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A SHOCK SIZZLED through me.

Bright.

Buzzing.

A lightning strike that filled my veins with Pop Rocks.

The crowd was so loud I couldn’t think. My head turned to static, a radio that had lost its signal.

Sebastian ran his thumb up the side of my neck and under my chin and sank deeper into the kiss.

His mouth opened, tongue sliding along my bottom lip.

He tasted like spearmint and Diet Coke, and this close the smell of bergamot was almost overwhelming.

The hands framing my face were gentle . Just a moment longer , I thought, letting myself turn to putty in the warmth of his fingers against my cheeks.

I hadn’t been kissed in a long time, and certainly not by someone who handled me like I was a delicacy.

For a breath, a second, a time immemorial, there was only this electrifying touch—his soft lips, and his hands traveling to my hips.

The kiss was desperate and deep and wanting, and inside of it was something new—

A melody.

Faint, but slowly growing louder. One I’d never heard before, even though it sounded so familiar.

I pressed myself against him, my hands coming down to rest on his shoulders, firm and steady, the heat from his body so warm in the stickiness of the theater, but I didn’t mind. He hooked his fingers through my belt loops and kept me planted. Grounded. Like he was afraid I’d fly off.

His tongue played across mine, then his teeth as he nibbled my bottom lip.

Get lost in him, Jo , I thought. Crack your heart open.

“She tastes like cherries.”

I gasped in surprise.

We broke apart.

Willa Grey handed off her video camera to one of her bandmates and grabbed her microphone, and our faces disappeared from the screen behind her.

She jumped along to the last moments of the song, twirling around like she was a conductor orchestrating the universe.

The song ended, but it wasn’t the music that left my ears ringing.

“Cherries?” I murmured. My ChapStick?

He rubbed at his mouth, looking down at the stage—and then sharply up to me. “I don’t—what?”

“You said I tasted like cherries.”

His eyes widened in surprise as if he hadn’t meant to say that out loud. It was vulnerable, as if he was about to explain why he’d said it, why the taste took him by surprise. But then he noticed a few people below us in the crowd snapping photos, and a mask closed over his face again.

And suddenly the sincere Sebastian Fell I’d kissed was gone.

He righted himself and smoothed on a smirk, his voice that languid molasses again. “I can’t recall, but I can kiss you again to make sure. I’m pretty well versed in ChapStick.”

My eyebrows furrowed. “I didn’t say it was ChapStick.”

A woman in the crowd below snapped a not-so-subtle photo of Sebastian and me.

My lips felt tender from his kiss. Gigi was going to flip when I told her that he kissed just as well as her fanfics dreamed, but then again he had fifteen years on the immortalized teenager in her stories, and a long list of ex-lovers he’d practiced on.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise that he could pick up the notes of my ChapStick on his tongue. But it was a little sexy, and that was something I wouldn’t admit to anyone.

“You’re fun,” he said, tilting his head toward me again. We were still close enough that if he wanted, he could kiss me again, or I could kiss him. “Wanna get away?”

A question with a thousand possibilities.

I could just lean over, and snag his lips with mine again, and get lost in the action of it for another song or two.

And maybe that song or two would turn into an entire night, and maybe if I was lucky, the night would turn into a few more, and maybe weeks and months and years would go by in the blink of an eye.

This was Hollywood, after all. Weren’t happily ever afters guaranteed?

But as soon as I thought about kissing him again, I remembered my early flight in the morning, and the long month I’d spend on the sunny beaches of Vienna Shores, and the unfamiliar dread that coiled in my stomach at the thought of it.

Besides, Willa Grey was saying goodbye to her audience, thanking them for a hot night at the Fonda Theatre, waxing poetic about how dreams really came true under the starry lights of LA.

“I’ve got a car out back,” he went on. “We can sneak away and no one’ll know. Unless you want to go out the front. Have a few minutes of fame—I’m cool with that, too.”

And that was when I realized he genuinely didn’t believe that I belonged here. He flirted with me because he thought I was a fan, kissed me thinking I was the kind of decision that he could shrug off in the morning. Was this the sort of pickup line reserved for people he thought wouldn’t matter?

“Is that it?” I asked. “Fame? Is that all you could give me?”

His neatly trimmed eyebrows furrowed, making a divot in the middle. He hadn’t gotten Botox, interestingly enough, or else the lines wouldn’t have looked as deep, and he wouldn’t have looked so puzzled. “Is that all?” he echoed, shaking his head. “What else is there?”

