Page 100 of Tripped By Love
My heart ached with the same feeling. My gaze dropped from the stage to Cassidy. She had her eyes turned to the front. She was sitting in the middle of a darkened theater and should have been a shadow, but instead, I felt like she was glowing. Like a halo of moonlight had cast its rays into the room. Or the flares around the sun. Maybe the rings of Venus. A life force you couldn’t look away from once it had caught your attention. I wouldn’t let anybody—Hardy, myself, or anyone else that came along—take that glow from her.
The crowd erupted into applause as their song ended. Brady left the stage, and Paisley moved out from behind the keyboards to take the microphone from Palak. Each of the band members took turns singing the lead in their songs, and they all had decent voices, but it was their charisma and their talent with a range of instruments that had really rocketed them to the top of the charts in just over a year.
“Thank you all for being here with us while we celebrate our new album,” Paisley said. Her voice was sure instead of the quiet shyness it normally was when she wasn’t in front of a crowd. An oxymoron of sorts. “This next song was almost scrapped from the album altogether before someone came in and rescued it. I wasn’t sure he’d be here tonight, but I see he snuck in while we weren’t looking. I’m kind of hoping he’ll help me sing it. Jonas? Care to join me?”
My body tensed, searching the aisles for Jonas’s lanky frame.
I found him near the front, sitting in between The Painted Daisies’ manager and Brady’s PR manager, Assad. I couldn’t read Jonas’s expression from the back, but his shoulders had stiffened. They were pulled tight in the way he held them only when he was on the defensive.
Assad shoved him in the shoulder, and Jonas slowly rose to his feet. He made his way down the aisle toward the stage and dragged himself on top of it without using the stairs. The fiery redhead of the band, Fiadh, grinned at him and shoved a microphone stand in his direction. Jonas stared at it for a long moment before taking the microphone out, shrugging out of his jacket, and hanging it on the empty stand. Then, he inhaled and turned back toward Paisley.
She had on a pair of thigh-high leather boots, a mini-skirt, and a torn black and blue top that matched her highlights. She looked older than seventeen, and yet her expression was still somehow sweet. She seemed suddenly as nervous as Jonas when he eased up next to her. Even with her stiletto boots, she barely reached his shoulder.
“I’m going to fu?screw this up,” he said into the mic before giving a wry grin to the audience. “I don’t have the vocals for it.”
“It’s your song as much as it is mine now,” Paisley said, and tears sprang to my eyes, knowing how much that meant to Jonas. He’d been through so much, and to have someone give him this… It was beautiful.
Cassidy’s fingers tightened on mine, and she tucked her face up against my shoulder as if she could give me the strength I needed when I felt like I was going to fall apart.
Paisley gave a signal to Adria on drums, and the beat started slow, a pulsing rhythm that was picked up in Fiadh’s Celtic harp. Paisley began singing, and it was as if pain ripped from inside her into the lyrics. Loneliness. Heartache. Misunderstandings. When she paused, Jonas joined in. It was rough and a little off-key, but his voice amplified the self-hate that rolled from the words. At the same time, Palak’s sitar collided with the notes from Fiadh’s harp, echoing the emotions of the lyrics. The song told a story of two people who thought they were worth nothing until suddenly their worlds collided. The conflicting instruments drifted from a banging contrast into a blended harmony, love filling the gaps that life had left in their souls.
It was agonizing and beautiful.
I wished I’d recorded it for Maliyah so she could see Jonas in this light. I wanted everything the song promised for him. A way to shrug off the past and see the possibilities of his future.
God. I wanted that for both of us.
To lose the sorrow and regrets and see only the brilliance of what stood before us.
Like Cassidy shining at me in the dark.
I leaned in and took her lips in mine again. Too many emotions filling me. Too many things I couldn’t say with words that only my body knew how to speak. She answered back, pushing her mouth against mine, tongue sliding inside, licking as if she was smoothing away the scars and burns. I returned the favor, trying to free her of the weight of Clayton and the fear he’d ground into both of us.
We would find a way. She would be mine, and I would be hers.
We didn’t have another choice because, just like the song said, we would never be whole without the other.
