Finest Hour

Chapter 13: The Song With Only a Title

Quin had always named his own songs the way he talked: long strings of words, funnier out loud than they ever looked written down.

[i might get thirty more cats and nobody can stop me]

[genuinely in love with my new name]

[whoever takes the street food out of my hands can fight me for it]

Later, when the tracks got finished and put out, every one of them went out under a different name — the kind a release could carry.

One never got a new name, because it never got finished. It was called:

[...]

That was the whole title.

They had a bass player in those days — Cole Vance, who was on every other thing they ever put out. He wasn't on this one. There was no bass on it anywhere.

Once, in the comments underneath, Quin had answered himself.

*Not one of these bass lines is right.*

It stayed up about a week and then it was gone, probably so nobody in the band would have to read it twice.

Eli had read it plenty.

He had found the demo at thirteen, the year he bought his first bass with prize money, and he had listened to it more than all the finished tracks put together. On his bike. At the kitchen table. In bed with the light off.

The song was for his mother. That part had been public for years, and he had never once had the first idea what to do with it.

One night that winter he couldn't sleep, so he carried the bass up to the roof and stayed up there twenty minutes and came down with a line. His fingertips were stiff with cold by then and his palms were hot, and he sat on the stairs a while with the case across his knees.

Then it was this room again, and his hands, at the end of a night he had already been told to leave.

The lamp hadn't moved. The books were still on the floor. Rain worked at the glass, steady, and on the couch Quin sat with his head down and his hair hanging over that side of his face.

Eli didn't say anything. He sat down on the floor where the light was, set the phone beside the amp, turned the phone up, and pressed play.

There were a lot of songs he could have picked. He picked the one with no name and no bass in it.

The bass in his hands was the one from thirteen. He had never bought another.

Guitar first, the way it always started: two bars of a jumpy Midwest emo figure that changed its mind every other measure. Then the kit came in underneath — math rock, hits set wrong on purpose, one early, the next late — so the whole thing leaned further over with every bar and never went down.

He let the guitar have that first pass on its own. His fingers lay flat across the strings, over the frets they'd need.

Then he came in.

Left hand hammering the low string, right hand up over the top of the neck and tapping — three notes, then four, then a shape climbing the board — and between the taps the hand opening into a slap, hard enough that the strings came down on the pickups and the note arrived off the wood before the amp had anything to do with it. The kit landed early in one bar and late in the next, and he put notes in the gaps it left.

None of it sat under the guitar. It came in level with it and stayed there.

Somewhere in the middle he had looked up, one bar's worth and no more. Quin's hand had closed into a fist against his own knee. It stayed closed.

Two minutes, start to end. The last bar came around the way it always did, and he took it, and laid his palm flat across the strings to stop them.

That was the bass he had bought at thirteen, and the first line he had ever written for anything of Quin's. It had taken him years to play it in front of the man who wrote the song.

Not a bull's-eye. He didn't know what it counted as.

He liked leaving the choice in the other person's hands. That part he was sure of.

He looked at Quin once. Head down on the couch, hair over that side of his face, and nothing from him — no joke, no complaint, not even the flat thing from before. Eli had spent years listening to him and had never heard him this quiet.

He unplugged the cable and wound it. He laid the bass back in its case and latched it, and put his hat on.

"Thanks for the amp. It did the job."

Nothing came back.

Eli didn't say goodbye. He opened the door, went out, and pulled it shut behind him.

Halfway down, his heart was still going hard, so he stopped on the landing with a hand flat against the wall until it eased. Then he called Theo. It rang twice and cut off into a busy signal.

Outside, the rain hadn't let up. He started down the street the same way he'd come up it.

"Hey. Bassist."

It came from above him, not from the phone.

He looked up and got rain in his face first, then the window: one story up, pushed open, Quin half out of it with a forearm on the sill and his head tipped over, the same face he'd looked up at six years ago, in snow.

Something came down. It turned over twice in the air and landed on the sidewalk by Eli's shoe — a folding umbrella, black, still closed.

"Don't wreck your bass," he said.