Heat resided in her cheeks as his hand smoothed across her face, causing her eyes to flutter close, creating a swirl of butterflies within the depths of her stomach. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek softly, trailing his fingers down her face, across her shoulders before wrapping strands of her hair around his fingers, pulling her in to embrace her in the most staggering hug she could have ever imagined.

He released his grip around her, still holding onto her hand. "I'll see you tonight, right?"

She nodded her head yes, unable to speak.

"I gotta go, but I'll call you with details!" He flashed his million watt smile before turning to leave the studio.

            Here one minute, gone the next. She thought. It was almost like he sweeps her off her feet and leaves her wanting more without even trying. She couldn't explain why she wanted to spend more time with him, but she also couldn't explain why she didn't want to spend time with him.

She was in trouble.

She had it bad.

"It's nice to see Adi shining through again..." Rob gushed.

Trey closed his eyes, having almost a frown on his face; he was both happy and sad for his dearest friend. "It's like she came back from wherever she was..." He watched his friend smiling in such a genuine way. It had been so long that he had forgotten what it looked like on her. It suited her well. Her flushed cheeks gave her character that matched well with the ecstatic look in her eyes.

Rob laughed, "Justin has that affect on women."

Adilyn smiled shaking her head at her friends' words. "I can hear you... you know that right?"

"Oh shit!" Trey jumped to his feet, "Totally thought you were still stuck in Timberland!"

Knowing she really was stuck in this alternate universe known as Timberland, she walked into the booth preparing to lay vocals on the song she had been working on with Trey and Rob for a week.

            The process of creating music was therapeutic for Adilyn, it always had been. Creating something from scratch was exactly how she liked it when it came to music. The melody's seemed to come to her when she sat and listened to everything and everyone around her. She would listen to the sound of buttons turning, footsteps walking around her, the tap of someone's hand on the desk. She listened to everything, intently, creating a beat in her head that would eventually become a melody and then an entire song.

Lyrically, she took you on a journey through every paramount emotion known to mankind. She was known to have this impeccable ability to make her audience feel the joy of her happiness or the bitter pain of her heartache. Passion was her ink and feeling was her pen. Her passion, birthed deep within her soul, bubbled through her vocal chords in a smooth blend of harmonies that stopped anyone in their tracks. Words, poems, songs of this caliber were not made-up. They were real. And, she'd written them. And every song captured your heart, ripped it to shreds, pulverized it, and slowly let it pour into your hand as an insignificant mound of ashes. And it was this raw and selfless delivery of every joy, every grief, every rage, and every sorrow that made her human. But, to her, she was merely a songwriter with an idea and a way with words.

Countless times over the years, she has sat with Trey writing songs that would take his breath away, he would have to remind himself to breathe; he wasn't the one going through the pain but her songs could make him feel each piercing stab in his heart. When he read her words, he knew that this was real. The intensity of the pain she was going through, but his best friend was stubborn. And, she liked to pretend, like a bad habit, that the lyrics she poured out weren't personal.

As Trey watched the look on his best friend's face in that booth, sunk down in that chair, scribbling on her infamous notebook, he knew this was one of those times. Her words were flowing out onto a sheet of paper, instead of expressing what she was feeling aloud. It was her way of processing the challenges in her life and it became her very own therapy session.

Amongst all the things she knew how to do, this, having a potential working relationship, wasn't one of them. This territory she found herself in had become something she didn't know how to conquer. She no longer suffered from a broken heart, there were no familiar scars. This territory was uncharted...

Her hand perfectly scripted each word on the paper, never backtracking; she wrote her thoughts out on the lines.

Just me, in a room sunk down in a house in a town, and I
Don't breathe, no I never meant to let it get away from me
Now, too much to hold, everybody wants has to get their hands on gold,
And I want uncharted.
Stuck under this ceiling I made, I can't help but feeling...

She looked at her words, foolproof of exactly how she was feeling.

I'm going down,
Follow if you want, I won't just hang around,
Like you'll show me where to go,
I'm already out, of foolproof ideas, so don't ask me how
To get started, it's all uncharted...

            Adilyn reached for her phone, noticing the blinking voicemail icon on her phone. She had missed a call from Justin. A smile appeared on her face at just the thought of him. She pressed the voicemail key and listened to it begin.

Two voicemails.

"Hey Adilyn..." His voice trailed off. "Unbeknownst to me, I have a work thing tonight that I can't get out of... I wanted to spend time with you... I feel terrible..." She felt her heart began to ache. It was going to be the first of many heartaches, she thought.

She ended the voicemail and walked toward the room where her best friend still sat.

"You okay?" Trey asked, "You seem to go from cloud nine to cloud negative nine..."

She turned back to him, "Reading between the lines again Trey?"

"You won't tell me, so I have to." He answered.

She shook her head, dropping her things into her bag. The pit in her stomach ached. "Why am I hurt that he wants to cancel?" She laughed at herself, pushing the door in front of her. "Silly me... thinking anything could actually... " She stopped herself, there was no point going into any details.

Trey climbed out of his chair and rushed through the door, attempting to catch up with her. "Justin? He cancelled?" He asked surprised.

She placed her bags down on the passenger seat in her car. "Of course he did."

"Why?" Trey demanded.
            "Does it matter?" She fired back before she realized she was taking it out on Trey when he didn't deserve the hostility. "Some work thing... I'm going to go home and crawl into bed with a man that hasn't let me down in my life."

Trey watched as she backed out of her parking spot and drove away. He stood there until her taillights vanished in the space between them. The guy he took a leap of faith with, the one guy he thought was going to treat his best friend with the respect she deserved, didn't even give her a chance.

Making a decision of what he had to do, he did the one thing he knew to do. He couldn't let his mistake, yet again, hurt his best friend. After all, he took the burden for Jaxon not having a father.