Page 99 of Sounds Like Love

I wanted to melt to the floor, I was so relieved.

“Who are you talking to?”Sasha’s worry rippled through his words.

Rooney called, I reported excitedly.

“Rooney … Rooney Tarr?”

We have a plan, don’t worry.

“In the meantime, I’ll mock up a cowriter agreement and send it over just for legal. Is his father in on it, too?”

“That has-been?” I said, tongue in cheek, because it was a song for Sasha and me. No one else. “He’ll never touch this song.”

Rooney cackled. “What’s the title? For the contract.”

I froze. It was the last thing we had to do. The final touch. I looked at the notebook again, chewing on my bottom lip. Sasha said that I could name it, but …

I hesitated. If this was the last piece of this song, and if we finished it after this, would his thoughts go away? Would he? I scanned the lyrics, looking for something we could use for now. It didn’t have to be final.

“Bird?”I heard Sasha call again, his voice so small I almost couldn’t hear him at all.“I don’t think I want to—”

My gaze fell on a lyric.

And so I told her.

It was like a red string snipping in two. One moment he was there, warm and comforting and golden in the back of my head, and then the next he was gone. A light switch turned off. A bulb shattered.

No, I thought.

No, no, no—

“Ooh, I love it! Amuchstronger title than your last one. You just keep getting better and better. I’m glad you’re writing again, Joni,” she added, sounding sincere. I barely heard her over the silence in my head. The resounding, awful silence. “You have so much talent. I’m glad people finally see it. More soon,ta!”

She hung up. I sat there, at the piano bench, staring at the doorway to the kitchen. That same terrible, chest-tightening panic started to settle in again, the kind that clawed at my throat. The kind that I couldn’t push down anymore.

Breathe, I told myself.

My head was so empty.

Breathe—

Sasha appeared around the corner, and came into the doorway, and didn’t move. He simply stood there, looking lost and confused and—

Heartbroken?Was that the look? I didn’t know, I couldn’t feel his thoughts anymore, I couldn’t puzzle out his emotions—

“What did you name it?” he asked, his voice raw.

My heart leapt into my throat. I could hear the loss there, just like in my own voice. A dazed kind of shock. I stood from the bench and moved through the living room toward him. My mouth trembled.

This was good, right? This was what we wanted.

But then …

Why did …

Somehow, over the weeks, he’d become the first person I wanted to talk to in the morning, and the last person I wanted to tell good night.

I realized like a lightning strike—I didn’t want him out of my head.

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