Page 49 of The Music of Us
“No.” I shut my eyes. I hadn’t officially turned it down. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to give up yet. Not when we were so close to making the livestream work and everything working out. “I mean, yes. I am. Probably.”
“Probably?”
“Hopefully.”
I felt the tension drain out of me. I was too tired to try to hold up the brick wall around my heart.
I could let Jake in, just for a minute.
I opened my eyes to find him watching me. “Mom won’t be healed by the fall. And with the way things are going, we can’t afford any staff,” I told him. “If I leave right when she needs helpand this place is hanging in the balance, it could be the end of everything.”
What kind of person would that make me, if I left? Mom dropped out of college to be there for me. Shouldn’t I return the favor to be there for her?
Wasn’t that what love was?
“You should go.”
My eyes jumped to Jake’s. “What?”
“You should still go. You always wanted to become a vet. It’d be wrong for you not to go after everything you put in,” he told me bluntly.
I felt the wall going back up. Jake’s sixty seconds were over. He had a point, I know he did. I’d studied extra hard in biology and math, since vets needed to be strong in those subjects. I’d pulled all-nighters to perfect my application essay. I’d maintained a perfect GPA. It was just worries that literally had nothing to do with what I wanted that were stopping me from actually attaining it.
But still.
This was the Jake Moody who walked out to pursue his own dream and ghosted me. I glanced down at my phone. The same Jake Moody who apparently walked out on his girlfriend and former muse right when she needed him most.
You should still goseemed like a typical Jake thing to say, and I didn’t think I should be taking any advice from him.
“Just don’t back out yet,” Jake told me. “All right?”
“All I need is for the livestream to work out,” I said quietly. “If we get enough business, it’ll save The Tiny Tiger, and Mom will be able to afford help so she won’t hurt herself. My whole future depends on it.”
“Okay.” Jake nodded resolutely. “We’ll get you that livestream, then.”
Just like that?
I looked up, my eyes meeting his. For a moment, as Jake stood in the café, dressed in his regular-guy clothes, it was easy to imagine that Jake never ghosted. That he grew up here, with me, and there was never a rift that left me constantly wondering whether it was safe to build a bridge over it or not.
How did these two Jake Moodys in my mind mesh together?
I drank him in, and he opened his mouth to say something...
And then “Lovely, Aren’t Ya” started playing.
“Ah,” Jake said, flatly—a little too flatly for the way he jabbed his finger over at the speakers. “Look at that. It’s the song of mine you hate.”
“I don’t hate it,” I bit out.It’s just that I have a weird relationship with it because the song makes me miss the old you for three minutes and twenty-one seconds straight, and oh my God, do you have an idea of the size of the crush I used to have on you? Of course you don’t, dummy. That’s why your stupidly pretty love song’s making me look like that.“I’m serious.”
“Right,” he said, monotone. “You’re literally making a face now.”
“No, I’m not!”
“You definitely are,” he muttered. “Anyway, what I originally came to tell you was that I got a business meeting on Zoom with Phillip tonight. Want to come?”
“Business meeting?” I questioned, wrinkling my nose.
“Phillip changed his number again. He does that whenever he’s sulking. So all I have is his ‘professional number,’” Jakesaid, rolling his eyes and putting air quotes around his last two words.
