Page 53 of The Music of Us
We both looked away, back up at the dark-velvet black.
After a beat, I heard Jake let out a breath—an action he always did when he’d been holding it, trying to figure out what to say, and I knew before he even started speaking that he was about to ask me something.
“Lucy?”
I turned toward him. “Yeah?”
“Why did you lie?”
A traffic light switched to red, mixing with the pale-blue motel sign and turning Jake violet, coloring the hollow of his throat and catching in the dark locks of his hair. Just a handspan away from him, the light cast me in fiery red, like a burning ember.
I turned away from him again and concentrated on the midnight sky before answering.
“You were sad,” I said quietly.
I could feel the shift in the air and heat beside me, and knew without a doubt that Jake had turned to look at me.
Even after four years apart, I still remembered what it felt like to have his eyes on me, taking me in like I was a complex row of music notes he was absorbed in deciphering.
“You had a bad audition. I wanted to distract you, but Ididn’t know the right thing to say, and I’d never been good at astronomy,” I explained. “So...”
“You made up a new star chart?”
“Hey, I didn’t completely make it up. Jupiter exists,” I protested, making Jake laugh. “I remembered Mom said that Jupiter’s visible here, you know, at some point during the night. So I just picked the brightest star in the sky and hoped for the best.” He snorted, and I placed my hand over my heart in mock outrage. “I picked the brightest star, Jake. Foryou.”
“So we could’ve been looking at any old star?”
“Jake, we could’ve been looking at a Southwest airplane.”
We both laughed at the absurdity of it, our giggles coming in waves until we finally settled. We sat in another comfortable stretch of silence, and then Jake said, “It did, you know.”
“Did what?”
“Make me feel better,” Jake admitted, quiet and honest. “You always were good at that.”
The neon sign across the street behind him buzzed again, creating a shimmering haze that outlined the darkness of his silhouette and shadowed the soft curve of his lashes and the sharp edge of cheekbones. The glow should’ve made him look untouchable—larger than life and out of this world. But it didn’t. Instead, it reminded me of something safe and rooted deep in my past. Because this felt familiar—me and him, being open and real.
It gave me courage.
I sent him a sidelong glance. “So, you take maple syrup in your coffee now?” Jake Moody didn’t blush. But if hedid, he’d be doing it now. “I thought you hated it when I made some for you to try years ago.”
“I didn’t hate it,” Jake protested. “I just didn’t drink as much coffee back then as I do now.”
I shook my head. “What made you think of trying it a second time?”
“When the Usual Suspects first started, we did a small road trip to promote our EP,” Jake began, eyes looking far away for a minute. “At five one morning, me and the guys were sitting in a twenty-four-hour diner, because it was the only spot open that early and Marie needed us on the road by six. We were exhausted, because it’d been like that nearly every day for two weeks, and we had late show nights too. I didn’t even know what town we were in anymore.”
A veil of violet settled over us from the signs, and I replayed Jake’s words in my mind, surprised that the band spent days on the road being up and then still performing—and rehearsing, I assumed—later at night. I hadn’t realized how hard the band worked. Was that how busy Jake was the whole time he wasn’t texting me? I thought maybe he’d been living it up, and I tended to think of celebrities as having it cushy. But maybe that was not always the case.
“Anyway, the diner coffee was terrible,” Jake continued, making a face at the memory. “Just awful. Like motor oil. I saw a bottle of maple syrup sitting on the table right between the salt and the sugar shakers, and I found myself thinking of you.”
Jake paused, exhaling a breath as I held mine. He hesitated for a moment, like he wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have admitted that last part out loud. But the whole point of telling the story was to explainwhyhe tried my old quirk again, and he likely couldn’t get around that nugget of truth.
He went on. “I grabbed the bottle, squeezed some into mycoffee, and took a big sip. Only to see my three bandmates staring at me, like watching me dump maple syrup in my cup had startled them all awake but didn’t make them feel any less disoriented.”
I giggled, imagining their faces. “And you kept the habit?”
“Yeah. At first, it was just to cover up the cheap coffee taste, and because I was homesick. But then I got into it and couldn’t shake it.” Jake shrugged. “When we go on tour and we’re in the bus, I always stash a bottle with my stuff. Sometimes the guys ask me to let them have some too.”
