Page 84 of Sounds Like Love

“Stop looking at me like that! I just forgot!” she snapped, and her voice cracked at the end. “I just …”

Dad saw me then, in the doorway, and his expression crumpled because I’d seen this part of their life, and this time he couldn’t pretend that I hadn’t. He looked like he wanted to say something, but then Mom sucked in a sob, and he quickly turned back to her and wrapped her in his arms.

I took a step out of the kitchen, and then another, and another, tracing my way back to the foyer. The storm, the proverbial one in my head, was roaring closer and closer the more we refused to think about it. I made myself breathe in and breathe out. I made myself ignore the feeling in my chest, the way it twisted, the way it constricted. I made my fingers curl around the keys to my parents’ Subaru.

I made myself leave the house, as fast as I could, down the driveway to the Subaru,where I strapped myself into the driver’s seat and tightened my fingers around the steering wheel. But I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do—

My spiraling thoughts froze.

I heard a song.

The melody—Sasha’s and mine. He was singing it, or trying to. Humming the song, and trying to fit lyrics into it.

‘‘It sounds like—no, shorter.”He sang the top of the chorus again.‘‘Sounds like—like what? Hearts, stars, horseshoes, clovers, and blue moons. Bullshit.”

The more he tried, the more aggravated he became. How long had he been working on the song without me?

“She used to make this look so easy,”he lamented. Oh, I wish I did. Wait,used to?

He wasn’t talking about me. His mother had been a musician, too. He must have been talking about her.

What kind of songs did she write?

I wondered, and sat, and listened, waiting for my heart to finally settle back into my chest. I just needed to calm down, and listening to Sasha helped.

“I feel you there,”he said.

At first, I thought it was a lyric. It was a nice lyric. Feeling someone near you, what a comfort that could be—like a friend you’ve always known.

Then I realized he was talking to me.

I sat ramrod straight in the driver’s seat.Oh! Oh god—sorry. I didn’t—I wasn’t—I mean we can’t really eavesdrop because we’re always in each other’s heads but …

“Do you have any suggestions?”

No, I admitted. I wished I could bottle up the feeling I felt while writing “If You Stayed,” the tug right at my center that drew me to every note,every harmony, every lyric. It was the same feeling I felt when I listened to my favorite song at full blast, the way it reverberated through my body as I lay on my bedroom floor. My heart floating in my chest. My soul so full it might burst. But how did you explain what it felt like to hear your favorite song?

An idea occurred to me. I sat up a little straighter.Where is your rental house, again?

FIVE MINUTES LATER,I pulled up to a yellow cottage on the beach about three blocks from my parents’ house. It was the Ashtons’ old place. Iwan had mentioned his mom had turned it into a rental.I’m here.

“Already?”Then he poked his fingers through the blinds in one of the front windows and scissored them open.“Is that you in the Mombaru?”

I beeped the horn in reply.

Two minutes later, he was hopping into his Vans and sliding into the passenger seat. “Wow, this reallyisa Mombaru,” he said delightedly. My parents had eclectic taste when it came to decorating their Subaru. They always had a fresh Yankee Candle scent hanging from the rearview mirror (Macintosh, obviously) alongside a disco ball, and the sunroof had suncatcher stickers that, on sunny days when they opened it up, poured rainbows onto the seats. I had it open now, and the windows rolled down, and the AC kicked all the way up.

Just like I used to.

Sasha buckled himself in. “I appreciate that I’m a bad influence on you,” he said smugly.“Here I thought you’d show up and ask to work.”

“Weareworking,” I insisted, “and besides, someone told me that when you’re stuck, sometimes you just need to do something else.”

He nodded sagely. “I agree with this wise, good-looking man.”

I rolled my eyes and ignored him fishing for compliments.

“So,” he asked, “what are we doing, then?”

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