Tattoos and Heartbreak by Quinn Marlowe

Author:Quinn Marlowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spitfire Press

LILA

These words weren’t coming out right.

I wrinkled my nose in frustration and scratched out yet another line of lyrics, frustrated beyond belief. I never had trouble with lyrics. They were my thing. Sure, I could write music with the best of them. I’d never had any trouble coming up with a tune and making it dance to my needs. But lyrics were something altogether different. Those were like magic for me. I’d have a thought that I needed something—some line or emotion—and that something would just appear in my head, like someone else had written it and sent it right into my brain. The words would come flowing out like I’d always known what they were and just had to reach out and grab them to make a song. The hard part had always been deciding which tune to fit them into.

But right now, I couldn’t write anything. I couldn’t come up with good emotion or words that fit together the way they should. Everything I wrote felt like I was back in the sixth grade trying to write my first love song when I didn’t even know how being in love felt.

Something was wrong.

I pushed back from the table and pulled my guitar into my lap. Maybe if I worked on some tunes instead, the language part of my brain would free itself up.

I strummed the strings and closed my eyes, letting myself sink into the chords that had been my home for years, and started plucking out a tune. It wasn’t complicated and it definitely wasn’t original—it belonged to Olivia, actually—but as I played, I felt the music work its way into my blood, and then into my imagination. And I was able to start thinking in what I’d come to term ‘lyrics language.’ I started seeing the world and everything in it in music and lyrics rather than regular old English. Everything was colored with notes.

With emotions and the words that described them.

There it was, I thought, relief flowing through me. There was the piece of me that understood this sort of thing. I hadn’t seen her in days—not since we’d started following this tour—and I’d been worried that she’d decided to fuck off and take a break when I needed her most.

“What are you doing?”

My eyes snapped open, the spell broken, and I looked up to see someone standing in front of me. Not just any someone, either. The someone I was pretending to date—and who had been studiously avoiding me for the most part, except for when some handy photographer was around.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He dropped into the seat across from me and sighed. “Can’t sleep.”

Then he took in my guitar, the half-eaten blueberry pie in front of me, and the sheet of paper next to that. His eyes traveled over my body and I remembered—belatedly—that I was dressed in my pajamas. Plaid pajama pants and a t-shirt that was at least a size too small.

Things I almost never let anyone else see.

I

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