Page 15 of Guitars and Mistakes
I didn’t give a damn about any of that.
But I did find it endearing and sort of hilarious to see her so flustered, her skin flushing red with frustration and her fingers tapping along the wood of her guitar as she tried to figure out what the fuck she was doing. I didn’t think Lila was the sort of girl who doubted herself easily. She’d probably been born with that instinctive belief that everyone would love her if she just smiled often enough. And I was betting she’d never run into a single person who didn’t respond to her the way she wanted them to.
So yeah, it made me smile to see her getting flustered about being shoved onstage without any choice in the matter.
That didn’t change the fact that I wanted to save her.
Hey, I said I knew I wasn’t any good for her. That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to step in for her when the occasion called for it.
I lifted my eyebrows high, gave her a pointed look, and strummed a cord from the song they’d played last night. Then I moved my fingers and strummed another. And another. The glare on her face turned even darker, until she looked like she might actually stick her tongue out at me. But then I broke into a fuller version of the song, the cords moving quickly from my head into my fingers and then to the guitar, and before long I’d started the song without her and she was scrambling to catch up, her fingers dancing across the strings of her own guitar and her cheeks flushing even brighter.
Beyond her, I could see Anna glaring at me like she wanted to strike me dead on the spot for needling her friend.
So you know, nothing new there. Anna had never liked me much.
That just made me smile even more broadly.
I turned my cheeky grin from Anna back to Lila, and found the start of a smile on her lips, too. She’d seen me making faces at Anna, then, and unless I was very much mistaken, she thought it was funny. This time when her eyes met mine they were sparkling with laughter, and when she sang the first words of the song they were muffled and hard to understand.
By the time she hit the second line, though, she’d found her stride and her voice was ringing clearly through the bar, all her nerves forgotten and her focus back where it should be.
We played through three songs, the guys learning Anna and Lila’s songs as we went and letting them take center stage. The girls had a great sound, half pop and half country, and the combination of guitar and keyboard was truly unique. Lila’s voice was both husky and somehow angelic at the same time, and when she combined it with Anna’s sultry alto, the sound made you feel like your heart was actually melting.
I was having more fun onstage than I’d had in years, and it was because we had Anna and Lila adding to our sound. Matt was practically beside himself with excitement about Anna—I had to figure out what was going on between the two of them at some point—and Noah and Hudson were looking at Lila like they thought she could actually walk on water or something.
Hell, for all I knew, she could. She’d walked into my life and given me a sense of joy I’d never had before. She managed to glow with something otherworldly and then did the impossible, casting that same glow over the people around her. She’d even made the press think I might be reforming myself into something happy and respectable.
For a week.
The song we were playing ended and Lila cast me a quick, teasing glance that immediately told me I was in trouble.
“Thank you!” she shouted into the audience. “But I’m pretty sure you didn’t come here to hear songs that Anna and I wrote. In fact, I’m guessing you’re actually here to see Global Authors and heartheirmusic, am I right?”
The cheering was rather lackluster if you asked me, but she acted like they’d just confirmed exactly what she’d already thought.
“Right! In that case, I say we start out with one of my favorite songs by this rock band. I’ve been working hard to learn it over the last week just so I could play it with them, because I think it’s one of their best. What do you think, can Anna and I stay on stage for one more song?”
This time, the applause tried to shatter the windows in the place.
“Yes!” she shouted, smiling so hard I thought her cheeks must hurt. “In that case...”
She cast me one more teasing look, lifted an eyebrow of her own, and strummed a chord. A chord, I realized, that I knew quite well.
The first notes of our one and only love song.
Well, shit. Global Authors had just started singing the tune on this tour because it had turned out to be so popular with the audience. The problem was, playing it always reminded me of Lila herself. And I’d always managed to find her in the audience and sing it right to her, even when I didn’t want to.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to take the risk of singing it with her on the stage with me.
But the guys were already jumping into it and she was playing it like she knew exactly what she was doing—she must have actually gone out of her way to learn it—and before I knew what I was doing, my fingers were finding the right notes on my own guitar and I was joining in.
When I started singing, Lila was right there with me, her voice blending seamlessly with mine and lifting me up in a way I’d never dreamed possible, and we soared together, flying through the space like we’d somehow sprouted wings. My heart was feeling both elated and broken at the same time. I looked over to find her staring at me, her eyes wide and open, showing me all her emotions, and God, if I hadn’t already been split in half that would have done it to me.
This girl. This beautiful, sunny, happy girl, who’d come into my life and tried to show me that there were animals in the clouds and sunshine no matter how dark the day was...
Only I couldn’t be the man she thought I was. I wished I could. I wished everything was different. If only I knew how to fix myself. Turn myself into the man she needed. Make myself whole, make myself worthy of someone like that.
If only I was anything like what she needed.
