Page 115 of Sounds Like Love

“You feel like home, bird.”

I felt myself smiling, but I couldn’t stop. Everything in my body just wanted to jump and dance. I wanted to shout at the sky. I wanted to tell the world that Sebastian Fell—thatSebastian fucking Fell—said I felt like home. No one had ever told me that before. I’d neverbeenthat before.

I pressed my forehead against his. “Stop saying stuff like that,” I murmured, unable to hide the blush rising across my cheeks.

He cupped my face with his hand, his thumb tracing my bottom lip. “Too mushy for you?”

“I’m just afraid if you say any more, I’ll fall madly in love with you.”

He wiggled an eyebrow. “Well then, I’ll just have to find another way to make you fall.” And then his gaze dropped down the length of my body, and the heated look he gave made me feel sexy even in jean shorts and an oversized Rolling Stones T-shirt. He purred, his voice deep and gravelly, “And I won’t utter a single word.”

Then he drew me close and kissed me. He tasted like rainbow Italian ice, sticky and sharp and sweet. I thought I would miss the way he kissed when he was in my head and I was in his, but with each new kiss I found myself falling deeper into the way he smelled, the way he tasted, the brush of his fingers against my cheeks and through my hair. Where before it was an onslaught of everything, now it felt simple. Cherished. Like the world narrowed down to just him and me in that moment, his breath against mine, his tongue sliding across my lips, his teeth nibbling. Now, there were fishhooks tugging in my stomach, pulling me toward him harder and harder, with the certainty of stars orbiting each other.

This was right. For the first time in years—this was where I needed to be. Iknewit was, deep in my soul.

WHEN I FINALLYtold my parents, standing in that storied lobby with all the photographs of musicians that came before, they were silent for a long while.

Then Mom asked, “But what about the life you built in LA, heart? Your career? You worked so hard.”

Dad agreed. “We don’t want you to give it up.”

“I know. And I’m not. I went out to LA thinking I knew what I wanted, but as it turns out, what I want is right here,” I replied simply, because it had always been here. I just hadn’t seen it yet. “Is that okay?” I added a little softer, just to Mom.

She understood. “Chase your joy, heart.”

And then she pulled me into a hug, and Dad joined, and they squeezed me tightly. They’d never tell anyone that they were heartbroken about giving up the Revelry, but I knew them. I knew this place, too. And maybe this was a terrible decision, but if it with-stood fifty years of hurricanes and ocean swells and angry rock stars, maybe the Revelry could stand the test of time, too. And me.

There was only one way to find out.

Eventually I had to pack up my apartment in Los Angeles and move home. Sasha helped—apparentlyhe was very good at moving. He’d done it so often in his youth, he knew all the best cross-country hacks. Sometimes, we’d feel a little shiver in our heads, but never another thought. Never another song. But that was okay, because we made the songs anyway, and it turned out that he was a much better producer than artist, and Gigi was a much better singer. So was Willa. And a handful of other artists that he lent his talents to.

At first, while he set up his business in LA, Sasha split his time between his Hollywood Hills apartment and Vienna Shores. And he’d meant what he said that day on the pier: I was the first person he called in the mornings, and the last person he said good night to, but the weeks he was gone felt likeyears. He rented a studio out in Burbank but kept toying with the idea of converting one of the old storage rooms at the Revelry into one.

“I don’t want to move thepiano,” Sasha always said when he brought it up. “What if it breaks? That’s why they never moved the one at Abbey Road. No, better to just bring everything to the OBX.”

It sounded like an excuse, but I didn’t mind. I started cleaning out the storage room anyway, just in case.

Billboardlauded his new role as “the comeback of the decade,” but I thought that was abitdramatic.

Though, when he produced his firstBillboardtop hit with Willa Grey, a bottle of champagne arrived for him at the Revelry. When he opened the card, I waited for him to tell me who’d sent the Dom Pérignon to a man almost fifteen years sober.

It turned out, when he finally showed me the card, I hadn’t even needed to guess. “Oh. Your dad.”

“Yeah,” he said, frowning at the card in my hands.

I studied his face, never wishing more that I could hear inside his head again. “Are you … happy?”

Because for so long he’d wanted to catch his father’s eye. He wanted to step out of Roman Fell’s shadow. Be his own person. And now he was.

“I …” And his frown deepened. He took the card back, studying his father’s scratchy handwriting. “I should be, but I … I’m finding that it doesn’t matter. No, itmatters, but I don’t care.” As he said it, his mood lightened. “Huh. I don’t care. I don’t care!” But then he paused and looked pointedly at the champagne. “Butthatdoes piss me off a little.”

He ended up gifting the champagne to Mitch and Gigi, who later said it tasted so bad they mixed it with orange juice the next morning for mimosas instead.

He wasmuchmore delighted when Mom and Dad threw him a surprise celebration for hitting the list. The Big Pie catered with his favorite pineapple and pepperoni pizza, and Willa flew in from LA, and at the end of the night when she tried to convince him to move back out west, he told her he was home.

And sometimes, if you came into the Revelry for one of his rare shows, he’d sing songs he never sang anywhere else—the songs we kept for ourselves—and whenever he did he would find me in the crowd, and hold my gaze, and the rest of the world would melt away. The people of Vienna Shores knew to deny that they ever saw him. Todd denied knowing his coffee order by heart, and no one ever saw him in colorful Hawaiian shirts, sitting at the Marge, delighted to try whatever concoction Uncle Rick spun up.

And he mostcertainlydidn’t have a seat at the bar inside the Revelry, where I could, on busy nights, steal a kiss whenever I wanted. No, this wasn’t a Hollywood love story, but the rumor was his girlfriend ran away from LA anyway.

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