Page 25 of The Sound Between Us (Vinyl Hearts #1)

The light has shifted again. Later now. Warm and syrupy, the kind of golden hour that makes everything look like a film still.

His eyes look different in it. Less amber, more brown.

Flecked with green I hadn’t noticed before.

These aren’t the eyes that appear in magazines, retouched and distant.

They belong to this moment. To this room. To me.

I don’t know how long we’ve slept, but the sleepy excuse for being this close has disappeared. We’re both awake now. Entirely. And the space between us is electric with all the things we’re not saying.

I roll to face him, the movement deliberate. His eyes search mine, looking for permission, or maybe proof that this is real, that I’m really here and not some fever dream brought on by creative exhaustion.

The silence stretches, taut and intimate. A heartbeat away from something irreversible.

I can hear his heartbeat. Can feel the heat of his skin warming the air between us.

Can smell his soap—clean and citrusy—cut with the sweat and static of the studio, and something underneath all of it that’s just him.

This is exactly what I swore I wouldn’t do.

What I promised myself when I agreed to that one week in his house.

But I don’t move. I don’t run.

There’s something in his gaze that makes every wall I’ve built feel obsolete. He’s not performing. He’s just looking at me.

“Seren...” The way he says my name—low, careful, reverent—is devastating.

“Don’t talk.” My voice is tight with the effort of staying coherent, of not reaching for him and damn the consequences. “You’ll only ruin it.”

Because words make things real. Words turn this suspended moment into something practical—something strategic, dissected and doomed by consequence.

They bring back every reason this shouldn’t be happening.

His fame. My baggage. The inevitable fallout of crossing wires we were never supposed to touch.

Words remind us that he’s Harrison Carter and I’m supposed to know better.

But his hand finds my hip.

Not possessive. Not greedy. Just anchoring.

His palm curves against me through the fabric of my shirt, fingers spreading with quiet certainty.

Reverent. The heat from his skin seeps through mine, and suddenly my body doesn’t care about logic.

Every nerve ending lights up, and I realise I’ve been holding my breath.

“Harrison, I can’t be that girl for you,” I breathe, the words rushing out before I lose my nerve. “The industry girlfriend. The muse. The temporary distraction between albums.”

“I know.” His response is simple. Direct.

No promises. No fantasy scripts about how we’ll make it work against impossible odds. No pretty lies about love conquering all. Just the impossible truth of it—and his choice to be here anyway.

And that undoes me completely.

Because what I’ve craved my entire life isn’t safety. It’s this. Someone who sees the complications clearly and still chooses me with both eyes open. Someone who doesn’t try to fix me or save me or turn me into someone else’s version of what I should be.

When he kisses me, it’s deliberate. Slow. Inevitable. A gravity we’ve both stopped resisting.

This isn’t London. That was chaos and adrenaline and too much too soon, desperation masquerading as connection. This is surrender. Conscious. Intentional. The slow fall into something we’ve been circling for too long.

His mouth is warm against mine—firm, searching, not rushed. I taste coffee and sugar and something purely Harry, raw beneath the polish. He kisses like he’s memorising, not devouring.

My fingers find his curls, finally. They’re softer than I expected. Wild under my hands. Untamed in a way stylists hate but I love. He makes a low, involuntary sound against my mouth—half sigh, half groan—and it shoots straight through me.

“Are you sure?” he murmurs against my lips, and there’s something vulnerable in the question .

“No,” I admit. “But I’m doing it anyway.”

His laugh is breathless, relieved. “Good. Because I’m not sure about anything except wanting you.”

We undress each other slowly. There’s no rush. Just reverence. Just the careful exploration of territory we’ve been mapping from a distance.

He watches me the whole time. Not ogling. Not cataloguing. Just watching. My shirt slips over my head, and his gaze follows every inch.

When his falls to the floor, I let my hands trace the lines of him.

The shape of his chest, the soft stretch of skin over lean muscle.

The scars he never talks about in interviews—teenage rebellion, maybe, or the kind of childhood no one likes to write into glossy magazine profiles.

There’s a tattoo over his heart, script so small it’s barely legible, but I catch fragments. Coordinates, maybe. Something personal.

He’s beautiful the way real people are beautiful. Flawed. Human. Utterly uncurated. There’s a small birthmark on his shoulder, a constellation of freckles scattered across his collarbone. He smells like skin and sleep and the salt from earlier sweat.

This is Harry. Not the version the world gets. The one who’s real when the lights go out.

“You’re thinking too much,” he murmurs against my throat, mouth brushing the curve where neck meets shoulder. His voice vibrates through me.

“Someone has to.”

“Not now. Not here. Just be in this with me.”

So I fall.

I stop overthinking. I stop cataloguing every red flag and potential consequence. I let myself feel his hands on my body—the warmth, the weight, the slow burn that builds between us. He moves like he’s trying to learn me note by note.

Because this isn’t just physical. It’s something deeper. It’s the kind of intimacy that terrifies you because it could actually mean something.

When he moves over me—eyes open, voice quiet, breath syncing with mine—I feel everything. The tenderness. The want. The terrifying honesty of being seen completely. Not as Damon Rogers’ daughter or Faith Jones’ legacy, but as myself. As Seren.

And when he’s inside me, slow and present, it’s not about the act. It’s about the connection.

We move steady and building. My fingers on his back, his mouth on my collarbone, the sheets twisted and the light golden around us. It’s not frantic—it’s deliberate. Reverent.

The heat rises, slow and unstoppable. I unravel beneath him, gasping his name—Harry—not Harrison. And he holds my gaze the whole time.

After, we lie tangled in the warmth. Skin against skin, no barriers left.

He doesn’t speak immediately. Neither do I. There’s no performance left in either of us. Just breath and silence and golden light that seems to cocoon the moment.

His fingers trace lazy shapes along my shoulder, and I listen to his heartbeat slowing beneath my ear. My brain tries to engage, tries to catalogue all the ways this complicates everything, but the panic doesn’t land. Not yet.

Because this, right now, feels like peace.

“What happens now?” I whisper against his chest, the words muffled by skin and proximity.

“I don’t know.” His voice rumbles through me, honest and uncertain. “But I know I don’t want you to leave.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” The words slip out before I can stop them, honest and terrifying and more true than anything I’ve said in years.

His arms tighten around me. “Promise?”

“For tonight. For now. For as long as this doesn’t destroy us both. ”

He’s quiet for a moment, fingers still tracing patterns on my skin. Then: “What if it doesn’t destroy us? What if it saves us instead?”

I lift my head to look at him properly. In the golden light, he looks young again. Hopeful. The boy who wrote songs about escape routes and believed music could change everything. Before the world got its hooks in him and taught him to be careful.

“Then we’ll be the luckiest idiots alive.”

His smile is soft and wicked and full of possibilities that make my stomach flip. “I can live with those odds.”

“Can you? Really?” The question comes out smaller than I intended. “Because this isn’t going to be simple, Harry. Nothing about this is simple.”

“I don’t want simple.” His hand finds my face, thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone. “I’ve had simple. I’ve had safe and uncomplicated and emotionally sanitised. It’s boring. It’s not real.”

“And this is real?”

“This is the most real thing I’ve felt in years.”

Outside, LA keeps performing its endless act of sunshine and ambition. But in here, in this bed, we’ve fallen out of orbit. Just us. Two people who’ve crossed a line they can’t uncross, holding each other in the amber light and pretending the world can’t touch us here.

Falling. Sinking. Burning.

And maybe—for tonight—that’s enough.

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