Thomas's life had become a road without destination. Nights bled into mornings, and mornings into more nights, each one a blur of hotel rooms, half-empty whiskey glasses, and the hum of neon signs searing themselves into his retinas. He drifted from Leeds to London, from tour buses that smelled of sweat and stale perfume to anonymous beds that offered no comfort, no warmth. The music kept him alive—or perhaps it simply kept him numb. And always, beneath it all, there was her.
He remembered her beneath lilacs, the way sunlight had tangled in her hair, the curve of her neck, the trembling line of her lips. He could see her still, as if memory had stitched her into the fabric of his body. Some nights, he would sit alone in a hotel room, guitar across his knees, and let himself imagine her as vividly as he had when they were young. His fingers would hover over the frets, lingering, as if they could conjure the weight of her presence, the warmth of her skin against his. He could almost feel her hands tracing the line of his forearm, soft but urgent, daring him to remember, to feel.
He whispered her name into the dark, letting it fall against the walls like a prayer, like a confession. And sometimes, in the quiet, he imagined her shifting closer, the scent of lilacs and rain clinging to her, the brush of her lips against his collarbone, the soft sigh that would make him shiver from spine to skull. He could taste the memory of her, almost taste her again—the heat of a stolen kiss, the tremor in her hand against his. Each thought was fire, each memory a spark that burned beneath his skin.
He ran his fingers along the strings, thinking of how her touch had lingered, how it had pressed into him in ways he had never forgotten. He imagined the press of her body, so close he could feel her warmth through clothes and years, and the subtle, exquisite ache of desire that had never fully faded. Desire for her had become a phantom, a constant pulse beneath the hollows of his chest, driving him wild with both longing and regret.
Every song he wrote carried her. Every lyric, every chord, every trembling note tried to capture her absence and the weight of what he had lost. He wrote of longing, of hands that remembered and lips that burned, of whispers in the dark and the ache of skin pressed to memory. Even when applause washed over him, even when the whiskey burned, he could feel her there, in the silence between notes, in the hollow spaces of his ribcage.
He imagined her laughing softly, the heat of her breath brushing his ear, her fingers ghosting over his chest, and it made him ache in a way nothing else could. There was lust there, sharp and delicate, tangled with grief and the impossible knowledge that time had stolen her from him. And yet he let himself imagine it anyway, letting the fire curl through him, letting the ghost of her body and her gaze consume him entirely in that small, lonely room.
He never stopped writing her songs. Each one was a confession, a brush against a memory he could never touch, a longing pressed into melody. And though he knew she would likely never hear them, it didn't matter. They were for her, for him, for the echo of what had existed between them. And sometimes, late at night, in the hush of the world, he would close his eyes and let himself feel her again, let himself tremble with the ache of desire, let himself remember what it was to burn completely for someone, and in that moment, he was alive in a way the world could never measure.