For Better or Worse

Instead it was a tiny, annoying nagging sense that he didn’t mind that they had to wrap up their practice early. Even worse: that Josh might be just a little bit relieved.

Which didn’t make sense. Josh loved music. Loved listening to it, writing it, playing it. He knew that without vanity or conceit, he was the center. Most of the band’s songs were his songs; the band was together because he’d brought them together.

Josh was the heart of the Weathered Gentlemen.

But lately, he hadn’t been feeling the whole band thing.

He’d been feeling the music, yeah. At the risk of sounding like a douche, even to himself, Josh had always felt the music. He was the kid that had happily squeezed choir in alongside baseball practice all the way through high school.

And though his baseball prowess had maxed out in high school, his voice was good enough to get him into an a cappella group in college, where he’d continued to write songs at night to give himself a break from finance homework and economics ­papers.

And that was the tricky part. Josh had been every bit as good with numbers as he was with music.

Only, it wasn’t just a matter of having two separate skills; it was as though they’d been intertwined. Music had been the counterpoint to the numbers, and vice versa.

Hence the problem. Josh still had the music, and was damn glad of it.

But he didn’t have the numbers.

Not since he’d quit the firm. First because he’d had to, and then because when it had been time to go back, he’d realized he hadn’t wanted to.

Hadn’t wanted to go back to the suits and the power lunches and the power drinks followed by power dinners, and then . . . repeat. Days had blended into nights, weekdays blended into weekends, and though objectively he’d known that it wasn’t his long hours that had caused his entire life to fall apart, it certainly hadn’t helped matters any.

Maybe if he hadn’t been so damn tired all the time, stressed to the max, living on frozen dinners and cocktails, he might have caught the signs a little earlier. Could have saved himself and his family a whole lot of fear.

And so he’d politely turned down his boss’s offer of having his old job back, and had become, well . . . whatever he was now.

He’d founded the band from a mix of old acquaintances and friends of friends a year ago. The Weathered Gentlemen were good, but they weren’t great. There was plenty of talent, good enough looks to get them into small weeknight gigs if one of the guys knew a guy. But with three out of the four holding down full-time jobs and four out of the four committed to an active social life, they weren’t going anywhere in a hurry. And Josh had been okay with that. He had more than enough money in the bank from his old job to sustain his new appreciation for the simple life.

For the other guys, he always figured this was more of a hobby. The kind of thing where they’d gladly be along for the ride if the band hit the big time, but music wasn’t their whole life.

And Josh was realizing slowly that it wasn’t his, either.

He needed music in his life, definitely. It just wasn’t enough. As if it wasn’t bad enough that his routine was boring the shit out of him lately, now even the band—the one thing he’d thought he wanted—wasn’t doing it for him.

Which begged the question: What was he missing?

A loud, repeated banging at his front door scattered his thoughts.

Heather.

Just like that, Josh felt his bad mood lift in spite of himself as he pushed away from the counter and went to open the door.

“That the neighbor?” Trevor called.

“Probably.”

“Then what’s the lady-killer smile for?” Trevor’s asked. “I thought you said she was a bitch.”

For once in Trevor’s charmed life, his timing sucked, the last part of his statement coming just as Josh had opened the front door and at the exact moment Donny and Felix stopped playing.

The word bitch hovered in the awkward silence.

Josh braced for Heather to tear him a new one. He deserved it. He hadn’t called her a bitch explicitly, but he hadn’t exactly said anything nice, either.

The woman was annoying, yes, but she was also . . . interesting.

And despite all those badass walls she tried to put up, he’d bet his guitar that there was a sweetheart hiding beneath all the curls and sass.