Sean shook his head. “Nope. I clocked off work the second the food hit the table.” I smiled at the reminder Sean was joining me for dinner because he wanted to, rather than because it was part of his job. “If you want fancy names,” he added, “you’ll have to come up with them yourself. At least they’d be better than my lame attempts.”
I snorted, my gaze flicking to the notebooks I’d spent the past two days filling with turmoil and nonsense. “I’m not so sure.”
“Why?” Sean’s eyes followed where mine led and he gestured to the notebooks with a lift of his chin. “I figured you must have been having a breakthrough. You’ve been writing non-stop for hours at a time.”
My head tilted to one side and my lips twisted in pleasure. “You’ve been watching me?”
His eyes widened, and he shook his head, rushing to chew and swallow the food he’d bitten into. “No, of course not. What I mean is, when I have seen you, by chance, you’ve always been writing.” Having made his excuses, he picked up his glass of wine and drained the contents.
Oh yeah, he’d been watching me. The thought made my heartbeat quicken and my body stir. I wanted more of Sean’s attention, in any way he cared to give it. Yanking my blatant narcissism back into line, I returned to the topic at hand. “I’ve been trying something new,” I told him. “That’s where all the writing is coming from, but none of it is making much sense. There’s certainly no music in any of it.” I had yet to inject the proliferation of words with a single chord or melodic rhythm. Attempts at poetic turns of phrase had left my body contorted in the chair, my pen hovering somewhere between hunger and rage.
Sean watched me closely as he asked, “How old were you when you wrote your first song?”
“Eight. I called it ‘Old Enough’.” He grinned, and I found myself smiling back at him. “It included a list of all the things I wanted to do when I grew up. Staying up all night, eating the whole family-size block of chocolate, lighting my homework on fire.”
“Ah, desires we can all relate to,” he said with a laugh. “Have you done all the things you talked about in the song?”
“I skipped the arson attempt, and I didn’t quite make it through the whole block of chocolate before I started to feel queasy. But otherwise, yeah.”
He refilled our glasses before taking another swig from his own. “So, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, you’ve already been writing songs for sixteen years.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I suppose so.”
“Exactly,” he said, lifting his hands in the air. “The best predictor of future success is past success. Plus, I reckon you’ve got a few more things to say yet.”
“That much is true.” If I’d learned nothing else in the past two days, it was that I had a fuckload to say about being attracted to men, and the torture I’d put myself through to keep my urges in check for so long. “But having something to say doesn’t help if I can’t make sense out of it.”
“And you’ve been trying this new tactic for how long?” he asked with raised eyebrows.
“Two days,” I replied, holding up a couple of fingers. “Two days, two pens drained of their ink and three freaking notebooks full of rambling drivel.”
Sean laughed out loud. He was tipsy, which didn’t surprise me given the enthusiastic way he’d been partaking of the wine. I liked tipsy Sean. His lips were looser, as if he was speaking freely around me for the first time. “Mate, you need to relax,” he drawled. “Let the words come out however they want to come. Eventually, you’ll figure out what they’re trying to say.”
I liked his phrasing. It gave me a new way to interpret the rush of words I’d experienced. Not as some weird form of purge, but more as a release of all the emotions I’d never allowed myself to verbalise before. Maybe, if I kept listening openly and without prejudice, the desperation would pass, and true communication would follow. I liked the idea. I could understand it, wrap my mind around it. “I think you might be right.”
“Damned straight.” He relaxed back into his chair, gazing at me with a soft smile. “You have a gift, Dante, and you know how to use it. Be patient with yourself, you’ll figure this out.”
“How can you be so sure?” I asked, needing to hear the answer. Needing to hear someone say I wasn’t finished as an artist.
“Because I know every song you’ve ever released,” he told me. “Talent like yours doesn’t just go away.”
A wicked pleasure flooded through me at the thought of Sean listening to my music, letting a part of me inside. “Are you saying you’re a fan, Sean?”
We stared at each other for a long moment and, for the first time, the stormy shade of his eyes didn’t remind me of Grey. Those eyes, grey though they were, belonged only to Sean.
“I’m saying you should keep going.” His voice was quiet now, as he continued to hold my gaze. “You’ve barely scratched the surface of what you can do.”
His words felt right, like a truth I’d forgotten. And as the idea settled inside my mind, a sense of calm came over me.
“And I think I’ve had enough wine for one night,” Sean said as he sat up. His low chuckle went straight to my gut, making me want more of that sound, of any sound he cared to make.
“Thanks for the pep talk,” I told him. “You give good advice.”
“I know.” He gave a not-so-modest shrug. “I think I may have been a bartender in a former life.”
I wasn’t sure about the bartender part, but Sean was turning out to be a pretty awesome muse. With any luck I could convince him to spend more time with me. At least until I figured out what the abandoned parts of me were trying to say.
