Page 33 of Sounds Like Love

I sat there on the bench, my knees bumping up and down. “Do you think ‘If You Stayed’ is a love song?” I asked.

“Sure it is.”

I deflated a little. “Ah.”

He tsked.“Every song is a love song, Jo.”

I … had never thought of it that way. But it was true that most of the emotions I drew on when writing stemmed from some sort of love. Even the songs I grew up listening to, when Mom put me on her toes and spun me around to “Tiny Dancer” in the quiet of the Revelry, or when Dad strummed his ukulele in the garden while singing “Brown Eyed Girl,” or when Mitch drowned out his feelings as he turned “All the Small Things” up so loud it vibrated all the portraits in the house crooked.

Love in a kaleidoscope of colors.

In the distance,lightning struck the ocean. There was a thin gray line between the clouds and the sea. Rain. A tourist asked his partner if it was a hurricane, but hurricanes looked different coming in. They felt different, too. There was no reasoning with those sorts of storms. This one was just an angry cloud.

It’d pass, like all the others.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that Sasha and I were opposites on a lot of things, but the one thing that we agreed on was music.

I guessed there could have been worse things to agree on.

The first big droplet of rain splattered on my forehead, and I decided I probably needed to get to the Revelry before the bottom dropped out.

Chapter14(I’m Just a) Cheeseburger in Paradise

THE NEXT DAYwas a bad one for Mom, and Gigi must’ve found out, because she asked if I wanted to hit up Iwan Ashton’s new restaurant. I didn’t, but thirteen cat memes later I caved. So I rolled out of bed and headed for the shower, putting on a random music mix on my phone. “Troublemaker,” a song from Renegade’s self-titled album from the late aughts, popped up. I was halfway through it when I heard a vocal track I didn’t recognize.

It took a moment to realize that it wasn’tinthe song.

It was Sasha. Singing.

“Uh … Sasha?” I called.

He went silent. Then:“J-Jo?”

“I have about a hundred questions, but the most important one is: Are you doing the dance, too?” Gigi had made me learn it, and no one ever told you when you were a teenager that muscle memory was forever.

“No …”

I could tell he was lying. Weirdly. “Liar.”

“How do you know this song? It’s like fifteen years old.”

“I was a teenager fifteen years ago, and this is my random shower mix, what’s your excuse?” I replied, rinsing out my hair.

“You’re in the shower?”His voice was forcibly nonchalant.

That was when I realized my mistake. My cheeks heated. “Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m not making it weird!”He guffawed.“You’re making it weird!”

“Says the one making it weird!” I batted back in mortification, so flustered that I didn’t get all the suds out of my hair before I turned off the water. “Get out of my head!”

“I—wha—sure, and lemme roll a boulder up a hill while I’m at it,”he replied, and started to think of—

“Stop thinking about a naked grandma!”

“What am I supposed to—”

“Find adifferentboner killer!”

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