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I curled my fingers up into his hair, and he relaxed into me. The hand he’d planted on the pillar fell against my shoulder, and then inched up to hold the side of my neck. There was nothing in my head, and nothing in his. Static and silence and thundering hearts—

And then his voice leaked in. Not just his thoughts—his feelings, his memories, his everything .

I wasn’t sure which were my feelings, and which were his.

Sebastian was right—kissing him now was more . It was like touching a live wire.

There was just so much in his head. The way it felt to weave his fingers through my hair, the way I smelled like coconut shampoo, the way he felt solid and warm and safe with me, the way I tasted like Cheerwine, if I liked his kiss, what I liked least, how he could do better, how he felt he wasn’t enough—

So much uncertainty. So much worry. And so much love for something distant and sweet and gone.

It danced across the edges of his tongue, almost incomprehensible.

I wanted to chase after those thoughts, I wanted to catch them and crack them open like eggs and let all the mysteries spill out. So I did.

I took hold of his shirt. His emotions tasted like butterscotch.

They were sweet and sticky, slow and strong.

And in that amber sweetness, as I sank into it, his thoughts built into images behind my eyelids.

The silhouette of a woman in a doorway, saying something I couldn’t make out.

Her face was shadowed, but it felt like she was smiling as she closed the door—

Then emptiness.

So much emptiness it mirrored mine. Echoing. Vast.

Something that was once there. Something that wasn’t any longer.

It scared me.

This teetering on a precipice, on the edge of a cliff, waiting to fall and fearing the fall and welcoming it —

I reeled away, gasping for breath, holding tight to his shirt. My head spun like I was drunk on a bottle of wine, though my lips felt tender, the wind crusting them with sand and sea salt.

My chest felt tight. My hands shook.

That was too intimate, too soon.

Too frightening to see that much of someone.

He pushed his thick, dark hair back with his hands. “Sorry,” he mumbled, unable to look at me. “I’m sorry.”

Then, in his head, he wondered, “What did she hear?”

“Nothing,” I lied.

He shot me a look of disbelief.

The answer was that I’d seen too much, and nothing that I wanted to.

I saw shades of a man the world rarely saw rendered in real life.

Things he was heartbreakingly afraid for anyone to see.

My mouth still tasted like the panicked end of his kiss, sour with a kind of sadness that sank, and kept sinking, deeper and deeper, with no bottom.

What kind of loss left something like that in a kiss?

Something personal, and something I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Something that he probably didn’t want to tell me about, either.

“Sadly,” I said with a sigh, forcing a lighter tone, something to pull us back from the intensity of that kiss, the feelings, the—the confusion of it all, “like I thought, there’s nothing in your head.”

He forced a laugh. The beach wind ruffled his hair like an old woman to a child, and it made him look vulnerable. Real. He replied, “Yeah, I figured. Just a bunch of shrimp doing the high kick, right?”

“They were actually doing the entire routine to One Direction’s ‘Best Song Ever.’”

He rolled his eyes. “Ah yes, the hallmark of our youth.” A rushing wave came up over the sand, washing over his ankles, drenching his shoes.

He didn’t seem to notice. I could hear the buzzing anxiety in his head now, too.

Was that how mine felt all the time—white noise and worry?

He licked his lips, the flicker of the taste of cherry crossing his thoughts, and his tense body unwound a little. “You’re a bad liar, you know.”

So are you.

A hint of a smile crossed his mouth. “It was a good kiss, though.”

I hated to admit that I agreed. “Those rumors, at least, are true.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Oooh, you’ve listened to rumors about me?”

I cleared my throat, deciding to ignore him. I was too worried to feel annoyed. If I’d felt his emptiness, what had he felt in me? “It didn’t work.”

And we shouldn’t do it again , I added in my head.

“No,” he agreed, “but it was worth a shot. And now we know.”

“I’m glad we tried,” he added.

I swallowed thickly. “Yes.”

