Page 51 of Sounds Like Love

I stopped on the pier and listened. The song was soft and sure, humming just below the whisper of the wind. “There it is again.”

“What?” he asked, and then paused. Cocked his head to listen, even though it was just in our heads. The speakers on the pier cut off at midnight, and it was almost touching one in the morning. “Oh, the earworm. I’ve tried to figure out what it’s from, and I can’t find anything,” he said. “The song doesn’t exist.”

“It has to,” I replied. “Because otherwise—why usrandomly? It doesn’t make sense. But I can’t get it to go away no matter what I do.”

“I’ve tried everything,” he agreed. “Did it just start over for you?”

“Yeah, it did.”

The realization was a slow flicker in our heads—I heard his thought just as it bloomed into mine. It was like an itch that had finally been scratched, or a stretch after a too-long car ride. He held my gaze, and I held his.

The song, unfinished and unending, sang between us.

The first time I heard it was in the Uber away from the concert.

“The walk home,”he added.

Then the next morning at the airport—

“Catching breakfast with Willa.”

Driving home with Gigi.

“Piano lessons at the school.”

The first night I heard you—

“The first night I heard you,”he echoed.

On, and on, and on.

It had been there since the beginning. Right in front of us. Playing on loop this whole time. If we weren’t connected this—thismelody—then why could onlywehear it? Two musicians, and a song?

“Well,” I murmured, “halfof a song.”

“Does it want us to sing it?” he mused, humming the few bars that were also in my head. “No, it’s not done.”

No, it wasn’t. That worried me. I hesitated, chewing on my bottom lip, because the more I thought about what the melody wanted, the less I wanted to say it aloud.

He tilted his head, watching me.“She looks cute when she’s thinking.”

“Maybe we need to finish it,” I said, ignoring his thoughts in my head. It felt like there was a stone, suddenly, in the pit of my stomach.

Sebastian felt the opposite. His eyes lit up, because I was a songwriter, of course. He barked a laugh. “Oh, ifthat’sall,” he said, “then it should be easy. Writing melodies is our bread and butter.”

I tried to walk it back, because suddenly this was a terrible idea. “I mean, we don’tknowif that’s what we have to do—”

“It makes sense. We already got the top line—well, half of it,” he went on enthusiastically. I found that when he was excited, he talked with his hands, waving his fingers through the air like he was conducting a symphony of his thoughts. “We have the melody, now all we need is the lyrics, find a few verses, some instrumentation underneath. Maybe a bridge with a key change—easy!”

Easy—the word echoed in my head like a gong.

“Easy,” I repeated. He sounded so happy with himself; you’d have thought he’d solved world hunger.

Sure, easy.Why did I have to write asong?

“We,” he clarified, spinning back to me, pointing between us. “Wehave to write a song.”

My chest began to feel tight. “I—I don’t know. What if we just waste time? And what if we just need—I can kiss you again. See if that works? Third time’s the charm—”

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