Sam and Colby: The Asylum

Chapter 25

I probably should have been scared of falling for someone like him. Someone with so many fans, so many people in his life who did really love him and appreciate him. But I wasn't scared. Not at all. I was embracing it, actually. Willingly and spontaneously dropping everything at a week's notice to travel across the country with four guys I hardly knew. Well, hardly knew in real life. Clearly, they had to like me a lot, or at least Colby had to. They had barely seen me, barely knew who I was. But they let me in.

And I knew I wasn't just there for the clickbait. Sam was concerned about how mean that would sound, but he'd let Colby ask me and I'd agreed with Jake almost immediately about the thumbnail. Clickbait was a big deal, I guess, but nowhere near as big a deal to them as their videos were. They would not have all agreed for me to come and then paid for me to join them at such a late notice unless they really did like me. This was their passion. This was it. And they wanted to share it with me. Colby wanted to share it with me.

I took a deep breath and something landed on my hand. I looked down to see a tear. Was that mine? Was I crying? I lifted a finger up to my eye and pulled it back. Yes, I was crying. Thank god my eye makeup and setting spray were waterproof. I looked back over at Colby, who was looking down at his phone, scrolling through Spotify. I saw that he had one earbud in, but on the side opposite of me. Probably so that he could hear me if I said anything.

"Thank you," I said weakly. He looked up at me, a smile on his face, until he saw that I was crying. "Oh," I said, quickly wiping my tears away, thanking God that new ones weren't replacing them. He stared into my eyes as his smile changed from happy to empathetic. I looked into those gorgeous blue eyes, him staring into my bright green ones. He lifted his arm up for me to lean into him. I did. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead again.

"Always," he responded. I nodded into his side. I laid there for a while, Colby unlocking his phone and tapping through Spotify every few minutes. After about two hours of me just leaning against him, he realized I wasn't asleep and handed me one of his AirPods. I put it in my ear and Colby played Mulholland Drive by Aryia. I smiled. That was his closest guess to what my favorite song was. I reached my hand out and set it on his knee, tracing circles on him with my acrylics.

The music after that wasn't what I'd expected Colby to listen to. I'd listened to the playlist he made on Spotify dozens of times, and those songs were all kind of... well, they were just sort of sad. I mean, not all of them. I liked the songs on his playlist but they all kind of had the same sort of vibe. These songs didn't have that feel. Not at all. These songs were slower, calmer, and just, well, happier.

I wondered if he just listened to different music when he was relaxing on a plane than his usual stuff, or if something was making him feel different than normal. And if that something was me.

I did eventually fall asleep, no longer able to hear the music he was playing.