Page 5 of Sounds Like Love

Faint, but slowly growing louder. One I’d never heard before, even though it sounded so familiar.

I pressed myself against him, my hands coming down to rest on his shoulders, firm and steady, the heat from his body so warm in the stickiness of the theater, but I didn’t mind. He hooked his fingers through my belt loops and kept me planted. Grounded. Like he was afraid I’d fly off.

His tongue played across mine, then his teeth as he nibbled my bottom lip.

Get lost in him, Jo, I thought.Crack your heart open.

“She tastes like cherries.”

I gasped in surprise.

We broke apart.

Willa Grey handed off her video camera to one of her bandmates and grabbed her microphone, and our faces disappeared from the screen behind her. She jumped along to the last moments of the song, twirling around like she was a conductor orchestrating the universe. The song ended, but it wasn’t the music that left my ears ringing.

“Cherries?” I murmured.My ChapStick?

He rubbed at his mouth, looking down at the stage—and then sharply up to me. “I don’t—what?”

“You said I tasted like cherries.”

His eyes widened in surprise as if he hadn’t meant to say that out loud.It was vulnerable, as if he was about to explain why he’d said it, why the taste took him by surprise. But then he noticed a few people below us in the crowd snapping photos, and a mask closed over his face again.

And suddenly the sincere Sebastian Fell I’d kissed was gone.

He righted himself and smoothed on a smirk, his voice that languid molasses again. “I can’t recall, but I can kiss you again to make sure. I’m pretty well versed in ChapStick.”

My eyebrows furrowed. “I didn’t say it was ChapStick.”

A woman in the crowd below snapped a not-so-subtle photo of Sebastian and me. My lips felt tender from his kiss. Gigi was going to flip when I told her that he kissed just as well as her fanfics dreamed, but then again he had fifteen years on the immortalized teenager in her stories, and a long list of ex-lovers he’d practiced on.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise that he could pick up the notes of my ChapStick on his tongue. But itwasa little sexy, and that was something I wouldn’t admit to anyone.

“You’re fun,” he said, tilting his head toward me again. We were still close enough that if he wanted, he could kiss me again, or I could kiss him. “Wanna get away?”

A question with a thousand possibilities.

I could just lean over, and snag his lips with mine again, and get lost in the action of it for another song or two. And maybe that song or two would turn into an entire night, and maybe if I was lucky, the night would turn into a few more, and maybe weeks and months and years would go by in the blink of an eye.

This was Hollywood, after all. Weren’t happily ever afters guaranteed?

But as soon as I thought about kissing him again, I remembered my early flight in the morning, and the long month I’d spend on the sunny beaches of Vienna Shores,and the unfamiliar dread that coiled in my stomach at the thought of it. Besides, Willa Grey was saying goodbye to her audience, thanking them for a hot night at the Fonda Theatre, waxing poetic about how dreams really came true under the starry lights of LA.

“I’ve got a car out back,” he went on. “We can sneak away and no one’ll know. Unless you want to go out the front. Have a few minutes of fame—I’m cool with that, too.”

And that was when I realized he genuinely didn’t believe that I belonged here. He flirted with me because he thought I was a fan, kissed me thinking I was the kind of decision that he could shrug off in the morning. Was this the sort of pickup line reserved for people he thought wouldn’t matter?

“Is that it?” I asked. “Fame? Is that all you could give me?”

His neatly trimmed eyebrows furrowed, making a divot in the middle. He hadn’t gotten Botox, interestingly enough, or else the lines wouldn’t have looked as deep, and he wouldn’t have looked so puzzled. “Is that all?” he echoed, shaking his head. “What else is there?”

I opened my mouth to reply, when someone called my name from behind me. “Joni!Joni!”

I whirled around. It was Willa Grey, fresh off her set. She took me by surprise, because wasn’t she supposed to do an encore?

She hurried over to me, glittering in sweat and, well,glitter. Her fiery red hair bounced around her like the curls had a mind of their own. She pulled me into a wet, sticky hug. “I’msoglad you’re here!”

“What are you doing here?” I asked, perplexed. “You—your encore?”

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