Pt. 2
Nico

The final chord floated out and hung in the air, stubborn like it didn’t want to leave. When Nico finally dared to look up, Jordan was smiling.

 “I expected worse.” 

“Me too, actually,” Nico confessed, his voice light with relief. There was something about playing, that always made him feel a little less tangled in his own head.

He shifted uncomfortably, glancing at the couch beneath him. The embarrassment was manageable now, faded into the background of the song.

“My dad used to say improvising wasn’t about getting it right. It was about being in it. Letting it happen.” Nico’s voice had softened, the memory tugging something tender loose in his chest. “He’d sit around for hours messing with the guitar. Just making noise. Sometimes it sounded amazing. Sometimes it was total garbage.” A faint smile crept in as another memory surfaced. “Once, when my mom made pancakes for breakfast, he wrote this ridiculous song using the ingredients on the back of the mix. Like, word for word. ‘Enriched wheat flour’ became a whole verse. It was so dumb.”

“He’s not around anymore?”

Nico nodded, barely, fingers absently curled around the neck of the guitar, not playing but just holding. He was glad when Jordan didn’t push. 

“Sounds like he had a good way of letting go,” Jordan reached for the glass of water on the coffee table and took a slow sip. He spoke like he was offering an observation instead of poking at something fragile. “Do you ever write about him?”

“Not really,” Nico said. Then he paused. “Or—I mean, I’ve tried. But it doesn’t come out right.”

It was true. Every time he tried to write about his dad, the words came out fractured. His mind would go cloudy, his rhythm would break, and he’d just sit there, staring at the screen or the page or the keyboard beneath his fingers, not knowing what he was even trying to say anymore.

It wasn’t that Nico didn’t remember him. He remembered everything: his laugh, the way he used to tap on the steering wheel when they drove anywhere, like the world had a beat only he could hear. The way his hugs always smelled like cheap cologne and cigarettes and laundry detergent, but in a way that made Nico feel safe. He remembered falling asleep on the couch with his dad’s arm around him, the flicker of late-night TV casting shadows on the wall. He remembered his voice, too. How it changed when he was angry, how it softened when he apologized afterward.

But whenever he tried to turn any of that into lyrics, the words sounded hollow and too clean. Like he was scrubbing the truth just to make it rhyme. Maybe it was because the grief had fossilized into something he couldn’t quite crack open again. His dad had been gone for nine years now, and yet every attempt to write about him felt like trying to speak a language he’d forgotten how to speak. Like he was reaching for something just out of reach, and the more he reached, the blurrier it became.

Sometimes he wondered if part of him was still too young to hold it. Too young to write it right. Because how do you write a song about someone who used to be your whole world, when you were still a kid when that world collapsed? How do you capture that kind of loss without turning it into a story that feels fake, or forced, or worse, ordinary?

Nico wanted to do it justice. But all he ever ended up with were broken verses, or unfinished chords, or lines that sat flat in his notebook like they were waiting for a better writer to come along and fix them. So he stopped trying. He wrote about other things instead. 

“Do you?” 

“Hm?” Jordan reached over and gently took Nico’s hand from where it rested on the guitar, curling his fingers around it, absentminded at first, then more deliberately running his thumb along Nico’s knuckles. 

Nico didn’t mean to look, but his eyes dropped anyway, drawn to the way Jordan’s fingers moved with his own. “Write about your family,” he said, almost a whisper, as if speaking too loud would make Jordan let go. 

“No. Never feels useful.” Jordan looked relaxed, maybe even bored, but Nico didn’t buy it. There was something tight in the way he held his jaw, something he wasn’t saying.

“Maybe some stuff doesn’t fit into a song. Or a book, I guess.”

“Maybe it does. Just not in ways anyone else can understand.”

The silence that followed didn’t feel heavy. If anything, it felt shared. Like they were both sitting in the same vague ache, not trying to name it or explain it but just letting it be.

Nico shifted a little, the couch dipping under him. “What do you do when you’re stuck? Like, creatively.”

Jordan rested his head back against the cushion. “I pretend I’m not. Trick myself into writing anyway.”

“That actually works?”

“Sometimes. Mostly I just keep showing up. Eventually something moves.”

“That sounds like something you’d say in an interview.”

Jordan’s lips curved slightly. “I probably have.”

Nico leaned in a little, his curiosity quickening. “Like… a TV interview? Have you been on TV?”

Jordan didn’t answer right away. He turned toward him with a kind of tired amusement. “Is that where you’re heading?”

“I hope so.” 

Jordan studied him, eyes narrowing slightly in a way Nico couldn’t read. Then he nodded. “It’ll happen. You’ve got the hunger for it.”

“I mean, it’s all I think about. All the time,” Nico felt the words rush out, unfiltered. “I’m working on some demos, but it’s just me and my laptop right now. Cheap mic. Not even real software.”

“It’s a good start.” 

“I just want it so bad, you know?” Nico looked down at the guitar in his lap. “It’s not just about getting played, or being onstage. I mean, I want all of that too but… I just want to matter. I want someone to hear a song I wrote and feel like it was meant for them.”

It sounded so dramatic out loud, but it was true. More than fame, more than stages or screaming fans, Nico just wanted to be understood. Music was the only place he didn’t have to explain himself. Every chord and every lyric was like translating feelings into something that made sense, something that didn’t get stuck in his throat or tangled in awkward moments. He’d been writing songs for as long as he could remember, in his room with a half-broken keyboard and secondhand headphones. 

“Then keep writing. If it’s honest, it’ll land somewhere. Might not be where you expect, but someone will hear it.”

Nico smiled. He glanced at Jordan, then over his shoulder, his eyes catching on the wall clock above the kitchen entrance.

4:12.

Shit.

His chest sank. The room had felt timeless but reality had crept back in.

“I should go,” Nico said, reluctantly pulling his hand back. “I’ve got school in like… three hours.”

As Jordan stood, Nico tugged his pants on quickly, the denim feeling too stiff and cold against his skin. 

“I’ll tell my driver to take you.” 

“You don’t have to do that.”

Jordan didn’t argue but just walked him to the door. He fished out his phone from the jacket hanging in the hallway, thumbs moving quickly as he typed. 

“He’s already outside,” Jordan said without looking up. “You’re covered.” 

At the doorway, Nico hesitated. The knob was right there, easy to grab, but his body resisted, caught in that quiet stretch of almost. He thought about saying something, maybe a joke, or a thank-you that actually landed right. Maybe even a hug, if the air between them didn’t feel so strangely weightless.

Jordan hadn’t followed him to the threshold. He stood a few steps back, his expression a polished surface that offered no cues. 

So Nico nodded, too quick and too stiff, and mumbled, “Thanks again,” barely getting the words out before slipping through the door, hoping the act of leaving would feel more decisive than it did.

The hallway outside was dim and quiet in that late-night, hotel-lobby kind of way, where everything felt temporary. He didn’t risk a glance behind him. Didn’t trust himself to.

But his face stayed hot the entire walk to the car, the echo of everything he didn’t say prickling under his skin.