Page 42

THE HOUSE LOOKED tidy and unlived-in, the signs of someone just passing through.

Or, you know, two someones passing through into the bedroom, stripping off the rest of our clothes, and tumbling into the bed together.

At some point we fell asleep, because now as I blinked blearily awake, I found myself tangled in the sheets with Sasha.

Morning light came in through the large windows.

At first I thought the curtains were drawn, because the room was so dim, but that was just the weather outside.

Gray clouds stretched across the horizon, hazy with the early morning.

The outer bands of Hurricane Darcy had reached us, rotating out in the Atlantic, stirring up dark waters.

There was something soft and serene about cloudy windswept summer days.

It was the kind of stillness that never came to LA.

Sasha was asleep, his face angled toward me, burrowed into my hair.

He was a quiet sleeper, though every now and then a muscle in his jaw twitched, as if there were things he couldn’t escape even in dreams. His messy hair stuck up at odd angles, the shadow of a beard against his otherwise clean-shaven face.

In the soft gray light of morning, he looked like the kind of muse any rose-tinted heart would write a thousand songs about.

I rested my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. Ninety-five beats per minute. Keeping in perfect time with the melody in my head. I closed my eyes and relished the sound. Was this, I began to wonder, what love sounded like? Was this, simple and certain and scary, how it started?

I bolted upright in bed.

That was it.

Sasha groaned, cracking an eye open. “Bird, what … ? The sheets!” he sleepily slur-cried as I wrapped the bedsheet around myself and dragged it with me, out of the bedroom and into the living room, where an upright piano sat.

I backtracked and grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him with me up to the piano. I slipped onto the bench, wanting to remember that feeling, the spinning, the off-centeredness, the infiniteness of it all, dancing with possibility—or the ghost of it, maybe.

The piano was for decoration—Lily Ashton had taken lessons for a few years—but I flipped the keylid anyway and found the first chord of melody. It wasn’t too out of tune.

I played the melody—the top line—and a shiver raced down my spine.

“You have that look in your eyes,” he noted, coming to sit down at the bench with me. “Like you’re onto something.”

I found the chords again, a little faster than in our heads, but it felt right.

“Oh,” he murmured, mesmerized.

“You can hear it, can’t you?” I asked.

He nodded, marveling. “Yeah, bird, I can.”

That was all the encouragement necessary. I needed my phone. I needed to record this before I forgot—

Wordlessly, he found it on the coffee table and handed it to me.

I turned on the audio recorder, and shuffled for a piece of scrap paper somewhere near the bench, until Sasha disappeared and came back with my notebook from my purse.

“Thank you,” I murmured, and flipped to the page I’d scribbled on a few nights ago, and scratched out a word, and wrote another, and I saw it then.

The puzzle pieces coming together.

I sat a little straighter. “Something that sounds like love—rhymes with it,” I clarified. “ Dove ? Shove ? Hereof ?”

“ Enough ?” he suggested.

“That doesn’t rhyme.”

“It’s close enough .”

I rolled my eyes. “We’ll need coffee— above !”

And a song formed slowly. A song about a cacophony of sound.

About a love, sweet and gentle. A meet-cute in motion.

A ballad in Technicolor. About finding someone who understood you without asking questions.

Someone who was at your side, singing your favorite songs, telling you that you were not alone.

“‘ Kiss me in the morning, and keep me in a song. Love me with conversations that take the whole night long ,’” I sang, scratching out words, adding others.

Sasha turned himself around on the bench to face the keys. He hummed along with me, repeating the melody, then: “What if—here.”

“Countermelody?” he suggested aloud, playing the notes.

“For the pre-chorus—oh! And then that little bit at the end of the melody? Where it goes up? Highest point of the song. But what if, in the verses, we flip it?” And I played what it would sound like, singing out the notes as I went.

For the next hour, we traded off back and forth, putting in thoughts and suggestions.

It was like the lid had finally been unscrewed, and all our ideas came pouring out.

I fixed morning coffee while he scrolled through some instrumentations online, and we made notes on a scrap of paper and recorded different melodies for the verses, and as we did, words started to take shape. Ones we just started to gravitate to.

Memory and morning , song and light , night and longing , and heartbeat and motion.

“Secret, secret,” he murmured, jotting it down. “A secret of night—no, not secret . Something bigger, something—”

Odyssey , I suggested.

“Yes! That. That.”

I hummed, “Love songs set alight. The pounding of a heartbeat …”

“In a forever night—no. Not forever , doesn’t fit.”

“Never-ending?”

Like the story?

“Oh, we’re a story never told before.”

I looked at him, smiling. Just trying to get it right.

He jotted it down and sang the lyrics. Then he laughed. “Corny, but you know? I like corny,” he said, and took a gulp of his now-cold coffee.

I watched him with a smile. “I do, too.” I’d never seen him this animated before, and my heart squeezed because I loved this fire in him.

He asked, “How did you figure out it was the wrong tempo?”

“Because I listened to your heart beat,” I replied simply.

His face softened. His shoulders melted.

It was an answer he never expected. “You’re amazing.

” Then he leaned forward and kissed me, and I felt his adoration like a sunrise, bright and warm and golden.

He pressed his forehead against mine, savoring the connection.

“I have been so tiny and mad for so long,” he murmured, “that I forgot what it felt like to make something. To enjoy making it.”

“It’s magical, isn’t it? Nothing like it.”

“I think it’s because of you,” he thought, and I leaned into him, and kissed him again.

