Page 13 of Score
“Easy to say when you look like that.”
It’s out before I catch it. Our eyes hold and our smiles melt at the same rate until we are studying each other through moonbeams and shadows.
“Um…” Her eyes drop away from me, maybe anywherebutme, finally landing on the notebook I still hold loosely on my lap. “You out here journaling at a party? Real smooth.”
“Not exactly.” I turn the notebook over in my hands. “It’s where I keep all my ideas, compositions, songs—all of it starts here.”
Her smile fades and her eyes go a little distant. “I rarely go anywhere without my notebook, too.”
“What’s inyournotebook?”
“Same. I mean, stories, not music. I don’t have a musical bone in my body. I couldn’t carry a tune if I tried.”
“You’re probably being too hard on yourself. You can’t be that bad.”
“The only place I sing is in the shower, and even then, Petra begs me to stop.”
The image of Verity naked and soapy in the shower sends heat straight to my dick, and the mention of Petra follows fast like a bucket of freezing water.
“You sounded amazing at the club last night, by the way,” she says.
“Oh, thanks.” I shrug. “Just paying some bills.”
“What’s your specialty? Pop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll?”
“Yes.” I laugh at her eye roll. “I can play anything.”
“So modest.” She pulls her legs under her in the lawn chair and leans back, arms crossed over her stomach.
“Music is the only thing that has ever really felt like, when I’m doing it, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be and doing what I’m meant to do.”
She nods slowly, her eyes locked with mine. “I get that.”
And I think, when so few actually do, Verity really does. Maybe that was the recognition I felt when I first saw her last night—this artistic kinship. Could I have mistaken that for attraction? For more?
“You asked before if I’m religious,” I go on, unsure why I’m telling her this—confessing this—but not hesitating on the next words. “When I’m playing music, that’s the closest I’ve ever felt to God. It makes me believe.”
“Believe in God?” she asks, her eyes alive with curiosity and a small dose of wonder.
“I’m not sure sometimes,” I admit. “When you grow up with parents who hold those kinds of beliefs, they’re often fed to you as absolutes. Right. Wrong. Black. White. Do. Don’t. Always. Never. The older I get, the more I want to consider the in-betweens, the grays. The sometimes. I want to figure out whatIbelieve. When I’m playing, I believe. I don’t even have to perfectly articulatewhatI believe in. Just having that sense of hope and faith and confidence of what I’m on Earth to do, when most of the time, I can’t find it… There’s nothing else like that.”
“I’ve never heard anyone speak that way about the thing they love to do,” she says, her voice barely carrying over the music and laughter slipping through the slightly ajar sliding glass door. “But that’s how I’ve always felt about writing. My mom used to tease me about carrying a notebook around everywhere. I grew up in a small rural town, and that notebook felt like a portal to another world. It’s where I put my imagination into words. It transported me.”
I nod and shift in the lawn chair. “You an English major, journalism, or what?”
“Film studies. Specifically screenwriting.”
“Were either of your parents writers or artistic?”
A shadow falls over her face again, and I immediately regret the question, but she chases it away with a smile that I don’t quite buy.
“My dad could really draw,” she says, looking down at her hands and biting her lip. “He didn’t have formal training or anything, but he’d draw on the walls, painted stars on my bedroom ceiling and on the mirrors.”
A short laugh breezes past her lips. “Drove Mama crazy. I can still hear her saying, ‘Now, Will, if you don’t clean that mess off my walls.’”
She pulls a knee to her chest and wraps an arm around it. “It wasn’t mess, though. He was talented. I can’t draw for shit, but I like to think my creativity came from him.”
“Here you are,” Petra says from the open patio door. “I been looking all over for you.”
