Page 95 of Sounds Like Love
I’d never felt anything like it.
I was afraid I never would again.
He began to sing the top-line melody, and I harmonized with him as he drew out certain notes, made others a half step higher, a fun house mirror of itself. He would take my pencil from between my teeth and mark something on the crumpled and folded piece of paper we wrote the song on, and I’d snatch it back from behind his ear when I found a rhyme. And slowly, note by note, brick by brick, we built something impossible. We gave it pieces of ourselves—the part of my heart that quivered, the gentleness of his hand on the small of my back, or the color of his eyes in the Revelry’s tungsten lights, and the part of his heart that waxed poetic about the way my hair curled around his fingers like ivy, and hazel shade of my eyes, and the sweetness of my voice in his head.
But as we put pen to paper, and fleshed out this song that had lived in our heads, the melody grew fainter between us until it was little more than an echo.It was working; 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 willIbe?”
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 CAMEdown 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 tohateyou.”
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.