Good love songs made you want to fall in love.

They held emotions, weight, memories. What was the point in feeling , in being , if I couldn’t make anything with it?

I saw the world best when I was on the outside looking in.

I had just been so afraid of doing that.

Of taking my emotions and holding them up to the light.

I was afraid they’d fracture, that I would just find myself broken, but the truth was that love was like a diamond—it sparkled and it cut.

Someone just needed to give me the courage to look. And now a new picture was taking shape.

He read over the lyrics as they coalesced, writing his own between mine, combining our ideas.

This was the right song. These were the right lyrics. This was what it wanted to be, whether or not we were ready for it. The melody was getting softer, after all. And—even though neither of us wanted to admit it—so were the sounds of each other’s voices in our heads.

At first it wasn’t much, but as the day wore on it became harder to hear him.

Because this was the right song. Written the way it was supposed to be.

He looked back at the lyrics. “My mom would love this song.”

I turned to him on the bench, looking up at him.

I tried to imagine what his mom had looked like, if she had his dark hair or his bright eyes, his stature or his nose or his wide, soft mouth.

I wondered what music she liked, her favorite food, her dreams. How she had stumbled into Roman Fell’s embrace.

Did she and Sasha have the same kind of humor?

Did she like loud prints? Where was she from, to give him that soft accent I couldn’t quite place?

“Can you tell me about her?” I asked.

He shifted on the bench to face me, too. “What do you want to know?”

Everything, I wanted to say, but I settled on, “Whatever you want to tell me.”

He let out a breath, and then got up from the bench.

“She was amazing,” he began, walking over into the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee, although it was afternoon now, and the coffee was very much cold.

He took his black, as it turned out, whenever he wasn’t ordering it from a barista.

His voice might have been faint in my head, but it was clear.

I didn’t have to strain to hear it. “She lit up every room she walked into, and she never met a person she didn’t like. ”

I left the piano, too, and went to lean against the breakfast bar. I folded my arms over each other and put my chin on my hands. “Would she have liked me?”

“Oh, she would have had a riot with you,” he said. “And your mom.”

I marveled at the idea. “It’s not so far-fetched that our moms might’ve known each other. They both played in the Boulevard. Maybe they were friends.”

“Maybe, but she never talked about it. I don’t even know when she was in or for how long,” he replied sadly.

“But … I like to think that maybe my mom planted the song in my head to lead me to you,” he teased with a laugh, and slid up onto the barstool beside me.

“I like to think she’s still around in a way.

Making things happen. She was a romantic that way, you know.

She always thought that her big break was just around the corner.

We moved around a lot when I was little.

She kept trying to make a name for herself in LA. She was my best friend.”

Like my mom was mine. It was hard losing her now, but if I had lost her when I was younger …

“She died on her way to a music audition, actually,” he went on after a moment, tracing his thumb around the lip of his coffee mug, looking down into the blackness, but not really seeing it.

“I’d stayed up half the night studying for some stupid math test, so I didn’t even tell her bye before she left.

She probably opened the door, said goodbye like she always did, and left.

I could’ve told her to be careful. Good luck on her audition.

” He frowned, the memory still raw, even twenty years later.

“But I didn’t, and she died in a car accident on the way there.

A drunk driver heading home from an all-night bender.

Head-on. The EMTs said it was instant. I think they just told me that to make me feel better.

So now I just—I have to keep her memory alive.

And when I had my wreck it sort of … was a horrifying wake-up call. ”

We sat quietly for a long moment.

Then, “I’m sorry I dragged down the mood.”

I reached over and threaded my fingers into his, and squeezed his hand tightly. Thank you for telling me.

“Not quite the Sebastian Fell everyone wants to know, am I?”

No, but I was glad of that. He was human.

Real, and faulty, and rough around the edges.

So much more than the bite-sized pieces I’d been fed for the better part of two decades.

The alluring, vapid man I’d met in that VIP lounge had melted into the one I’d seen in glimpses that night, thoughtful and comforting and sharp.

“That guy doesn’t exist,” I replied. “You do, and I see you, Sasha.” I bent close and pressed my forehead against his, staring into those lovely cerulean eyes.

Gossip mags and Vogue articles could say whatever they wanted to about those eyes, but they would never be caught in them the way I was.

It was enrapturing, his gaze the sky, and I the only thing in it.

I see you.

He picked up our intertwined hands and kissed the back of mine. “Thank you,” he whispered, his thoughts tinged with the edges of sour memories. Was that what grief did? Spoil every soft and good thing it touched?

“I’d like you to meet my mom,” I said after we broke away. “Maybe they did know each other. Maybe she can give you a few more good memories.”

He swallowed thickly. “I—I …”

“I think I’d like that, bird.”

“Then it’s settled,” I decided. “I’ll introduce you.”

He grinned, a glimmer in his eyes. I knew that look. “You’ll introduce me to your parents? No one’s ever done that before.”

“I can’t imagine why,” I remarked wryly.

He seemed unfazed—excited, even. “Can I wear the pink flamingo shirt I got at the shop?”

“No.”

He poked out his bottom lip and made it wobble.

“ Fine ,” I relented.

He grinned. “I knew you’d say yes,” he teased, and kissed me again.

It was then that I realized I could barely feel his thoughts when we kissed.

I could barely make out the shape of them.

The song itself, the one that had brought us together, was nothing more than a vague echo in the back of my head.

And I wondered, once our connection broke, who we would be without it.