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THE RAIN KEPT on.

Throughout the night, and into the next morning, it barely even let up. It didn’t matter—we didn’t go out in it, anyway. I texted my parents to let them know I was alive, and glanced at the text from Gigi. It was short. To the point.

We need to talk, she said.

I guessed we did.

But before I could shoot off a reply text, Sasha excitedly called me back to the piano because he figured out a better rhyme for night , and I told myself I’d respond later.

We called in an order for Chinese food, and we wrote, and we fed each other egg rolls and watched reruns of Law we were disappearing from each other’s minds.

I should have been relieved, but I was the opposite. Though I’d lived all my life with only my own thoughts, the idea of having to do it again felt—

Lonely .

Very, very lonely.

“What’s lonely?” Sasha asked, looking up from the piano.

“Nothing,” I said dismissively. “It’s nothing.” His frown told me that he didn’t believe me, so I leaned forward and planted a kiss on his mouth. I said, “I was just thinking how lonely your bed’s going to be, when I crawl into it without you tonight.”

His eyebrows shot up. Distraction: successful. “And where will I be?”

I slipped off the bench, heading for the bedroom. “I dunno. Where would you want to be?”

His eyes grew bright. He closed the keylid, and followed after me into the bedroom, shutting the door behind us.

The song wasn’t finished yet, and though soft, the melody was still there.

So when he kissed me again, and we slipped into the bed together, I felt his warmth in my head, bright and burning.

And I savored it for as long as I could.

THE RAIN CAME down harder. Throughout the night, the ocean swelled, reaching all the way up to the edge of the dunes, before it sighed back out again.

All the weather reporters said that the hurricane wouldn’t make landfall.

I kept checking. They said it’d sweep back out into the Atlantic with the high-pressure system coming down from the north, but I was beginning to have my doubts.

Maybe Van had the right idea, getting out of Vienna Shores while he could.

The morning was dark and gray. I watched the waves from the window for a while, sitting next to Sasha still asleep in bed. Or at least I thought he was.

“You look worried,” he told me.

I tore my eyes away from the weather outside, and sank down beside him in bed. “It’s the storm. It was downgraded to a tropical depression, but I get nervous anyway.”

“And here I thought the hurricane didn’t scare you,” he teased, and shifted to curl his arm around me.

I wished we could lie like this forever, in this good moment.

The bed was warm, and although the sky was gray, I felt safe.

As I laid my head against his shoulder, he began to hum a tune quietly. The song. Our song.

Made with only the good notes.

“It’s not the hurricane that scares me,” I admitted, tracing my fingers across the scar on his abdomen, feeling the bumps and ridges.

One swerve, one bad choice, that was all it took for his life to change.

“I know how they form, when warm water meets low pressure. I’ve lived through dozens at this point.

No, it’s everything else you can’t predict.

One change in the weather—a shift in the wind. The swell of the tide …”

That’s what scares me , I admitted, thinking of the Revelry, and of losing the comforting presence of Sasha inside my head. The things I can’t see coming.

“You act like changes are bad,” he observed.

“Aren’t they usually?”

He took my hand that traced his scar, and threaded his fingers through mine. “Change can be good—even if it doesn’t feel that way at the time.”

I sighed. “You sound like my brother.”

He barked a laugh. “Is that the guy from the first night? Tall guy, looks like Danny Zuko?”

“That’s him,” I confirmed. “He’s my brother, tragically. Irish twins. And he’s going to hate you.”

His eyes widened. “ Oh? Why?”

At which I smiled, and pushed myself up on my elbow, angling toward him.

My hair fell over my shoulder, framing my face in dark curtains, my braid forgotten.

The longer I stayed in this town, the less of the Joni Lark from LA I remembered.

I was a child of beaches and sticky ice cream summers and messy windswept hair.

Vienna Shores ate all my hairbands, but I never really missed them.

Because you’re about to kiss his little sister.

He smiled, and his eyes glittered dangerously. “Are you about to make me a villain, bird?”

“Do you think because you’re some famous guy, he’d approve?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m a terrible influence.”

“And why is that?”

“Because I’m in your head,” he teased, and kissed me. It was brief. Barely more than a brush of his lips. But his thoughts ate into mine again, that sanguine pull of comfort. I loved the way he saw me. I loved myself in his eyes.

I hesitated. “We should probably get up and finish the song.”

“We don’t have to, you know. You can admit you’ll miss me,” he murmured, eyelids half-closed as he pulled his eyes down the length of me. “How many people can say they have a rock star in their head?”

“You’ll miss me more,” I teased.

“More than you know,” he admitted, his voice rumbling through my head in that intoxicating, heady growl.

I felt gooseflesh pull up on my skin, ending in a shiver. Things like this—comets crashing together, heavenly bodies crossing each other in the sky, tides meeting—rarely ended well. Maybe we wouldn’t, either.

Maybe all of this was just us feeling too intensely, and once we were out of each other’s heads, it wouldn’t feel as invasive and consuming. Maybe I was alluring to him because of our connection—and without it …

Maybe I was just like every other girl.

At Willa Grey’s concert, if I hadn’t met him in the private balcony, I’m sure I never would’ve entered his orbit. He never would’ve known I existed.

I was so very certain of that.

But he couldn’t stay in my head forever.

Not if we wanted to get on with our lives.

Our careers. I had to hope that this spark meant my well was full again.

That pouring his emotions into this song had opened up something in him, too.

And as soon as we put a name to it, we’d be done.

Would our connection break permanently, then?

What would it feel like? Lost reception, a missing limb?

After we finished this song … I wondered if he would stay. In his head, I could hear him worry about everyone’s motivations—everyone’s except mine, because he knew my mind. And I worried that he wouldn’t like me the same way once he lost access to my head.

“Maybe in the future we can work together again,” I said, shoving whatever feelings were rolling around in my chest to the farthest reaches of my hopeful heart.

He laughed. “Maybe next time I won’t make such a bad first impression.”

“You probably will,” I teased, “because I’ll probably interrupt your brooding alone time.”

“Brooding is an art form seldom done right,” he replied matter-of-factly. “But I’ll meet you as myself next time. If you’ll do the same?”

“I’m always myself.”

He hummed thoughtfully. “When I met you in LA, you walked like you were on nails, not a single hair out of place. You existed like you were just visiting. You were like stone. Immovable. But here?” And he lifted his hand, twirling a lock of my messy dark hair around his finger. “Here, you’re like poetry in motion.”

Poetry in motion . I think just then, I lost whatever battle I had been waging with myself. I’d been called a lot of things in my life, good and bad and everything in between … but poetry in motion ?

No. I’d never been called that.

“Here,” he went on, a bit quieter, “you look like you’re home.”