Page 65 of Sounds Like Love

I swallowed the knot in my throat. Stared down at the keys.It’s like—like there’s this iceberg on my chest, I began.And it makes it hardto breathe or think or—or create. I keep trying to. I keep reaching deeper and deeper and I just … I can’t find anything. Just emptiness. Just silence.I felt the knot slide all the way down into the dread that made my chest tight and cold.

A foreign body that had crept in and nested just beside my heart.

“My heart has never felt so silent before,” I whispered.

It felt taboo to say it out loud. Here I was, successful and on top of the world. I shouldn’t befailing.This sort of failure was for five years ago—eight! It was for the beginning of my career, not this high up. Not this far in. And the worst thing was, I didn’t know what I did wrong. I didn’t know what I could have done differently to make sure this never happened.

I just knew that every time I opened my notebook, that terrifying ball of dread in my chest grew, and nothing I wrote was good enough—and that was assuming I wrote anything at all. There wasn’t a voice in my head telling me that I was a failure. There wasn’t that seeping, inky impostor syndrome bleeding out into my head. No, there was just nothing.

Nothing at all.

“And I don’t know if it’ll ever come back, whatever thatitis. I just …” I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I’m supposed to be good at this.”

He tilted his head to look at me. “You know, when I was asking around about how to make a comeback, my manager threw around a hundred names. I listened to a hundred songs. And none of them made me feel—atall.But then I heard about a songwriter named Joni Lark. How she’s brilliant. How, if she’s on your team, she can spin anything into poetry, turn feelings into melodies. They say she’s nice to work with, and she’s earnest, and soft, and much too good for this industry.”

Those last bits got me. I curled my fingers into fists, feeling the impression of my nails in my palms. Another reason why LA never liked me—

“But they’re wrong,”he added, and leaned toward me, his voice low and rumbly. “Because how can someone who wrote these perfect notes belong anywhere else?”

And as he spoke, the dissonant chords drifted into “If You Stayed.” I’d heard it a thousand different times from a thousand different artists, all playing the same major chords and minor lifts. But the way he played it, languid and wanting, made my stomach twist in the strangest way. Because it finally sounded like it was meant to.

Yearning. Savoring. Indulgent.

Not the breakup ballad everyone thought it was, but the opposite. A sound like finding home.

He leaned so close to reach the notes, we were inches apart, and if I just went a little farther, pushed myself toward this bad idea, I could brush his hand, play a countermelody across them. And I remembered the way his hands cradled my face, the touch of his calloused fingertips against my skin. I remembered it so well I could write overtures about it.

It was a bad idea. The worst—

“What are you thinking?”his voice echoed in my head.

I realized I was staring at his perfect mouth.You surprise me.

He grinned.“I hope in a good way.”

Yes. No. Both of those answers scared me, so instead I said, “You play really well.”

“I’m classically trained, I’ll have you know.”

Then, in my head, he added,“And I’ve been told I’m very skilled with my fingers.”

A flash of heat pulsed through me as I thought about those fingers, about where else they could touch me—

I heard the same thoughts echoed, where he wanted to explore, what he wanted to taste, the course he wanted to chart across my body—the places where my trails of freckles led, the taste of cherries on my lips, the steady map of my body from mouth to chest to stomach to toes. He wanted to see me, all of me; he wanted to know it all, as intimate as a favorite song—

“No.” I lurched to my feet, slamming my hand down on the keyboard. A cacophony of sound startled us both. “We are not doing that. No.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Because of what we felt when we kissed?”

“That,” I admitted, and added, “and it’s too messy. It would bewaytoo messy. Especially if you want to have a comeback, and you do, right? It’s not just rumors?”

“I do,” he admitted, the words calculated. “I want a comeback.”

“Thenthiscannot happen.”

“Have you told that to the thoughts in your head?”he asked, giving me a knowing look.

If my blush could get any redder, it did.

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