Page 45 of The Sound Between Us (Vinyl Hearts #1)

the final show

Harrison

The roar doesn’t just hit me—it swallows me whole. Forty thousand voices, each one a fragment of something bigger, something ancient. It’s a sound so massive it feels like the ground might crack open beneath me.

The Pyramid Stage is lit like a dream—gold spilling into smoke, a haze of fairy light and sweat and bass that vibrates straight through my spine. I can’t hear myself think.

“Good evening, Glastonbury!” I shout, my voice burning against the mic, and the crowd erupts like I just set fire to the sky. Phones raise. Arms wave. Someone throws a bucket hat. And just like that, we’re in it.

One last time.

I don’t look left or right at first. I don’t dare. Not at Jamie, thundering steady on the drums. Not at Dex, backlit and sober and eerily sharp, fingers flying across the synth keys.

And definitely not at the wings. Not yet.

We launch into the set. No build-up, no soft landing. Just a sprint through ten years of music that held us together, broke us down, and stitched us back up again.

I sing. I scream. I sweat like it’s penance. The stage feels too small and too big all at once .

I finally glance sideways.

There she is.

Seren.

Fuck.

She’s in the shadows offstage, half-lit by the spill of floodlights. Wearing our first album tee. Hair messy. Shoulders set.

She looks like everything I’ve been trying not to dream about for months.

She looks like home.

I grip the mic harder, just to stay standing.

I’m wearing my Revelry tee tonight. Damon’s band. It smells faintly of old whiskey and rehearsal rooms.

We close out “Static Heart,” and I’m drenched. My voice is rasping at the edges, fingers raw from playing too hard. The crowd won’t let it go—chanting the chorus back like a heartbeat. Forty thousand lungs working in tandem. It’s too much. Not enough. Everything.

I hold up a hand. Signal the band to cut.

Jamie throws me a look like, You sure? Dex just raises his eyebrows.

The crowd hushes. Slowly. Wonderfully.

“This is it,” I say. Just me and the mic and the kind of silence that buzzes in your blood. “Our last show as Elementary.”

A gasp. Murmurs ripple through the crowd.

“But…” I drag the word out, soften the blow. “We’re not leaving you empty-handed.”

I grin, even though my stomach is a knot. “Our final album is dropping. Right now. Like, in thirty seconds. So you’ll have something to ugly cry to when this hits you later.”

Laughter rolls forward like a wave. It’s healing. Disbelief giving way to delight.

“Want to count it down with me?”

They do. Oh, they do.

“Ten! ”

“NINE!”

By the time we hit zero, it’s chaos again. Arms, confetti, someone throwing a bra. Dex gives me a mock salute. Jamie’s got tears in his eyes.

But I’m not done yet.

I walk to the side piano, barely seeing the keys through the sweat on my lashes. My fingers hover like they’re scared. Maybe they are.

The mic squeals slightly as I sit.

“I want to play something you haven’t heard before,” I say, and I know my voice is hoarse now, too rough to be pretty.

“I wrote this when I was falling in love. Really falling. Not PR shit. Not magazine spreads. The kind where your chest feels too small for your heart, and the sound of her breathing becomes a melody you can’t unhear. ”

A beat.

“She’s here tonight.”

That hush again. A thousand camera flashes aimed toward the wings. Seren’s still there. Still watching. Her arms are crossed. Her face unreadable.

“If this goes badly, please clap anyway. My ego’s hanging by a thread.”

Laughter. One more breath.

“This is ‘Frequency.’”

And I play.

It’s slow. It’s stripped back. No drums. No backing vocals. Just the ache in my chest and a hundred nights of missing her bleeding out through the melody.

The lyrics are a prayer. A confession. A map of what we were and what I still hope we might be.

I sing about Tokyo. About coffee spoons and whispered lyrics and the kind of silence that says more than words ever could. I sing about fucking up. About hurting the person you love because you’re afraid to admit just how much you need them .

About writing a song that might be the only way to say sorry and mean it.

The last note hovers—one fragile, trembling sound held in a space so huge it shouldn’t matter, but it does. My foot slips off the pedal. The piano hum fades.

Silence.

Then—

Applause. Deep and low, not frenzied.

I turn my head.

She’s still there.

Seren.

Holding up a sign.

Sharpie scrawled across the back of a setlist sheet.

5/10.

I burst out laughing. Head back, whole body shaking.

The audience doesn’t get it. They just laugh with me, the way people do when joy is contagious. When someone on stage breaks and it reminds you that they’re human, too.

I wipe my face. I’m crying, I think. Fuck it.

“That was for someone who makes me better,” I tell them. “Even when I don’t deserve it.”

And then I stand.

I walk back into the centre spotlight. Pick up my guitar. Turn toward Jamie, Dex.

One last nod.

And we play.

Not for the cameras. Not for the labels or the deals or the people who doubted us.

But for the girl in the wings.

For the version of me I almost lost.

For every kid who heard one of our songs and felt a little less alone.

We play like it’s the first time and the last. Like we’re gods and fools and everything in between.

And when the final chord hits—when the last note of Elementary rings out over Glastonbury for the very last time—it’s not an ending.

It’s a beginning.

And this time, I’m not walking offstage alone.