Page 90 of Flipping the Script

A few groups raised their hands, and the audience laughed.

Sebastian threw back his head and laughed with them. “Thanks for your honesty. I’ll try to make your evening a good one.”

“I want to have your babies!” a female voice screeched from somewhere near the bar.

“How about we start with something new?” he asked, ignoring the heckler.

The audience clapped loudly, and a few people hooted and hollered excitedly.

Jesus. Sebastian really was an ambivert. The way he handled the crowd was impressive, and his confidence was hot as fuck. He was the perfect blend of rock star and regular guy at an open mic show, and he had the crowd eating out of the palm of his hand.

He smiled and resumed strumming the guitar strings, the notes of a song I’d never heard before filling the air. “I wrote most of this song about three years ago, but I never finished it. Then I forgot about it until last week.” He chuckled softly, rocking back and forth in gentle waves as he played the notes on a loop like he was repeating the same five seconds over and over. “But I found it, finished it, and now I’d like to debut it. This is ‘Not Until You.’”

He leaned back on his stool, his hands moving fluidly over his guitar as he started to play.

The tone of it was low and melancholy, and the tempo was slow, but it didn’t sound sad, exactly. More wistful. Like when you thought about good times with someone you miss.

Then he started singing, his throaty voice so full of emotion I could barely hear the lyrics because I was so focused on how the song made me feel.

The crowd was absolutely silent, and I couldn’t look away, mesmerized by not only his song, but by him.

The lyrics were about missing someone, but not a lover or girlfriend. It was about drifting away from friends as you grow up and remembering the good times you had with them.

The crowd was silent for a few beats when he finished playing. Then applause broke out, but it was subdued compared to his first song.

“Yeah, I didn’t think that one through.” He huffed out a shaky laugh and scrubbed his hand through his hair in anembarrassed move. “That wasn’t the right choice to get the night started. How’s this?”

He started playing the opening bars of “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond. The crowd immediately started singing along, belting out the lyrics to the infamous refrain along with him.

“Bah bah bah!” He crooned into the microphone, being as extra as I’d ever seen him. He finished it off with a dramatic guitar riff where he somehow made his acoustic guitar sound like an electric one.

“Is that better?” he asked the crowd.

They shouted and cheered, back to their original energy.

“Awesome. How about we do some requests? It can be for anything of mine you’ve heard or a cover of one of your faves if I know it.”

“Cellophane!” someone yelled, getting their request out before the mess of other people called their answers to him.

That was the song from the video on his dock, the one that had enthralled me.

“Cellophane it is.” He strummed the opening bars.

Hearing him perform it in person was a thousand times more intense than seeing it on video. Sebastian sang like he was born to be on stage, injecting so much emotion into every word that you felt his music as much as you heard it.

My entire body was covered in goosebumps by the time he finished the first chorus.

I needed to go.

I came here to satisfy my curiosity and learn a bit more about Sebastian’s music, and I’d done that.

I hadn’t expected to see such a different side of him.

Bas was incredibly talented. I’d always known that, but I never really thought about just how gifted he was. How dedicated he was and how hard he’d worked to achieve what he had.

And I’d ragged on him for retiring. I basically called him a failure when he was the furthest thing from one. He’d accomplished more by twenty-five than most people did in a lifetime. More than I ever would.

Feeling a little numb and a lot off-kilter, I slipped out of the bar and headed back to my truck.

---