I opened my mouth to reply, when someone called my name from behind me. “Joni! Joni! ”

I whirled around. It was Willa Grey, fresh off her set. She took me by surprise, because wasn’t she supposed to do an encore?

She hurried over to me, glittering in sweat and, well, glitter . Her fiery red hair bounced around her like the curls had a mind of their own. She pulled me into a wet, sticky hug. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

“What are you doing here?” I asked, perplexed. “You—your encore?”

“They’ll wait,” she replied, flapping her hand toward the audience, who were already beginning to chant for said encore.

“You made it!” she added, getting a good look at me as if she didn’t quite believe I was here, and then hugged me again.

“I was half-convinced you wouldn’t show.

And you know Sebby!” she added, smiling at Sebastian Fell.

The puzzlement on his face grew. “You … two know each other, Will?”

She rolled her eyes. “God, it’s like you tell him one thing and it goes in one ear and out the other,” she said to me, and then turned to Sebastian. “This is my songwriter. You know, the one I told you about? Joni? ”

It took a moment for him to connect the name. “Joni … Joni Lark.”

“Now you remember, fantastic. But I could’ve sworn you two knew each other—that kiss was so intimate,” she said. I felt myself blush. “But really, you two are strangers?”

“And getting stranger, it seems,” he replied, looking at me in a new light, not like a nobody he had kissed, but calculating now. The kind of look I immediately hated.

Willa didn’t notice—her back was turned to him.

Her assistant motioned from the doorway, tapping his fingers to his wrist, saying it was time to go.

Willa huffed, annoyed. “Sorry, I gotta go, but …” She took me by the hands and squeezed them tightly.

“I have tomorrow off from tour. Let’s hang out? Catch up? How’s your mom?”

At the mention of my mom, I felt myself tense, magnified only by Sebastian’s scrutiny. “I’m heading home tomorrow,” I replied apologetically, “for a month—longer than I usually go but I have the time and I sort of need a vacation anyway and …”

Mom.

She squeezed my hands again. Her face was sincere and open. “I get it. I appreciate you, you know.”

Her assistant was having a conniption in the doorway, waving his hands to get her attention. She motioned to him that she was coming, and then on second thought hugged me tightly around the neck. She whispered into my ear, “Seb’s not so bad if you give him a chance.”

Then she was gone, just as quickly as she’d come.

And Sebastian Fell was still studying me. I finally returned his gaze, as if to say, Do you believe me now?

He inclined his head. “Joni Lark,” he said, my name sounding like a spell on his tongue, though I wasn’t sure whether it was a blessing or a curse.

I was still lingering on that kiss, and the sudden coldness.

Willa liked him—and she rarely liked anyone really.

Told me to give him a chance, and I thought about the flicker of someone sincere just before our kiss.

Maybe she was right. I might’ve convinced myself, too, if he hadn’t smoothed on a grin and leaned toward me with all the audacity of an asshole.

“Will I be the inspiration for your next song, then?”

I reeled back. The question stung like a slap. “Really?” I heard myself ask, before I pulled the rest of me back together. I felt my entire body tense with anger. “First you thought I wanted your autograph , and now you think I want to use you as a muse or something?”

He tilted his head, as if yes—that’s exactly what he thought. “Everyone wants something, sweetheart.”

“I’m not sweet,” I snapped, and held up my hands in surrender. “God, I can’t believe I kissed you.”

He narrowed his eyes. They were again stormy and muted. “You enjoyed it.”

“Until you started talking, sure.” I grabbed my purse off the back of the stool, slung it over my shoulder, and started out of the private hell I’d willingly wandered into.

But then I stopped at the doorway, a thought occurring to me, and I whirled back around to him and said, “By the way? That song is a terrible pickup line.”

Before he could respond—probably with something snarky, probably something casually cruel—I fled down the stairs. The security guy was at the bottom, playing solitaire on his phone.

In the Fonda Theatre, Willa Grey came back onstage, and the crowd yelled so loudly, it vibrated my bones.

Then she launched into her first hit—a song about taking chances and kissing strangers.

Not mine, but it was a good song. I liked the sound.

Hundreds of people sang along with her, joyful and bright and living so readily in the moment their love was almost catching.

I lingered by the door for a verse, listening.

And then I went out of one of the emergency exits into the parking lot, and called an Uber.