Page 60 of Sounds Like Love

And she shifted her eyes to Sebastian. Not very subtly.

She was mortifying sometimes.

Sebastian saved me from answering. “I’m heading out anyway. These shirts really aren’t my style. I’ll see you tomorrow? Bright and early at noon?”

“That’s not early.”

“It is to me,” he replied.

Gigi darted her eyes between the two of us. I could justimaginethe thoughts running through her head. The AO3 tags. I would never hear the end of this, I could already tell.

“Fine, noon,” I agreed, and then added,Don’t be late.

“Perish the thought,”he replied happily, and nodded to Gigi. “It was nice to meet you.” Then, as cool and suave as he had appeared, he left the boutique and slipped into a black car, as if it’d been waiting there for him the whole time. Knowing him, it probably had.

Gigi opened her mouth to say something, but I pointed at her. “Not a word,” I warned. “It’s justbusiness.”

“Business my ass,” my best friend muttered under her breath as we left the boutique, too.

Chapter22(Never Look Back and Say It) Could Have Been Me

WHEN I GOTto the Revelry that afternoon, the front door was already unlocked, and the office light was on. I dipped my head in through the window to see if anyone was there. A few boxes had been pulled down from storage shelves and rifled through, papers and old Christmas pageant flyers and show set lists strewn across the room, as if someone had considered cleaning it out but didn’t quite know where to start. I frowned—was it Dad? But then the swoony sound of Roman Fell and the Boulevard drifted through the lobby, and a smoky voice I recognized sang along to “Little Loves”—Mom.

Putting my keys and wallet in the box office, I crept to the doorway of the theater and leaned in to watch as she rummaged around an old box at the bar, humming through Roman Fell’s discography. Growing up, before GPS location sharing, if I ever needed to find my mom, I knew exactly where she’d be—the Revelry. It was hard to believe that it had been Dad who’d grown up here, because Mom justfit.

I liked to think that I fit, too, like a puzzle piece in a missing hole, but I wasn’t sure I did. I was probably more like Sebastian Fell in Vienna Shores—utterly out of place. So out of place, you could tell with one glance.

The jukebox shifted to the next song—“Wherever.” Mom began to sing along with it. When Mitch and I were little, she sang Roman Fell songs disguised as lullabies. It was a bit weird that I was now working with Roman Fell’sson—and my teenage self would freak out if I went back in time and told her, but that novelty wore off a long time ago.

Mom pulled out a few pieces of paper from the box, a mix of photographs and ticket stubs and lost invoices, and slowly sorted through them, pacing around the table. I finally slipped into the theater, and the door creaked closed behind me. She gave a start at the sound and whirled to me. “Jesus!Heart, you could have told me you were here!”

I sheepishly smiled. “Sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt you.” “You could join. I know you know the words,” she added, bobbing her head to the song. She swayed to the chorus, humming along to it. I shook my head, pulled a stool down from the bar top, and sat on it. Mom came up beside me and nudged me in the side. “You’re no fun anymore.”

I gasped. “I’m always fun!”

“When you were little, you refused to go to sleep to anything else.”

“I didn’t know what the song was,” I replied. “It has a nice beat.”

She agreed. “I remember when he first pulled out his guitar and played it right there on that stage.” She folded her arms over her chest, hugging herself tightly, a little lost in her head. “It feels like a lifetime ago.”

The look in her eyes was foreign—like regret. I asked, “Is everything okay?”

She blinked, coming back to herself. “Oh, no worries, heart. I’ve just been lost in my thoughts while cleaning out these boxes.” She gestured to the one on the bar. “Thought I’d go ahead and start so we won’t be in a rush at the end of the summer.” She motioned for me to follow her over, and I did. Beside the box were piles of sorted things—ticket stubs and flyers and photographs.

I picked up a photograph I hadn’t seen before. It was grainy and faded, one of my parents years and years ago, at some Halloween party. They’d gone as the Goblin King and Sarah from the movieLabyrinth, but Dad had lost his blond wig before the photo was taken. Uncle Rick was in the middle, posing as Dolly Parton. I snorted a laugh.

Mom glanced over at it. “Oh, that was when you were five—no, six? I would tell you about it, but honestly, we were so shit-faced I don’t remember.”

“Was that the year Dad came home with a lampshade on his head?”

“No, that was the Christmas party when you were eight. I rememberthatone because Mitch superglued the babysitter’s hair to the couch.”

I grimaced. It had beenme, actually, but no one believed Mitch, and I certainly wasn’t ever going to correct them.

“Look at what else I found,” she said, showing me another photograph from the pile. It was of a four-year-old me sitting at the Steinway, slamming my fingers on the keys. My feet didn’t even touch the ground. Then another of Mitch hiding in the curtains. One of him looking serious in the middle of a bunch of old rockers.One of the Revelry packed, the lights from the stage so bright I couldn’t make out who was playing. There were photos of some of the old barbacks and bartenders who had worked at the Rev for years. So many photos, so many memories, so muchlife.

As I looked through all the things she’d already pulled out, she started to sort through more in the boxes. My parents rarely got rid of things—if there was a small trinket that held a moment in time, they kept it. It didn’t matter what it was—stickers, labels off beer bottles, someone’s random phone number written on a gum wrapper. It was all here, shoved into these cardboard boxes put on a shelf in the office.

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