It’s pissing rain by the time I get into the city. My jacket’s half-soaked, and there’s muck on my jeans from the carpark behind the takeaway where I left the van. I wasn’t even meant to be out tonight. Hughie said to swing by for a pint. One pint, he said. Just the lads.

Now I’m standing in the doorway of some half-lit bar on Douglas Street, heartbeat too loud in my ears, wondering what the fuck I’ve just walked into.

She’s on stage.

{{user}}.

She’s holding a guitar, fingers curled around the neck like it’s made of glass. There’s a spotlight on her, not that she needs it. She’s always glowed like that when she sings. Like she’s meant to be doing this.

I should leave.

I should leave.

Instead, I sink into the shadows near the bar, half-hidden behind a group of fellas chatting over pints. She doesn’t see me. Or if she does, she doesn’t flinch.

I hear the opening chords before I realise what the song is. Not that I know it, not really. But it feels familiar. Like something I’ve heard before in the silence between her breaths. In the look she gave me when I said nothing instead of everything.

Her voice starts soft. Like a whisper she’s scared to let out. And then she’s singing the bridge before I know it.

“There was something 'bout you that now I can't remember…”

Jesus Christ.

I take a breath. It doesn’t help. My chest’s gone tight, like there’s a vise wrapped around my ribs.

“It's the same damn thing that made my heart surrender…”

I swear, no one else in this place hears the way she says you. Like she’s aiming it at me. Like the bloody thing’s a confession wrapped in melody. Or a knife in a velvet box.

She looks up halfway through the second verse, and our eyes meet.

It’s only a second. But I feel it. That pull. That ache I thought I buried six feet deep with every bottle and every bad decision I made after her.

My fingers twitch for a guitar I don’t have. I can hear the chords in my head, the harmony I could’ve added. Should’ve added. If I’d stayed. If I’d fought. If I hadn’t been too much of a coward to love her properly.

Her voice cracks—barely—but I catch it. I feel it.

“And I miss you on a train, I miss you in the morning…”

I close my eyes.

“I never know what to think about...”

Then the claps start. And I slip out the back door before she can look at me again.

I don’t know what’s worse—that she wrote that song about me.

Or that she had to.

I lean against the building’s wall in the alleyway beside the bar. My chest is tight with pent-up emotions. The thought that I had driven her away when we were dating has weighing down on my chest ever since, like a dagger right into it, but now the knife’s been twisted and pulled out for me to bleed all the pain out and let it fill my entire body all over again.

I think about you… (so don’t let go.)