Page 58 of The Music of Us
He’d just tried opening the door.
And it didn’t budge.
“Uh...” Apprehensively, Jake tried the handle again, pulling at it, but the door stubbornly stayed shut. He glanced back at me. “Lucy?”
“No.” Absolutely not. “Don’t say it.”
“Okay. I won’t say the door’s locked.”
I crossed my arms. “Jake.”
“I used to come up here a lot. This never happened before,” he protested.
“Is there another lock on this side?” I questioned. “Does it need a code?”
“There’s not even a keypad,” he replied, wrestling with the door. “It’s either stuck or it’s been updated to automatically lock now.”
Groaning, I glanced around, studying the neon-lit area until my eyes landed on something protruding from the rooftop’s edge.
“Hey, Jake, stop for a second,” I said. Without taking my eyes off my target, I absently reached back and hooked my hand around Jake’s arm, pulling his attention away from the door. “I think there’s a fire escape. Let’s go check it out.”
He followed me through the flickering lights over to the far side of the roof. I’d been right—I had spotted a fire escape.
Jake pressed the heel of his boot against it and pushed down with his weight, testing its strength. It looked old and weathered, covered in raindrop stains and red rust, but it held up under him.
“It seems sturdy,” Jake said, climbing onto it. “I’ll go down first, and you can follow me.” He started down the ladder, before pausing. “If we get caught by anyone, we’ll just say I was on the roof trying to rescue a stranded kitten or something.”
“Isn’t that the exact opposite of the image Marie loves so much?”
“Oh, right. Never mind. Tell them I was up on the roof graffitiing lots of obscene art. And saying we should pollute the oceans and not recycle.”
“Wow, you’re really good at this whole edgy thing.”
“So glad you noticed.” Jake took another step, and the hinges of the ladder creaked slightly beneath his boots but remained steady. His eyes dropped down, hidden under his feathery lashes for a moment as he studied the rung below, before his gaze flickered back up at me to joke, “Kiss for luck?”
“I mean, I would, but your single last year was titled ‘I Don’t Need Luck, I Just Need You,’ so I feel it’s redundant.”
Jake made ahmmnoise in the back of his throat as he continued down the ladder. “Leon got to help cowrite the chorus on that one.”
“It’s catchy,” I said. Jake had gone far enough down the ladder to leave room for me, so I started down after him. “I hear that song in the café at least twice a week.”
Jake took another step down the ladder, and muttered a comment I couldn’t quite catch since he was a foot below me, but it sounded something like, “Oh, so you like his song, but not mine.”
I frowned, pausing in my descent as I clutched rough metal. “What was that?”
“I said I think these rungs are doing fine,” he replied smoothly.
“Hold on—”
“That’s what I’m trying to do here.” I couldn’t see him, but I couldhearthe sly, teasing grin in his voice.
“You know that’s not—”
“We have a problem.”
“Yeah, we do. Trying to get a straight answer out of you is like trying to get Rumple to relinquish a turkey slice he’s stolen out of a customer’s sandwich.”
“Well, thank you for that hilarious mental image, but no, really, we have a problem.” I heard the sound of his boot heel stomping against stubborn metal below me. “The ladder’s stuck. It won’t go all the way down.”
