Au Bord de la Mer - Redux

Whiplash

A/N: Sorry for the delay, lads! Busy times around here. Hope you enjoy!

It was one hell of a concert. 

Matty was right about the crowd - the arena was packed to the brim and a right riot. As soon as the lights dipped down and the boys came out, screams were all one could hear. Rylee was blown away that she was watching a reaction to the same four guys that she had been fooling around with previously at a bar and in a tiny room backstage. They were just four guys. Matty just had an interesting vocabulary, zero tie tying skills, and penchant for getting under one's skin, and he was just a guy. 

And yet, they were all perceived as rockstars here. Matty was a rockstar.

Surreal was the only word that came close to how it felt.

He flirted almost shamelessly with the crowd like it was his job - which it was on some level, Rylee assumed. But Matty looked to do it with pleasure, flaunting himself like some sort of godlike deity. He blew kisses, winked, laughed out loud at the dumbest things. Rylee watched him take a bouquet of flowers from a fan and weave one into his hair, grinning like a kid on Christmas, while saying something pretentious along the lines of, "Keep doing that and you'll inflate my impossibly big ego." There was just something so captivating about him, as strange as he was, and he was incredibly aware of how to use it to his advantage. 

His lyrics posed a powerful advantage, too. They were so raw - more so than Rylee ever thought Matty, the man who cried heavily over one song earlier, would allow. Love, heartbreak, drugs, sex - not a facet was left out. She felt like she was listening to a diary - the diary of a scruffy, kind of all over the place, but deeply intelligent boy. Seeing him up on stage confirmed that. 

It was impossible not to fall in love with him.

Rylee discarded the feeling the second she felt it. How childish was she being, bringing up such a deep and heavy word as love when thinking of a random guy? Matty was a guy. A guy with a voice and a persona. She should not be catching feelings over a guy like that, a guy with an act. Love was not a word she should even begin to associate with him. 

How easy it was to do so, though.

How easy it would be to fall for Matty, with his swinging hips, blustery aesthetic, and overly poetic tongue dripping in deeper truths. How easy it would be for her to take advantage of her new position, to make those girls around her screaming his name come second in the grand scheme of things. How easy it would be for her to say yes and fall - to let it happen and stand by, drowned in the colorful ride that someone like Matty was sure to bring. 

How easy it would be.

She couldn't, though.

She saw too clearly through the facade. She saw the man underneath between each carefully placed word and flip of his hair, and her prior knowledge gave her little to balance it out. She did not know enough about him to give in, to let the persona capture her and the man beneath to capitalize. He was too much of a mystery. A beautiful mystery that hurt her too-thoughtful mind to contemplate. 

She needed to sit there and simply enjoy the music for what it was and be done with it. 

Matty, however, had other plans.

A soft guitar melody echoed throughout the arena. It elicited a string of gasps and screams. Even Matty's friends seemed to be into the gentle chords, though far less chaotic than their surrounding peers. Matty let the screams continue for a moment before clearing his throat and inching toward the edge of the stage. Once he seemed to gauge he had the crowd's attention, he sat down. He swung his legs for a moment before smiling into his microphone.