Page 13 of Sounds Like Love

The car was newer, and we were fifteen years older, but the song still sounded the same.

It always would.

“I’m glad you’re home,” Gigi finally said as the song ended and moved into Bruce Springsteen. “I’ve missed you, Jo.”

I took out the last hush puppy from the greasy bag. “I’ve missed you, too, Gi.”

VIENNA SHORES, NORTHCarolina, was a blip on the map—and most of the time not even that. I’d lived my entire life in this beach town surrounded on all sides by water on the Outer Banks.In the winter it emptied of everyone but the locals, businesses went dark, and coffee shops closed early, and in the summer, tourists migrated from all ends of the earth to walk the beaches and dip into the different art bars and local restaurants, and watch the wild horses gallop through the streets.

We hit beach traffic the second we got into Vienna, alongside cars with license plates from Maine to Idaho, so when we finally saw the sign for Main Street, it was a relief. That was my hometown in a nutshell. It was a place you loved and a place where you built your life and a place you could never escape, even when you did.

Main Street was crowded tonight, as it was every night in the summer, the Ferris wheel spinning colors all across the boardwalk, the merry-go-round playing a sweet rendition of “I’ve Got Sand in My Shoes” by the Drifters.

The CD faded to the last song—

“Wherever” by Roman Fell and the Boulevard.

The opening drum solo, the piano melody, the crash of guitars—there was nothing in the world like it. But when I closed my eyes to enjoy it, the face of Sebastian Fell flashed into my mind, his stormy gaze, his mouth half-open, dark hair falling gently into his face as he bent toward me to—

I opened my eyes again. My heart hammered in my throat.

“Perfect timing,” Gigi said and turned up the volume, and with the windows rolled down, the music swirled around us in the humid, salty wind. Roman Fell and the Boulevard were icons in Vienna Shores in the way that Bruce Springsteen haunted New Jersey. It was where biographies said Roman Fell really got his start. After years of touring, he stepped onto the stage at the Revelry and sang a song that changed his life forever.

This song.

My entire childhood was filled with it. The lyrics, the melodies, it all took me back to when Gigi and I were both seventeen, drinking Cheerwine out of glass bottles, sand and sunscreen crusted to our skin, singing at the top of our lungs.

There were some songs you made special—songs for first dances, songs for funerals, songs for heartbreak and forgetting.

And then there were the songs that made you.

“Wherever” came to a close as Gigi pulled into a dirt lot a block and a half away from the Revelry, behind a laundromat. I couldn’t imagine someone like Sebastian Fell coming to Vienna Shores, much less the Revelry. It wasn’t his vibe. He was made of Hollywood nights, he’d evaporate in the sun here. Then again, if Mom had stuck with the band, maybe I’d be just like him. No, she’d never have married Dad, never have had me or Mitch. I wouldn’t exist. Maybe, in that universe, neither did Sebastian.

“You’ve got a look on your face,” Gigi said as we got out of the car.

“A look?”

“Yeah, a look.” And she scrunched her eyebrows together and frowned, as if mimicking my own face. “I know I don’t singthatbadly.”

“It’s silly,” I admitted, but she pulled her arm through mine as we got onto the sidewalk.

“I love silly.”

I debated. “I guess you’d appreciate this, actually. So you know how I went to Willa Grey’s concert last night? I saw Roman Fell’s son there.”

Her eyes widened. “No shit—really?” She stopped in her tracks. “Like, you aren’t pulling my leg. You saw Sebastian. Sebastian Fell? From Renegade?”

“That’s the one.”

“And you’re just telling menow?” she cried, earning looks from a few tourists driving by in a golf cart.

I turned to her, pulling my arm out of hers. “It wasn’t that big of a deal—”

“Why was he there? Was he with anyone? How close did you get? Did you talk? How does hesmell?” The last question was, regrettably, the loudest.

“I don’t know why, but I thought you’d be normal about this.”

“Normal? I’msonormal. Do you see me? Here?” And she motioned to herself, and struck a crossed-arm pose, hip cocked, leaning back, the caricature of cool. “Sonormal. Seriously, though, how does he smell?”

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