Page 117 of Hard Rock Muse

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“Wait, what if we try this,” Julian told me. “Shove over, let me show you.”

I shuffled over on the piano bench and let him take a seat next to me. He put his fingers to the keys and began playing while singing the lyrics we’d come up with — with a few important changes.

Julian’s voice wasn’t as strong as it might have been if he’d been trained to sing, but it was pure and sweet — and heartfelt.

“See what I’m doing here?” he said in between verses. “What if we did it this way instead?”

After that night when we’d made up, when Julian had confessed his feelings for me, he’d immediately gone back to our song, insisting on re-working it.

He had played around with some of the verses, re-written a couple lines of the chorus. It didn’t seem to be a big change at first, but as I heard him sing it, I realized exactly what he’d done.

“Good?” He stilled his hands as he finished played.

“It’s fantastic,” I told him, my heart swelling in my chest. “It’s exactly what I imagined it could be.”

Julian made a few notes in pencil on the music sheets.

“Okay, so we do it this way,” he said. “Now we try playing it again from the start. I’ll play, you sing.”

He straightened his back, flexed his fingers and bowed over the keys to start playing.

I waited for the right note then launched into the song. As I sang, my breath was almost taken away. Just those few little changes, changing up a few words, made such a difference.

As I sang and Julian played, his fingers lightly stroking the keys, I was filled with a sort of wistfulness. The song evoked a sense of longing, a feeling of regret. It made tears fill my eyes.

But as we continued making music together, it changed. He pressed the keys harder, with more force, the sounds thrumming through my chest, fierce and full of a passionate fervor. The tears dried up as my heart soared, my veins buzzing with a vibrant energy that made me want to move my body, made me want to thrash and bounce and cheer. He played the last chorus and I couldn’t stop the grin from spreading across my face as I belted out the last note.

This was it. I knew. This was our song.

His hands crashed down on the keys and came to a stop. He turned to me with his own wide grin. I laughed and jumped into his arms. He caught me and pulled me into his lap on the bench. He planted a sloppy, wet kiss on my cheek, making me giggle.

“So this is it?” I asked.

“This has to be it,” Julian said. “I can’t think of a single thing we could do to make this song better.”

“What if we played it on the oboe? Or extended it to a fifteen minute long opus? Or what if we—”

Julian silenced me with another kiss, this time on my lips. I felt the curve of his smile.

“I really couldn’t have done this without you,” he said. “You’re so amazing. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I replied, wondering at how easily the words came to him now.

The door to the music room flung open.

“What was that?” Cerise demanded from the doorway.

We pulled back from each other with a start.

“That song,” she said bluntly, ignoring the compromising position she’d found us in. “What was it? It sounded like yours, but it was different.”

“We decided to keep on working on it,” Julian said as I scrambled off his lap, trying not to flush.

Seth and Nathan peeped over Cerise’s shoulder in the doorway.

“What are you guys up to?” Seth asked. “We were working and then Cerise’s ears perked up like a cat hearing the rustle of the treat bag.”