Loud is How I Love You Read Online Free

had sex last night to, you know, mean anything.”
    “Exactly,” I say, and I am waiting for him to look relieved that he doesn’t have to deal with any weirdness as far as I’m concerned. That I am not some needy girl who expects things from him other than the usual. Be on time for rehearsal. Play your Goddamned guitar like you mean it. Drive me home when I’m drunk and carry my amp for me and be an integral, essential part of me pursuing my dreams. Okay, that’s a bit much but the thing is, he does it. All the time. And I can’t lose this.
    This is what I would assume he also wants, for everything to just be normal and not weird and for us to not be on the brink of fucking up this very great thing we have together. I expect him to acknowledge that while last night was, in fact, awesome, it was also a mistake that could potentially kill this band we’ve worked so hard to build.
    But instead of relieved he looks blank, like the Travis I know so well has crawled into a hole and what’s left is this fake Travis, the cardboard cutout that I really don’t know at all.
    “I just want everything to go on as usual, okay?” I say. “We can just be grown-ups about this. It’s only sex.”
    I look up and see Sonia standing next to me with the check, her mouth hanging open. Travis would be amused if he didn’t look so angry. He pulls out his wallet and takes a twenty-dollar bill out and drops it on the table. Then before I can give him any money, he walks right out.
    Sonia and I stare after him in silence for a moment. I don’t look up, but I feel her eyes on me and I’d like to slink down under the table right about now.
    “Wow, you finally did it,” she muses. “You finally slept with Travis.”
    “Yeah, I did,” I say. “And look at how happy he is about it.”
    “Oh, I doubt that’s why he’s unhappy, Emmy.”
    “He’s unhappy because it’s going to fuck up the band,” I say, wringing my napkin to bits. “He knows it just as well as I do.”
    “Does it have to fuck up the band?” she asks. “I mean, isn’t there any way you two could work it out?”
    “Well, I don’t know, let’s ask him,” I say way more sarcastically than Sonia deserves, but that’s my mouth for you. I turn to the empty seat across from me. “Travis, do you think . . . Oh hey, look at that. He’s gone. I guess there’s our answer right there.”
    “Maybe he’d still be here if he thought that’s what you wanted.”
    “This is not about what I want,” I say. “It’s about not fucking up something important that we already have.”
    “Oh, right,” she says, every bit as sarcastic as I’ll ever be. “Good luck with that.”
    ***
    It’s not that I don’t have feelings for Travis. It’s really not that at all. It’s that after two years in Soft, my feelings for Travis transcend your average boy-meets-girl kind of situation. It’s not just a tingle I feel when he’s near, a bounce in my step. We’re well past that already (okay, I did feel pretty tingly when he walked in the door at Neubies today). Travis is my guitarist and there’s a thing between us that is difficult to translate for someone who hasn’t been in this kind of situation. Writing music is personal, intimate even, and you have to be pretty comfortable to be able to do it with other people. When you find someone you work this well with, it’s rare and special and it’s more than friendship. I know this sounds dumb, but it’s kind of like finding a unicorn. If you found a unicorn, you would take care of it, protect it. You’d keep it safe. You definitely wouldn’t fuck it, right?
    I started my very first band, Popsick, when I was a sophomore in high school. It was my band and mine alone because I couldn’t keep anyone in it for longer than a month, usually because all my friends wanted to be lame and hang out with their boyfriends, smoke weed, and watch TV or whatever. It’s a serious pain in the ass to find girls who can play drums and