Page 71 of Sounds Like Love
“Right,that. And that’s what you want?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
Gigi flopped back onto her towel, putting her sunglasses back on. “I dunno. He did a shitty thing to you. I just don’t want you to get your heart broken like that again.”
“I won’t. I’m not that girl anymore,” I replied, turning my gaze out to the ocean. The family beside us sent a soccer ball careening behind us and into the dunes. A kid ran after it. “And he’s not that guy anymore.”
“I don’t think people changethatmuch,” Gigi said, checking her watch. “Ugh, I have a telegram in an hour and I probably should shower before I show up as an anatomically correct heart to someone’s anniversary dinner.”
I frowned. “Do you ever think about doing something else?”
“All the time,” she said, and pushed herself up to her feet. She shook out her towel. “But what other jobs let me dress up in sequins and sing?”
“Not many,” I admitted. I thought again about asking her if Mitchell had popped any sort of life-altering question—Momhadgiven him the ring so he could ask her, after all—but I figured that if he had, Gigi would’ve told me.
She wouldn’t keep something like that a secret. Not fromme.
“Want me to walk you to your car?” I asked, beginning to gather my things, but she motioned for me to stay.
“I think I’m going to go use your shower to wash the sand off and go, so no worries. Wyn’s on a bad day?”
“Yeah. She’s in bed. She was fine this morning, but when she remembered she’d misplaced the Folgers jar and we haven’t found it yet, she went back to bed. And now Dad’s turning the house upside down looking for it.”
“It’s somewhere,” Gigi said, “and she’ll be better tomorrow. I’ll pop my head in to tell her hi.” Gigi waved goodbye, saying she’d see me at the Rev tomorrow, and picked her way up the hot sand to the tiny wooden archway into my parents’ backyard, and by then she was lost behind the sand dunes.
I lay back down on the towel and closed my eyes. The wind whipped across the beach, rattling the umbrella, and the seagulls squawked back and forth, and the family with the soccer ball lost it somewhere in the waves. A little ways down the beach, someone had brought a radio, and it crackled with a power-pop ballad.
I couldn’t make out the song—the waves were too loud and the seagulls too annoying and the wind too heavy—but I liked the tune. Bright, bold. Peppy. The kind of sound that made you want to twirl fast, arms wide, and land exhausted in a sand dune. It was the taste of cherry licorice on your tongue. Sun on your shoulders. Strong hands gliding over piano keys, a ballad of seagulls, moonlight painting the beach in silver linings, sticky-sweet strawberry kiwi margaritas, hands on your waist, a mouth against your ear, a secret and a promise.
It sounded like …
Wait—that was it.
Jerking to sit up, I dug my notebook out of my beach bag and flipped to a clean page. The melody flared, sunny and bold, in my head. I jotted down a few chords. A word, and then another.
“You’re writing,”Sasha said softly.
I was relieved to hear his voice, strangely enough.Am I singing in my head?
“No, but I can feel your joy. It feels like—like being at the top of a roller coaster just before the drop. It’s so bright and—addicting. Happy.”
Don’t you feel like that when you’re creating?
“I don’t think I ever have, but I like it when you do. What do you have so far?”
Well—I flipped back a page—I can show you. If you wanna get back to work tomorrow?
I couldn’t see his grin, but I could feel it as he said,“I can hardly wait.”
Chapter25Here It Goes Again (It Starts Out Easy)
“FOOD HAS ARRIVED,”I called as I came in through the lobby. Sasha and I had decided that he should start sneaking in through the loading dock instead, to keep rumors to a minimum. Especially after the Cool Beans fiasco. He was already at the Rev. I knew because he kept sending me photos of names he found in the men’s bathroom, delighted by them, snickering like a nine-year-old at “Dick Handsy.”
I came bearing a pizza from the Big Pie. We sat on the floor and shared the box between us. I’d gotten a half pepperoni and pineapple, half mushroom and olive, but there was so much cheese on it that it was hard to tell the two halves apart. He picked up his pineapple and pepperoni slice and took a bite.
He moaned. “Oh, fuck, that’sdelicious.”
I sat down across from him. “Best pie in the OBX.”
