So what are you going to do when the lights come on?
The words of her song come back to me now, making the hairs on the back of my neck rise just like they did the first time I heard them. I haven’t asked her about it, but somehow, the second the first verse started, I knew. It was her voice, and it shook me to the core like an earthquake rattling the room.
“I knew I didn’t want to put music out asPaige Rivera.” The contempt in her voice when she says her own name makes me ache. “I was Paige Rivera in all those stupid auditions and on every demo she made us do. My dad was the one who picked Paige for me, actually, but I just...I never wanted to be called into some producer or label owner’s office asPaige Riveraagain. I wanted this music to be different...to be mine, I guess.”
I start tracing the swirls of ink again. “Your truth.”
“Something like that.” Her rib cage rises and falls beside me. “Up until I started making electronic stuff, my music was always about what other people wanted it to be about. My whole life was kind of like that.”
You found your truth in the dark.
“And then...”
She trails off and stays quiet for so long I move myself farther up on my pillow so I can look at her. “Yeah?”
She’s staring at the ceiling, but she glances my way, and a sad smile lifts the corners of her mouth.
“Then you happened.”
My breath stops.
“You happened, and it was like I found this...I don’t know,sparkin me. That sounds fucking stupid, but it’s true. Before you, there were all these things I couldn’t put a name to, and then it all made sense. I started dreaming. I startedcaring. I wanted to make things for myself, and then we started messing around on that cheap-ass DJ controller you bought, and I just...I fell in love with it.”
That’s about the same time I realized I was falling in love with her.
“When you left, I...It took me a while to find that again. It took me a while to realize it was still there without you, that it was mine and not just ours.” She shudders, but it’s not the good type this time. “I wish I’d found out a different way.”
I move my hand to lay it flat on her chest, just over her heart. “Paige?”
She shakes her head and forces a laugh. “Here we are, both musicians just like we dreamed, both living in Montreal just like we wanted, and all we’ve got to say about the past six years is depressing shit from high school. How about you give me something good?”
I walk two of my fingertips along her collarbone while I think of what to say, and I feel a rush of satisfaction when she shivers.
“Um, so...” Her skin is so distracting it’s hard to speak. “Good things. Good things. Uh...”
Plenty of good things come to mind, but they’re mostly about what I could do to her in this bed. I force myself to come up with a topic that isn’t sexy.
“Uh, so you remember my friend Nabil?”
She laughs. “Not what I was expecting, but yeah, I do. He’s the guy from noodle night, right?”
I laugh too. “Noodle night?”
“What?” She shifts her position. “We got noodles. It was night.”
I can tell it’s more than that. She has a name for the day I came back into her life, and my chest swells at the thought that I really do mean as much to her as she means to me.
I went so long thinking that couldn’t be true.
She’s still Paige, though, and I know she’ll give me the finger and tell me to fuck off if I make a big deal out of it, so I just smile to myself and continue.
“Well, meeting Nabil was a really good thing for me. He’s my best friend. I worked part-time as a rigger at The Cube Room through most of university. Nabil was an assistant stage manager when I started. He was the only brown dude, so I guess me being a kind of brown dude brought us together. He actually thought I was raised Muslim too for like, the first year of our friendship.”
I chuckle at the memory. My family is pretty secular, but my dad grew up as part of Egypt’s biggest Christian minority, the Coptic Orthodox Church. With a name like Youssef Salah, though, most people just assume I was raised Muslim.
“But we had so much more in common,” I continue. “We liked the same music. We both went to McGill. Nabil is the one who got me playing live gigs in the first place. I don’t think we would have gotten where we are without each other.”
“But?” I look over and find Paige squinting at me.
