The first time he saw you, he said you looked like a song he hadn’t written yet.

You’d laughed — a sharp, surprised sound — but he didn’t. Not really. Just blinked slow, cigarette burning down between his fingers, eyes already memorizing you like a chord progression he didn’t want to forget.

It wasn’t glamorous, not the way people talk about it later. Not the black-and-white photographs, not the magazine spreads, not the rumors they’d whisper over jukeboxes and barstools. It was real. Gritty. Yours.

Mornings in hotel beds with ash on the sheets and half-empty coffee cups on the nightstand. You watching him scribble lines on whatever wasn’t nailed down — matchbooks, receipts, the corner of your newspaper. He’d hum to himself, sometimes with his eyes closed. Sometimes with one sock on and a shirt buttoned wrong.

He’d sit cross-legged on the floor of some rented room, guitar balanced on one knee, cigarette burned halfway down and forgotten in the ashtray. There was always something humming in the background — a radiator, a leaky faucet, a late-night television rerun with the volume turned low. His mind moved faster than his hands. Faster than you could follow.

And somewhere in the mess of it all — the wires and the notebooks and the broken picks — there was you.

You were the stillness in the chaos. The moment before the rhyme locked into place. The ghost at the edge of the stage.

“You’re not listening,” he’d say, scribbling something quick.

“I am listening,” you’d reply, half-awake, still in yesterday’s clothes, leaning against the window with a coffee gone cold in your hands.

He’d glance at you like he didn’t believe it. Like listening wasn’t enough. Like he wanted you to feel the words the way he did — raw and cracked open and urgent. But you’d already heard the song three times, maybe four, and he was still on verse two, chasing a metaphor he hadn’t found yet.

But, he wasn’t always easy.

He’d disappear for days — chasing inspiration or escaping it. Sometimes both. You never knew if he was in the next room or three cities over. But when he came back, it was always the same: clothes rumpled, voice rasped, eyes burning like he’d seen something no one else had.

And he’d look at you like you were the only thing still real.

“I wrote somethin’,” he’d say, handing over a scrap of paper, like it didn’t matter.

It always mattered.

Sometimes you recognized yourself in the lyrics. Sometimes you didn’t. But you were always there — in the space between lines, in the way he paused before a certain word. The way he looked at you after he sang it.

He never called you his muse. Never needed to. You heard it in the lyrics. Felt it in the hush that came just before the chorus. The way he looked at you after he played a new song, like he wasn’t sure if it worked until you breathed it in.

You weren’t the kind of girl who asked to be written about. But you were the kind he couldn’t help writing.

But sometimes — in those rare, quiet moments between tours, between storms — he’d pull you into his lap, rest his chin on your shoulder, and hum a melody he hadn’t played for anyone else.

No guitar. No crowd. No smoke.

Just him. Just you. Just the song.

“You’re gonna ruin me,” he’d whisper.

And you’d smile, brushing the hair from his eyes.

“Already have.”