Page 59 of The Sound Between Us

Instead, I close my eyes and hum the melody under my breath. Soft, almost nothing.

Dex tilts his head. “What’s that?”

“Nothing.” I stand, pacing. “Just... I can’t use it.”

He watches me for a long beat. “You seeing someone?”

I bark out a laugh. “No. That would imply I’m emotionally available.”

Jamie stretches, finally sitting upright in one of the leather armchairs by the mixing desk. “You’re different, though. You’ve been weird since London.”

They’re not wrong. I’m fractured, and underneath the swagger and the sarcasm is a boy who met a woman who didn’t flinch when he stopped performing.

And that’s dangerous. Because she saw me, and I liked it. Too much.

Jamie gestures toward the piano in the corner with his joint. “Why don’t you start something? You’re the lyrics guy.”

I stiffen. Because I have. I did. But the words belong to someone else now.

“Can’t force it,” I say. “Doesn’t work that way.”

Henry clicks the talkback again. “It’s worked that way for you before.”

I shoot him a look. He shrugs. Don’t hate me, I’m just here to get you paid.

“We don’t need a whole song,” Jamie mumbles, tapping ash into a vintage teacup someone brought in as a joke. “Just a spark. One good line.”

One good line. Right.

I only meant to kiss you once, but it felt like coming home.

Or, You make me feel like I used to before the lights got too bright and I stopped sleeping.

Or the bridge Seren half-mumbled at me last week while barefoot on the piano bench, distracted, a tiny frown on her forehead as she searched for the right lyric. It owed her money.

All of it still lodged somewhere in my chest. A splinter.

But I can’t use it. I won’t.

“You’re thinking too hard,” Dex says from his rug-nest. “Let it come to you.”

I shoot him a look. “Dex, you haven’t spoken in forty-five minutes. You were singing the Teletubbies theme ten minutes ago.”

“And it was a vibe,” he mutters, proud.

Jamie’s now riffing nonsense chords on a Les Paul plugged into a vintage Marshall, the echo bouncing off the walls. A mockery. I stare down at my notebook—the one I’ve had since tour started. The pages are all half-scribbled, ideas never followed through. I flip through them and find her handwriting. One note, one phrase in her messy scrawl: Maybe less rhyme. More truth.

I close the book so fast I almost bend the cover.

“Right,” I mutter, standing. “Coffee. Or whisky. Or bleach.”

Henry glances over his glasses from the control room. “Try the Lounge. The piano’s tuned.”

Of course it is.

I leave Studio A before I start launching microphones. The Lounge is sunlit and high-ceilinged and smells of bergamot and subtle disappointment. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, downtown LA gleams—distant, glossy, and totally uninterested in my artistic suffering.

The Steinway sits gleaming under a beam of afternoon sun, mocking me.