Page 92 of The Music of Us
What I actually meant was a very dangerous,You smell nice.
“It’s the Spanish cedar,” Jake explained. “Different guitars have different smells depending on their wood and lacquer. But this one’s my favorite. No matter where I am on the road, the guitar still smells like home. It makes me feel safe.”
I nodded, carefully filing that fact away in the back of my mind as Jake resumed playing.
This time, though, the song was slow—softer and sweeter than what he was playing before.
“What’s that?” I asked. It sounded different from what US usually released. “I don’t recognize it.”
“Hmm? Oh.” Jake looked down at his guitar, like it’d been playing without his knowledge. “It’s nothing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“It really is. Just me tooling around,” Jake deflected, shrugging it off, like the incomplete melody wasn’t already circling around my mind, begging for me to know how it ended like a novel I couldn’t put down until I reached the last page. “I’ve got a dozen half-finished songs.”
A month before Jake disappeared, he’d brought a stack of empty sheet music into the café and sat at a table in the corner, scribbling notes across the pages. He’d stayed hunched over the table for hours, looking like he was creating some kind of spell. When I asked him about it, he’d sworn that one day, he was going to write something people couldn’t stop humming.
Curiously, I asked, “Do you get to write a lot?”
“Well, I wrote most of The Song That Shall Not Be Mentioned—”
“Don’t start.”
“You so hate it.”
“I so don’t,” I said. Under my breath, I muttered, “Trust me.”
“What did you say?”
“Livie,” I lied. “I said Livie. I’m sure she liked it.”
She must’ve. She made several posts gushing over Jake before they broke up, all with the song’s audio. I never had any ill will toward her, but I couldn’t help feeling a twist of wistfulness right behind my rib cage when I saw news about them.
“Isn’t that what matters?” I asked. “That the person you wrote the song for likes it?”
“Right,” Jake said tightly. “That’s all that matters.”
I paused as his expression turned serious, darkening the veins of gold in his eyes.
Maybe Livie was a sore topic, considering they broke up. I mean, Jake had to have loved her, at one point.
“Lovely, Aren’t Ya” is the type of song you could only write if you were utterly head over heels for someone.
“Anyway,” Jake continued, “I got to cowrite several songs, but ‘Lovely, Aren’t Ya’ is the one I wrote mostly by myself. The label changed the title and swapped out a word or two in the lyrics. But otherwise, that’s all they changed, so it’s the one I’m proudest of. The label doesn’t always like my songs,” he admitted with a shrug. “But I’ve been trying to get better and experiment with different things so I can write another one that they can’t turn down. Although, sometimes, Marie says it’s not the song, it’s just that the piece doesn’t fit in with the type of music US usually does.” He paused there, sucking his bottom lip between his teeth for a minute before continuing to strum his guitar absently. “That’s why she told me to think about doing a solo side project.”
The very thing that had caused the band to fight in the first place.
I leaned back against the wall. “Back in the car the other night...”You know, the night I nearly kissed you.“You told the boys you didn’t actually take the side project offer.”
Whatever Jake had been expecting me to say, that wasn’t it. For the first time that evening, I heard his fingers trip over the strings, striking the wrong chord. He blinked, as if unused to hearing dissonant noise come from his beloved guitar.
“No,” he said, carefully setting the instrument down beside him. “I didn’t. I’d started working on a few song ideas just in case, since I’d been thinking about it.”
“Are you still?”
“No.” He frowned. “Yes? Maybe? I mean... it’s complicated.”
“Why?”
