Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 6: No
She’d said no, and Dash respected the no.
This was not a complicated thing. She’d given him a reason that was coherent and grounded in real experience, not a brush-off dressed up as an explanation. He recognized the difference. He’d been given enough of both in his life to have a working taxonomy.
He gave her space.
He stopped putting himself in her path. He stopped looking for reasons to be in the green room corridor before her set. He rode his bus and she rode hers and if they ended up at the same truck stop at midnight he found something to do on the other side of it.
It took five days to stop being aware of the distance.
In the meantime, he had the EP.
He’d downloaded all six songs before the tour started, when Joss had mentioned her name and he’d looked her up as a matter of due diligence — he always listened to the opening acts. He’d played through it once and thought: good. He’d played through it again and thought: better than good. He’d played it on the drive to Boston in his earbuds with his bunk curtain closed and found himself stopping on track three three times in a row to hear the lyric he’d almost missed the first time, in the second verse, where she talked about the way it felt to come home from a show to someone who asked about the drive but not about what happened on stage.
He took his earbuds out. Stared at the bunk ceiling. Put them back in.
He was somewhere in the middle of his third run through the EP when his curtain opened and Joss took one earbud out of his left ear and plugged it into his own.
“Hey—” Dash started.
Joss listened for four bars. His expression became neutral in the way it was neutral when he was very deliberately not having an expression. He unplugged the earbud, plugged it into his phone, and before Dash could stop him, had cast it to the bus speaker.
“Borrowed Light” filled the lounge.
Marco looked up from his phone. Reed took out his own earbuds. Joss returned to the couch and sat down with the air of someone who had done nothing in particular.
“Is this the opener’s EP?” Marco said.
“Yeah,” Joss said.
Reed listened for a moment. “She’s good.”
“Mm,” Joss said.
Dash sat up and looked at Joss. Joss looked back with absolute, serene composure. Dash thought, not for the first time, that if he ever needed to commit a crime the one person he would not want to bring was Joss because Joss would implicate him without saying a single thing.
“Turn it down,” Dash said.
“Can’t hear you,” Joss said. The song wasn’t actually that loud.
“Joss.”
“It’s a good song. We should all hear good songs.” He reached over and turned the volume up slightly. Not much. Just enough to make a point.
Marco was nodding along to the chorus with the professional admiration of a drummer hearing something with a good rhythmic hook. Reed had put his own earbuds back in, which was either indifference or tact. Joss sat with his arms folded and did not look at Dash at all.
The song ended. The next one started. Joss did not turn the speaker off.
Dash stood up and went to the narrow galley and made himself coffee, which took longer than it needed to and involved looking at the door of the small cabinet for a substantial amount of time.
“That’s the one she closes with,” Marco said from the couch. “The piano song. I heard it from backstage in New York. Different live.”
“Yeah,” Joss agreed. “She plays it differently every time, I think. Like she doesn’t want it to calcify into a performance.”
Dash poured his coffee and brought it back to the bunk area.
“Where are you going?” Joss said.
“To read.”
“Dash.”
“I’m reading, Joss.”
He lay in his bunk with the curtain closed and his coffee balanced on his chest and listened through the bus speaker as the EP finished. It was only six songs. It was over in twenty-two minutes.
The silence after it was different from the silence before it.
He heard Marco say: “She should have more than six songs out.”
He heard Joss say: “Working on it, from what I can tell.”
He heard Reed laugh at something, though he hadn’t heard the setup. He heard the bus move through the night outside.
He thought about the line she’d said to him in the green room: I know how that story ends. She’d said it without any particular hurt in her voice, more like a weather report — an accurate assessment of conditions. He’d wanted to say that he didn’t know how every story ended and that the only stories he knew for certain were the ones he’d already lived through. But that was exactly the kind of thing you said when you were trying to push past someone’s reasonable no, and he wasn’t going to do that.
She’d been right about what she needed. That was her to manage.
He was just going to have to find somewhere else to put this particular restlessness.
He pulled his notebook out from under his bunk pillow and opened it to the single line he’d written in Philadelphia, which was still there, alone on the page, waiting for something to stand next to it.
He added a second line.
Looked at them together.
Closed the notebook.
Outside the bus, the highway stretched toward Boston, and he thought about sound and about what it cost to be honest in a song and about the fact that the last time he’d written something he actually believed in, he’d been twenty-seven and afraid of nothing and completely unaware that this was a temporary condition.
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