Chapter 62 Aitor
Aitor
Everyone at Crownwell knew who I was.
The Music Prince. One of the Constellation. The quiet violin prodigy with the private studio and the tragic backstory people loved to whisper about when they thought I couldn’t hear them.
But almost no one actually knew me.
Not really.
I’d always been the kind of guy people found easy to approach. Chill. Friendly. Quiet in a way that didn’t make things awkward. My mom used to say I was the light of every gathering. Not because I talked the most or tried to steal the spotlight, but because I brought music everywhere. Every room, every moment, every mood had a soundtrack in my head. Sometimes I even played it out loud.
Garrett said my life was a musical and that one of these days, he was gonna break into song just to match my tone.
I totally couldn't picture that…
Music had always been my world. I was probably born with a violin on my shoulder, like my father, and with my mother’s musical ear.
What I definitely didn’t inherit from her was her fire.
Mom had been a flamenco dancer. A famous one. Passionate, loud, impossible to ignore. She loved the stage, loved attention, loved people. When she entered a room, the room became hers.
Everyone adored her.
I wasn’t like that.
Maybe I had been once. Back when my parents were alive.
But the day of my father’s accident—coming home from one of his recitals—everything ended.
People tried to help after that. Friends came around, teachers encouraged me, neighbors brought food we never ate. Linnea started teaching me piano—my one moment of happiness—and her mother became the person my mom leaned on when things got really bad.
But my mother had already given up long before cancer took her.
And within a year, I went from being the light in every room to a shadow in the corner of one.
All I had left was their legacy. My violin. The half-finished music studio they’d been building for me. And a whole lot of grief that felt way too big for someone my age.
Pain. Loss. Loneliness.
I shut everyone out. Stopped answering messages. Stopped showing up to anything. I was basically becoming a professional hermit.
I probably would have disappeared completely if it hadn’t been for two people.
Linnea.
And Garrett.
Linnea had always been my light. She was the one who sat beside me and patiently walked me through chords when my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. She was calm where my mother had been a storm. Steady, where everything in my life felt like it was collapsing.
I loved her.
Quietly at first. Then, not so quietly.
And Garrett… Garrett was my brother.
We’d grown up together. Our families had been friends forever, even if his mother never seemed thrilled about me hanging around him. I always suspected Helena William would’ve preferred Garrett spending time with someone like Linnea—someone elegant, respectable, perfectly aligned with whatever terrifying life plan she had for him.
Too bad for her.
Garrett and I were inseparable.
When my world collapsed and I turned into a grieving, socially useless orphan, he simply refused to leave.
He showed up every day. Dragged me out of bed. Forced me to eat. Helped me finish the studio. He even convinced me to start uploading my music online, which somehow turned into a blog with millions of followers.
The guy literally tried to learn the violin for me once.
I had to beg him to stop before he committed an actual crime against classical music.
He also attempted to blackmail Linnea into dating me.
That worked exactly as well as you’d expect.
I loved him like and I’d die for him, no questions asked, and I knew he’d do the same for me.
People at Crownwell mostly saw the asshole version of Garrett. And sure, he could absolutely be one. A spectacular one, actually.
But that wasn’t really who he was. That was armor.
Underneath it, he had one of the most loyal, generous, painfully sensitive hearts I’d ever known. The kind that got hurt easily and then pretended it didn’t.
A lot of that probably had something to do with his mother. Helena scared the hell out of most people on the planet, and I had a feeling growing up under her roof wasn’t exactly a relaxing childhood.
But that was one subject Garrett and I never touched.
I knew secrets about him that no one else did. I had spent countless nights sitting beside his bed when he couldn’t sleep, talking him through his nightmares, promising him I’d never let anyone hurt him or take him away again.
But those were his demons, not mine to tell.
I respected the silence.
After Linnea rejected me—politely but very firmly—because she wanted to focus on her career, and after Garrett came back from a traumatic year at some mysterious institution that ended his secret relationship with James, we made a pact.
No love.
Just casual hookups and zero emotional damage.
Garrett stuck to the casual part.
I mostly stuck to the avoiding-everyone part.
And then Aslan showed up.
The first time I saw him, I didn’t think much of it.
I’d always leaned more toward girls, even though I knew I was bisexual. I’d experimented a bit when I was younger, but nothing serious. No crushes on guys. No dramatic awakenings.
But the moment I saw him standing up for James in the middle of that cafeteria—fire in his eyes, completely fearless in front of four of the most powerful students in the school—I knew we were all screwed.
Garrett hated him instantly for reasons even he probably didn’t understand.
Every time Garrett planned one of his ridiculous bullying campaigns against him, a part of me just wanted to step in, shield Aslan from the mess we’d created…
And, weirdly enough, kiss him.
Obviously, I didn’t do that.
Mostly because it became painfully obvious very quickly that Garrett wasn’t bullying Aslan because he hated him.
He was bullying him because he liked him.
A lot.
So there we were.
I wanted to kiss the guy.
Garrett wanted to punch the guy.
Two logical, yet very different, ways of expressing love.
I was conflicted. And yeah, a little jealous too. Because even though I could tell Aslan was attracted to me, he was clearly drawn to Garrett in a way that was… complicated.
And bro code is bro code.
You don’t go after someone your best friend wants.
Ever.
But then Garrett started acting weird about the whole thing. Dating Trisha. Pretending Aslan meant nothing. Telling everyone he didn’t care.
And that’s when I started reconsidering the bro code. Because if my best friend was determined to lie to himself, I wasn’t sure the rules still applied.
The situation was already messy enough.
Yesterday Garrett had looked me straight in the eye and told me he wanted nothing with Aslan. I knew that had shattered Aslan, even if he tried to pretend it didn’t.
And just an hour ago, Linnea had done the exact same thing to me.
She cared about me, she said. Always would.
But she couldn’t be with me.
Strangely enough, they had both used the exact same excuse.
Even if they wanted to… they couldn’t.
The two people who mattered most in my life were actively rejecting love.
And somehow the center of that chaos was the same person.
Aslan.
Beautiful, stubborn, compassionate Aslan.
The boy I had been fully prepared to let go for both of them. But not anymore.
They had made their choices.
They had practically given me their blessing, even if the whole situation was completely insane.
Which meant that now, for the first time, I was allowed to choose for myself.
Maybe Aslan and I could heal each other.
Maybe we could build something out of the wreckage they’d both left behind.
But probably not like this.
And definitely not tonight.
Because right now Aslan was kneeling in front of me under the moonlight, looking like a fallen angel.
His face was pale. Tear-streaked. Those golden eyes, shining with a mixture of hope and heartbreak that made my chest tighten.
“Take me out of here, Aitor…”
I was going to.
Of course I was.
I was going to take him somewhere quiet. Somewhere safe. Somewhere the world couldn’t reach us for a while.
Somewhere I could hold him, protect him, and let him fall apart if he needed to.
Somewhere we could both grieve what we’d lost…
And maybe figure out how to start again.