Glass Houses

Iris

The tiles were cold against my knees.

That’s what I remember most. Not the blue creeping across his lips. Not the foam gathering at the corner of his mouth. Not the eighteen thousand people chanting his name from the arena floor below, their voices muffled by soundproofing that suddenly felt less like luxury and more like a sealed coffin.

The tiles. White hexagons. Clinical. The kind you’d find in a morgue or a hospital or any other place where bodies become problems to be managed.

“Stay with me.” I had his head in my lap, tilted back the way I’d seen in movies. His purple hair was dark with sweat, plastered to his forehead. His eyes—those gray eyes that had looked at me like I was oxygen—were half-open and seeing nothing. “Ezra. Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay—”

His skin was cold. Wrong. He ran hot. Always. Like something inside him was burning too fast, consuming itself. But now he felt like meat left out on a counter.

I pressed two fingers to his throat. His pulse fluttered. There. Gone. There. Gone.

A moth trying to escape a jar.

The bathroom smelled like industrial cleaner and something sweet underneath. Something chemical. I’d later learn that smell was his body shutting down—Loss of bowel function. Pulmonary edema. The clinical terms for a person becoming a thing.

The fluorescent lights buzzed. One of them flickered. The mirror reflected us back: a girl in a sequined dress kneeling in a pool of someone else’s sweat, holding a star who was turning blue.

Somewhere behind me, the door burst open.

Voices. Footsteps. Someone screaming for a medic.

The someone was me. Had been me this whole time.

“Miss, we need you to move.”

Hands on my shoulders. I couldn’t let go. If I let go, he’d slip away. I knew it the way you know things in the dark.

“Miss—”

“Don’t let him die.” I was looking up at a paramedic, a woman with a face that had seen this before, and I was saying it like she had power over it. Like death was something you could argue with. “Please. Don’t let him die.”

She didn’t promise.

That’s how I knew.

They lifted him onto a stretcher and his hand slipped out of mine—fingers trailing across my palm like he was reaching for something—and then they were gone and I was alone in a bathroom that still echoed with eighteen thousand people screaming for a man who might already be dead.

The fluorescent light flickered again.

Buzzed.

Went still.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

To understand how I ended up on that floor, you have to understand how I ended up in his orbit in the first place.

It started the better part of a year earlier, in a bar called The Hollow.

The Hollow was the kind of place that used to have character before the neighborhood got expensive. Now it survived on nostalgia and cheap whiskey and an open mic night that drew the same twelve regulars every Tuesday.

I was one of them.

The stage was a wooden platform barely big enough for a stool and a microphone stand. The lights were too bright—they’d installed new LEDs last year, the cheap kind that buzzed and made everyone look slightly jaundiced. The air tasted recycled. Stale. Like the same breath had been circulating through this room for years.

I sat at the bar nursing a whiskey sour I couldn’t really afford, watching the singer before me—a guy named Derek who wrote songs about his ex-girlfriend with the subtlety of a car alarm—and trying to remember why I still did this.

Twenty-three years old. Three years in LA. Still playing open mics. Still waiting tables. Still telling myself next year like it was a religion.

“Iris Bennett?”

The host. My turn.

I climbed onto the stage. Adjusted the mic. The spotlight hit my face and I couldn’t see the audience anymore, just vague shapes in the dark, and somehow that made it easier. Easier to pretend I was alone. Easier to open the door I kept locked the rest of the time.

I played a song I’d written called “Glass Houses.”

It was about my mother. About watching someone you love disappear into themselves. About standing outside a window, watching them break things, knowing you can’t go in and you can’t look away.

When I sang, I bled. That was the only way I knew how to describe it. The notes came from somewhere underneath my ribs, somewhere I didn’t have access to when I was just walking around being a person. It hurt. It always hurt. But the hurt was the point.

I finished.

Silence.

Then scattered applause from the twelve regulars.

I stepped off the stage, blinking as my eyes adjusted. Made my way back to the bar. Signaled for another drink I couldn’t afford.

“That song.”

The voice came from my left. Close. Too close for a stranger.

I turned.

And my brain just... stopped.

Because Ezra Wolfe was standing three feet away from me.

Ezra Wolfe. Two Grammys. Sold-out arena tours. The kind of face that launched a thousand Tumblr blogs. Purple hair that looked like it cost more than my rent. Gray eyes with flecks of silver that caught the light wrong.