Love by Kvitan Shevchuk

There were definitely easier ways to throw your life into chaos

than falling for a rock musician, but Kostia was still sitting on the railing of the second-tier balcony at Mala Opera, admiring the curly-haired guitarist on stage. That guy was practically bathing in the spotlight and in the attention of the crowd. The young girls in the front row were giving him all their fan devotion, all their energy, all the breathless love they had carefully saved for boys with guitars and sad eyes.

It was the first big concert of his band, SLON. Not some tiny backroom show at Teplyi Lampovyi, not another cramped venue with sticky floors and bad sound, but an actual concert hall. SLON had already built a decent following by then: around thirty thousand followers across social media, including those very girls pressed against the stage. The concert was not even halfway through, and they were already close to climbing there. The band even had a group chat with fans in a messenger app. And of course, Yehor—that was the guitarist’s name, and the frontman's too—was the unquestionable star of it all.

Kostia was not in that chat. He thought it was cringe. He was not some eleventh-grade schoolgirl, after all, but a grown man. A serious one. With an apartment in old Darnytsia and an unpaid Monobank credit limit hanging over his head.

He truly did not belong to the company of sloneniata, as the band’s fangirls called themselves. He simply could not get enough of Yehor’s voice. He could not stop watching the way his brown eyes caught the fractured light of the disco ball hanging in the middle of the hall.

Then the band started playing their most popular song. It was the usual little thing about love and longing with intricate guitar solo. Yehor, being the person with the microphone and therefore the power, told the audience to take the hand of the person standing next to them. And then he lifted his gaze. Higher and higher, all the way up to the second balcony.

Kostia knew the song was for him.

Every single fangirl down there probably believed the frontman could dedicate that beautiful flood of chords to her. They all imagined themselves special, chosen, and seen. But they were all wrong. None of them had ever heard Yehor mutter a quiet fuck while trying to find the right chord on an unplugged Cort electric guitar, sitting on a tall bed in a red plaid shirt. 

The eye contact felt like an endless pleasure and a form of torture for both of them. Only a few meters of hot, close air—thick with rhythmic breathing, singing, and smoke-machine haze—separated them, and yet the distance felt almost theatrical in its cruelty. No one in the dancing crowd suspected a thing.

Yehor lifted his hand to his face, kissed the tips of his fingers, and blew a kiss into the air. Kostia reached out to catch it and nearly fell off that damned balcony. But he caught it. With a playful grin, he pressed the invisible kiss to his lips. Some fans tracked its path at once and screamed loud enough to shake the room. The most devoted admirers, the most active users in the band’s group chat, definitely noticed who had received the flying kiss from the crush of their collective dreams. Suddenly, leaving the concert hall alive became a questionable prospect for Kostia. There was, after all, nothing more terrifying in this world than the wrath of seventeen-year-old fangirls in love with a rock guitarist.

He stayed until the last note dissolved into applause, until the lights shifted, until Yehor disappeared backstage with the careless swagger of someone who knew exactly what he had done.

Later, in the dressing room, they jealously kissed with all the hunger they had denied themselves in public. Like payment for every autograph Yehor had signed on flushed teenage chests, for every little heart shape he had made with his fingers, and for every flying kiss he had ever thrown into a crowd. Like the natural result of that long upward glance from the stage.

Somewhere outside, girls are already typing frantic messages into the fan chat, trying to identify the man from the balcony. Inside, none of that mattered. Because love: sweat, smoke, jealousy, and bruised lips in a cramped dressing room.