Page 54 of Sounds Like Love

It was all manufactured, and yet whenever he was around, I felt my entire body tense, like now. I turned back to the keyboard, trying to push the feeling away. It wasn’t nerves. It was something else.

“I’m just working,” I told him, not lying but not telling the truth. “This is just what it looks like when I’m working.”

He made a humming noise deep in his throat, as if he didn’t believe me, and I watched him push off the doorway out of the corner of my eye and cross the theater to the stage. The way he moved was intoxicating,like he was home in any room he found himself in. I wondered what that was like. “So where do we start?” he asked, leaning against the lip of the stage, reaching up with my coffee.

I took it and arched an eyebrow. “We?”

He shrugged. “Shocking, I realize, but I do compose occasionally.”

I cocked my head. Was he more a Moleskine sort or a leather-bound journal kind of guy? He seemed a bit too dramatic for—

He frowned. “I can hear you thinking.”

“It’s a fair question,” I retorted.

“Moleskine,” he decided and made a movement for me to scoot over, so I did. He put his coffee and wallet beside mine on top of the Steinway. “And I’m notthatdramatic.” He sat down on the bench beside me. Our thighs brushed together in the closeness. Two adults on a piano bench was a tight squeeze. From a distance he always looked so slight, but whenever he was near, it felt like he took up the entire room with his presence. He bent toward me a little and playfully whispered, “I don’t have cooties, bird.”

“Well, I might,” I replied with mock offense.

“Oh, what a glorious death that would be, to die of your cooties.”

“I’m not sure if I’m flattered or grossed out by that.”

He made a face and bobbed his head uncertainly. “It sounded better in my head.”

I barked a laugh, and, realizing the irony a little too late, he joined. His laugh was bright and untethered, like it surprised him just as much as it delighted.

I liked his laugh.

“I like yours, too,”he agreed. Then said aloud, “This is gonna be hard.”

I plinked out the top melody of the song in our heads. “At least we have the melody.”

“What?” He blinked then, his face pinching. “Oh, right. That, too.”

What had he meant otherwise?

I tried to listen, but he immediately shifted his thoughts to the messy way I wrote. I started to defend my handwriting when he asked, “How do you normally decide how to write a song?”

“I always know what a song’s about before I start it. I know the genre, the feel, the mood of it. But with this one …” I hesitated as I concentrated on the keys. My fingers played a few notes, chords that sang but not for this song.I honestly don’t know, I admitted.

In my head, it was always as simple as finding the perfect blend of cheeses on a charcuterie board or the right word in a sentence. But I hadn’t been able to find the right word for months now. The right feeling, really.

Any feeling at all.

“We can start with what’s popular, and build from there,” he said.

I frowned. “Then we’ll just make something that’s been done before.”

“Everything’s been done before,” he pointed out. “But the popular ones are popular for a reason, right?”

I tilted my head, thoughtful. I placed my hands on the keys and felt through the melody we had. “I guess …”

That made him huff in frustration.“You don’t agree.”

“No, I really don’t,” I replied truthfully. “That’s not how I write, anyway. I’m not saying Idon’tpay attention to what’s popular, but …” I got to the end of the melody and looped it over again. “But this song doesn’t have to begood. It just has to be.”

The last part was more for myself than for him, because I was still circling the notes we already had, going around and around, without a foot forward.

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