. There was something else in my head.

"I keep falling for the heart breakers..." I sign softly, then switch the chord. "The ones I can't have. I keep running and searching and hoping for someone to come back home to me."

I bite my lip. I took that straight from the leatherbound notebook in my room. I couldn't be singing that here, in front of him, especially when we're writing for him.

But Ronan comes up to me. "That sounded pretty." It was a generic comment, but it made my heart skip a beat anyways. "Do you want to work with that?"

I gulped. "I-"

"Or not."

"No, wait." I turned to him. "What do you think you could do with that?"

Ronan shrugged. "Well I mean, from that line alone, a song about continuing to fall for the wrong person, being with someone that doesn't feel right, wanting to find someone that, you know, feels like home. Someone that would come back when, I guess, others don't."

I guess, I repeat his words in my head. You don't guess, Ronan. You know that feeling.

"It would fit some of the other stuff we started," he looks down at the scribbles of lyrics in the notebook we were writing in.

"The Upside of Falling does not fit this song, are you kidding?"

"Tell me how many albums you listened to that's full of only break up songs or only falling-in-love type songs. It's more like... if we do write something along the lines of what you just sang, it's part of the story the album is telling."

"And what story are you trying to tell here?" I asked him, genuinely.

Ronan tucked his hands into his sweater pockets. "I don't know yet. Sometimes it comes together after you write the stories you want to tell."

Was that code for I-think-you-know-but-you-won't-like-it? Because I was the one that asked him not to write about us anymore.

My phone vibrated on the table. It was Ivana, asking me what progress I made with our latest project. We were going to meet up in - I checked the clock - thirty minutes now to discuss.

"I have to go now." I picked up my phone. "I guess you're still going to work on it?"

I could see his tongue run over his teeth. Out of the blue, Ronan asks: "Hey Aster, would you mind if go out for dinner tonight?"

"Dinner?" I asked, repeating him. "Just... the two of us?"

He nodded.

Butterflies filled my stomach, but I tried to respond without hesitation. "If you pay, then sure."