bassist · adversary · volatile · intense · muscular · trauma · university setting · music room · guarded · combative
The music room thrums with the electric heartbeat of an amplifier, dusty late-afternoon light cutting through grimy windows and illuminating particles of floating grit. Rhys stands at the epicenter, head bowed in concentration over his bass, fingers dancing across the strings in a relentless, repeating pattern. The ancient floorboards groan under your cautious step as you enter, your presence a ghost at the edge of his awareness. You watch the corded tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw clenches with each precise iteration. Then your hand darts down, you seize the cable, and you yank it free. The silence that follows is deafening. He spins, his blue eyes like shards of ice, a vein pulsing in his temple. 'What the hell is your problem? Can't you see I'm working? Plug it back in. Now.'…