Page 50 of Sounds Like Love

Then emptiness.

So much emptiness it mirrored mine. Echoing. Vast.

Something that was once there. Something that wasn’t any longer.

It scared me.

This teetering on a precipice, on the edge of a cliff, waiting to fall and fearing the fall andwelcoming it—

I reeled away, gasping for breath, holding tight to his shirt. My head spun like I was drunk on a bottle of wine, though my lips felt tender, the wind crusting them with sand and sea salt.

My chest felt tight. My hands shook.

That was too intimate, too soon.

Too frightening to see that much of someone.

He pushed his thick, dark hair back with his hands. “Sorry,” he mumbled, unable to look at me. “I’m sorry.”

Then, in his head, he wondered,“What did she hear?”

“Nothing,” I lied.

He shot me a look of disbelief.

The answer was that I’d seen too much, and nothing that I wanted to. I saw shades of a man the world rarely saw rendered in real life. Things he was heartbreakingly afraid for anyone to see. My mouth still tasted like the panicked end of his kiss, sour with a kind of sadness that sank, and kept sinking, deeper and deeper, with no bottom.

What kind of loss left something like that in a kiss?

Something personal, and something I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Something that he probably didn’t want to tell me about, either.

“Sadly,” I said with a sigh, forcing a lighter tone, something to pull us back from the intensity of that kiss, the feelings, the—theconfusionof it all, “like I thought, there’s nothing in your head.”

He forced a laugh. The beach wind ruffled his hair like an old woman to a child, and it made him look vulnerable. Real. He replied, “Yeah, I figured. Just a bunch of shrimp doing the high kick, right?”

“They were actually doing the entire routine to One Direction’s ‘Best Song Ever.’”

He rolled his eyes. “Ah yes, the hallmark of our youth.” A rushing wave came up over the sand, washing over his ankles, drenching his shoes. He didn’t seem to notice. I could hear the buzzing anxiety in his head now, too. Was that how mine felt all the time—white noise and worry? He licked his lips, the flicker of the taste of cherry crossing his thoughts, and his tense body unwound a little.“You’re a bad liar, you know.”

So are you.

A hint of a smile crossed his mouth. “It was a good kiss, though.”

I hated to admit that I agreed. “Those rumors, at least, are true.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Oooh, you’ve listened torumorsabout me?”

I cleared my throat, deciding to ignore him. I was too worried to feel annoyed. If I’d felt his emptiness, what had he felt in me? “It didn’t work.”

And we shouldn’t do it again, I added in my head.

“No,” he agreed, “but it was worth a shot. And now we know.”

“I’m glad we tried,”he added.

I swallowed thickly. “Yes.”

The beach breeze had undone my braid, so I pulled it out the rest of the way and inclined my head up toward the top of the pier. He followed. We climbed the sand dune to the boardwalk, where a few late-night tourists lingered, bent together like melted Valentine’s Day chocolates.

---