The beach breeze had undone my braid, so I pulled it out the rest of the way and inclined my head up toward the top of the pier. He followed. We climbed the sand dune to the boardwalk, where a few late-night tourists lingered, bent together like melted Valentine’s Day chocolates.

I stopped on the pier and listened. The song was soft and sure, humming just below the whisper of the wind. “There it is again.”

“What?” he asked, and then paused. Cocked his head to listen, even though it was just in our heads.

The speakers on the pier cut off at midnight, and it was almost touching one in the morning.

“Oh, the earworm. I’ve tried to figure out what it’s from, and I can’t find anything,” he said. “The song doesn’t exist.”

“It has to,” I replied. “Because otherwise—why us randomly ? It doesn’t make sense. But I can’t get it to go away no matter what I do.”

“I’ve tried everything,” he agreed. “Did it just start over for you?”

“Yeah, it did.”

The realization was a slow flicker in our heads—I heard his thought just as it bloomed into mine. It was like an itch that had finally been scratched, or a stretch after a too-long car ride. He held my gaze, and I held his.

The song, unfinished and unending, sang between us.

The first time I heard it was in the Uber away from the concert.

“The walk home,” he added.

Then the next morning at the airport—

“Catching breakfast with Willa.”

Driving home with Gigi.

“Piano lessons at the school.”

The first night I heard you—

“The first night I heard you,” he echoed.

On, and on, and on.

It had been there since the beginning. Right in front of us. Playing on loop this whole time. If we weren’t connected this—this melody —then why could only we hear it? Two musicians, and a song?

“Well,” I murmured, “ half of a song.”

“Does it want us to sing it?” he mused, humming the few bars that were also in my head. “No, it’s not done.”

No, it wasn’t. That worried me. I hesitated, chewing on my bottom lip, because the more I thought about what the melody wanted, the less I wanted to say it aloud.

He tilted his head, watching me. “She looks cute when she’s thinking.”

“Maybe we need to finish it,” I said, ignoring his thoughts in my head. It felt like there was a stone, suddenly, in the pit of my stomach.

Sebastian felt the opposite. His eyes lit up, because I was a songwriter, of course. He barked a laugh. “Oh, if that’s all,” he said, “then it should be easy. Writing melodies is our bread and butter.”

I tried to walk it back, because suddenly this was a terrible idea. “I mean, we don’t know if that’s what we have to do—”

“It makes sense. We already got the top line—well, half of it,” he went on enthusiastically.

I found that when he was excited, he talked with his hands, waving his fingers through the air like he was conducting a symphony of his thoughts.

“We have the melody, now all we need is the lyrics, find a few verses, some instrumentation underneath. Maybe a bridge with a key change—easy!”

Easy —the word echoed in my head like a gong.

“Easy,” I repeated. He sounded so happy with himself; you’d have thought he’d solved world hunger.

Sure, easy. Why did I have to write a song ?

“We,” he clarified, spinning back to me, pointing between us. “ We have to write a song.”

My chest began to feel tight. “I—I don’t know. What if we just waste time? And what if we just need—I can kiss you again. See if that works? Third time’s the charm—”

“You don’t want to do that,” he chastised. “And don’t tease.”

I shook my head, rubbing my chest to alleviate the sudden tension. “But what if—”

What if I couldn’t? What if I doomed him to being in my head forever? What if I didn’t have another song to give? What if—

What if I fail?

He took my face in his hands, so I could look nowhere else but at him. “Bird,” he murmured, “breathe.”

I took a deep breath.

“We can do this together,” he told me.

His voice grounded me, even if I didn’t believe him. How could he put so much trust in someone he barely knew? It frightened me almost as much as my heart did when he called me bird .

“So.” His hands dropped from my face. “Partners?” he asked, extending his hand, waiting for a handshake.

I dropped my gaze to it, his open hand waiting for mine. “Associates,” I replied, and shook his hand. His grip was strong and sure, but my gaze never left his face as I watched his mouth curl into one of those crooked, melting smiles.

“We’ll see.”