Page 110 of Sounds Like Love

And I wanted to know every one of those bits. I wanted to put them all in songs. I wanted to match the inflections of his voice to notes on this piano, and I wanted to make love songs with all of them.

WHEN SASHA ANDI slipped away, Mom was the only person who saw us. She was in charge of the jukebox, and she gave us an inconspicuous wink before she put on the next record.

“Wherever” by Roman Fell and the Boulevard.

‘Wherever you go,’ Roman Fell sang, the brassy sound of the rock band behind him, ‘there you are.’

And strangely enough, I learned that Sebastian knew every word to the song.

“I thought you said you hated your dad,” I teased, pulling him into the foyer, a soundproofing blanket draped over my arm. I put it down on the floor under the ticket window and made a nest.

He rolled his eyes. “I hate my father, notmusic.”

“Mm-hmm, do you have a favorite?”

He said, sitting down next to me, leaning back against the wall, “Guess, and I’ll give you a prize.”

I scowled. “That’s not fair, I can’t read your mind.”

He clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth. “Pity, it was a good prize …”

“Gimme a hint?” I leaned against him.

“Too easy.”

“Hum a few notes?”

“It’d be cheating.”

I pouted.

“Ooh, sadly, that’s the wrong guess.”

“Then I’ll take a consolation prize,” I replied as I closed the distance between us and kissed him, and to my surprise, that warm and golden comfort was still there. It had just changed a little. The warmth was my hands in his, and the comfort was his steady presence, and that was good, too. Sasha and I stayed pleasantly where we were, leaning against each other, my head on his shoulder, his arms around my body, curled together as the eye of the storm passed and the back of the hurricane raged through our town.

At some point between our conversations about his classical piano training and my self-taught guitar, and our adamant disagreements on the perfect four-chord progression—he claimed it was the axis progression,while I firmly believed that the royal road chords werefarsuperior—he fell asleep.

I sat awake, watching the storm through the glass front door. I was never very good at falling asleep during hurricanes.

Neither was Mom. As long as I could remember, I’d always spent hurricanes at the Revelry. We’d post up either here in the lobby or near the loading dock, and wait.

I wondered if she was still awake, too.

I needed to pee, anyway.

Silently, I unwound myself from Sasha. He didn’t even stir. Sebastian Fell was a lot of things, but a light sleeper was not one of them. He could sleep through a freight train. I envied that.

So I went to the bathroom and then peeked into the theater. The kids were asleep on the stage, while everyone else was scattered across the room. Dad was snoring upright beside the jukebox, while Mitch and Gigi were slumped together under the bar, wrapped in each other’s arms, awake but drowsily muttering to each other about their future. I heard snippets—things like “singing” and “we’ll try LA” and “I can be your Yoko Ono,” which I think was just Mitch being Mitch.

Finally, I found Mom by the doors to the loading dock. She’d propped open a door with a metal chair and sat on it, watching the stormy winds roll across the road in watery waves. The worst of the storm had passed, having flung debris of tree limbs and waterlogged wood across town.

She noticed me approaching and whispered, “Ah, we have to stop meeting like this, heart.”

Instead, I sat down on the ground beside her and leaned my head against her knee. I stifled a yawn. “Feels like we’ve done this before.”

“Only a thousand times.” She gently stroked my hair, pulling tresses one by one out of my tattered braid. “Now a thousand and one.”

“I’ll take a million more.”

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