The rehearsal space was too clean. Reid had always hated that about Silas—his need for order in a room meant for chaos. The amps were neatly stacked, cords coiled like they had job interviews to attend, and the air smelled faintly of lemon-scented cleaner instead of sweat and broken promises.
Reid sat on the edge of a folding chair, nursing a coffee that tasted like regret and pretense. He didn’t even play with these guys anymore, not really. But he’d been invited back tonight—casual, last minute, like someone had remembered him five minutes before the text.
Silas hovered near the mixing console, fidgeting with levels that didn’t need fidgeting. Reid watched him in silence, waiting for whatever was coming. Silas didn’t do idle conversation. If he was talking, it was strategy.
“You good, man?” Silas asked eventually, still looking at the console.
Reid blinked. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
Shrug. “You’ve just been… I don’t know. Quiet. People noticed.”
“People.”
“Yeah. Just stuff in the air, you know?” Silas adjusted a knob with faux focus. “Ever since the Astrid thing. And Dom said you’ve been kinda intense lately. Everyone’s just hoping you’re alright.”
There it was. The drop. Served cold, with a squeeze of friendly concern.
Reid set the coffee down. “Dom said that?”
“Not like in a bad way. Just—you know how he is. Wants to keep things smooth.”
Reid didn’t answer. He looked at the cords—how perfect they were, how smug in their alignment.
“I’m fine,” he said eventually. “Just watching which way the wind’s blowing.”
Silas chuckled, forced. “Hey, no shade. Just checking in.”
But he still didn’t look up.
And no one else in the room said anything.
Reid lingered. The silence felt rigged. Not hostile, not even awkward—just practiced. Like they'd all been here before, and knew their lines better this time.
There were no direct insults. No one turned their back. But he could feel it in the way no one asked him to play. In the way Silas kept fixing things that weren’t broken.
He looked at the wall where someone had tacked up an old photo. Reverb Night, two years ago. Reid mid-song, Silas in the background grinning like the applause was for him. Astrid had taken the picture. She’d captioned it something like "my wild boys making noise" back when she still liked being seen with him in public.
Funny how no one mentioned her now unless it was in lowercase, indirect. The Astrid thing. Like she was a power outage.
He almost laughed.
It had always been this way, hadn’t it? The moment you stop being useful to the narrative, you stop being invited to write it. People remember your voice. They just pretend it was echo.
Reid exhaled. Looked at Silas again, head down in his cables.
I was never supposed to be the loud one, he thought. They just got used to the sound of me holding the silence.
The first time Reid saw Silas play, he was a mess. Nervous, sweaty, playing like the guitar owed him money. But there was something there—raw energy, maybe even talent, if you squinted past the panic.
Reid gave him a shot. Let him sit in on a session. Then another. Eventually, it stuck. Silas got better. Polished. Precise.
“You’ve got timing,” Reid had told him once, passing him a beer. “Just don’t try to be interesting. Try to be real.”
Silas had laughed like he got it.
He never brought it up again.