Page 6 of Sounds Like Love
“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.Andyou 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 wassointimate,” 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 yourautograph, and now you think I want to use you as a muse or something?”
He tilted his head, as if yes—that’sexactlywhat he thought. “Everyone wants something, sweetheart.”
“I’mnotsweet,” 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.
Chapter3(I’ll) Say a Little Prayer for You
I’D LOST COUNTof the times I’d stood in front of baggage claim four, watching suitcases bump along the carousel as I waited for mine. You would think after eight years of living in LA, I would have put an AirTag in my bag, but I think deep down Ilikedthe drama of standing there, watching, wondering if this time it would be lost somewhere between LAX and Raleigh.
It was one of the few thrills that still got to me, mostly because in the grand scheme of things it was such a tiny worry. A small bump in the road. It wasn’t like having your house get flooded, or being fired from a job, or needing to write your next song on contract but every time you sat down to try your chest began to constrict and your heart leapt into your throat as you tried to pull something—anything—from the depths of yourself, because you used to so easily, but now you just find yourself … empty.
No, waiting for my luggage was not like that at all.
I think that was why Sebastian Fell’s comment about offering me inspiration hit so hard last night—because I panicked thinking that he somehowknew.That he’d somehow divined that hitmaker Joni Lark was bone-dry, that she hadn’t written a new song in close to a year. Sure, she’d revised old ones, pulled them out from the depths of her old notebooks and journals to keep the mirage going, but now she was stuck.
Empty.
I’d never felt empty before.
