Read The Bonding Ritual (Girls Wearing Black: Book Four) for Free Online Page B

Jill said. “Let’s talk about you for a minute. Tell me something about yourself, Zack.”
     
    *****
     
    Tell her something about himself?
    Zack had so many things he could say.
    I’m lost. Those were the first words that came to mind.
    I’m so lost I don’t really know where I am or how I got here. I’ve felt this way for weeks, maybe months. I can’t even remember when it began. I know I was happy once, but I can’t remember why. I don’t know where to find the happiness again. I’ve been looking and looking for it, but it’s nowhere to be found. That is, until tonight.
    “Well,” he began, “I play in a band. You know that already, though.”
    The band. Sometimes the band made his mind go quiet. The simple rhythms of the drums, the movement of hands and feet, coordinating the sounds of snare, bass drum, and high hat.
    He had come to believe the band, and only the band, had the potential to bring him happiness if he could figure out how to fill the giant hole in his life.
    He had thrown so many things into that hole. Alcohol, pills, video games, Lana …
    As if summoned by the thought of her, Lana called Zack at that moment. It was only out of habit that he pulled the phone from his pocket and looked at the screen.
    How unwelcome her name was in his world tonight. More than unwelcome. Distasteful. Her presence, even virtually, defiled the moment. Lana was the opposite of the girl sitting in front of him. Whereas Jill made him believe there was hope for something better in life, Lana’s name on his phone reminded him how elusive happiness had been.
    He silenced the phone and put it back in his pocket.
    “What brought you out to our show tonight anyway?” he said.
    With a smile on her face, Jill wagged her finger through the air. “We’re talking about you, remember?”
    God, her smile. Jill wasn’t the conventional knockout that Zack might approach at the bar. She was much more than that. Her beauty was intimate. It spoke to Zack on a personal level.
    “You play in a band,” she said. “What else?”
    “What else?” Zack repeated, quietly.
    Some mornings I wake up with absolutely no idea what happened the night before. My girlfriend is someone who was in my bed on one of those mornings, and I swear, the first time I woke up next to her, I had no idea who the hell she was. I start drinking with my bandmates during practice in the afternoon and don’t stop until I’m passed out after my gig, then I have such a headache the next morning I have to kill it with these big white pills Lana buys on the street. I spend my days in a stupor.
    I’ve been sleepwalking through life, and it seems like I’m always struggling to remember a time when it wasn’t like this.
    Talking to you, I feel like I’m waking up.
    “I do landscaping work to help pay the bills,” he said.
    “Oh? What kind of landscaping work?”
    “Private residences, mostly. I mow lawns, prune trees, pull weeds.”
    “Do you like it?”
    “I used to.”
    “You used to? Does that mean you don’t like it anymore?”
    Zack looked down at his coffee. This was so hard. He barely knew this girl and he wanted to tell her everything. He wanted so badly to just open up and pour out his soul for her to see.
    For her to fix.
    Who was she? Why was he so crazy about her?
    Zack had never thought of himself as a romantic. Love at first sight, head over heels, soulmates—to him, those were cotton candy daydreams for preteen girls. In Zack’s mind, love was something you nurtured over time. It was something you built, not something you ‘fell into.’
    “I used to like landscaping because it gave me time to think,” he said.
    “What changed?” said Jill.
    “I don’t know. Let’s be done talking about me for a bit. You’re the interesting one at this table.”
    “I’m not so sure about that,” said Jill.
    “No, I can tell.”
    “Can you now?”
    “Yes! The same way I knew you were going to say jazz when I asked you what kind of music