The crowd gasped and booed.
I folded my arms over my chest.
“You loathed it?” Beale demanded, shoulder-checking me. “So rude.”
“But,” Jay told the audience, motioning for them to settle down. “But! That was mostly because he didn’t know it was about him. So I wrote the guy a new song. And this time, I want to play it for him directly. So there’s no confusion.”
He stood up and beckoned toward me, then patted the seat of the stool, inviting me to share the stage with him.
Holy shit. He was burning italldown. Not just coming out as gay, but coming out as mine. I knew he had to be scared as hell, which officially made him the bravest man I knew.
And I knew there’d never be anyone other than him for me until I died.
I didn’t hesitate. I took a step forward.
But a hand wrapped around my elbow and yanked me back into the wing with surprising strength.
“Rafe, precious… you need to… pause for… just one second while I fix you,” Toby panted, like he’d run a great distance to save me from a fashion emergency. He adjusted the collar of my T-shirt, straightened the hem, then lifted up on his toes to sift his fingers through my hair. “Love may be rose-colored, but telescopic lenses are forever! Have you looked at yourself even once since you left wherever the heck you took off from this morning? Answer: no.” He stepped back and assessed me with a critical eye. “Ugh. Why do you and your brother look so good in big boots and scruff? The universe is so inherently unfair.” He winked and patted my chest, then stood back to lay his head on Beale’s arm. “There. My work is done. Go get your man.”
“Handsome,” Jay said softly as I approached, his eyes dancing as he appreciated Toby’s efforts. “You ready for this?”
“Areyou?” My eyes searched his. “What happened to waiting? Shit, what happened to Iron Pipes?”
“It came to my attention that if you want to grow something, you can’t keep it in the shadows. And you and I are meant for sunshine, Rafe Goodman.” He grinned. “And that being the case, I decided the main stage at Iron Pipes can wait. The organizers understood that family comes first, so they let me out of today’s show. Now. Any more questions, or are you gonna sit down and let me sing for you?”
That didn’t even justify an answer.
I straddled the stool and sat without another word, and as soon as my ass touched the wood, as if by some understood signal, the crowd cheered. I didn’t look at them, partly because I thought they’d freak me out but mostly because they didn’t matter. They were literally background noise.
Jay took a second to adjust his mic, and then he took a breath and launched into a new song, letting the melody unfurl and twine around me.
He sang about choices. About how the world only wanted to pick and choose certain parts of him but how he was choosing to be whole.
He was choosingme.
At first I tried to commit the lyrics to memory, but I gave up pretty fast. I could make him sing it later, over and over and over again. What I wanted to commit to eternal memory was the look in those green eyes as he sang to me in front of an audience containing most of our family and friends. What I wanted to remember and never, ever doubt again was how good he made me feel.
When he got close to the end, he stopped playing mid-verse and swung his guitar behind him. With the mic in one hand, he reached up and pushed back my hair with the other, then sang to me in a voice aching with emotion.
I choose the love and light of you
The stars shining through the night of you
The always and forever right of you…
His smile flashed as the song ended, and I surged forward, wrapping my arms around him at shoulders and hips. Then I kissed the hell out of him, tasting his honey-citrus sweetness right there on the stage in front of my family and friends and thousands of strangers.
If Jay had wanted a boyfriend who could sit calmly and resist him, he needed to pick a different guy or to stop singing such fucking amazing songs… neither of which was gonna happen if I had any say in the matter.
Jay dropped the mic to thread his hands through my hair and kiss me back, and the feedback whine was swallowed by the stomping and shouting of the crowd as they cheered us on.
“Not too overproduced?” Jay croaked when he finally pulled back.
“I love you,” I told him. “I have loved you forever. The day you kidnapped me was the luckiest, happiest day of my life. And I’m gonna tell you so every day from now on, for as long as you’ll let me.”
Jay’s answering grin was brighter than a thousand stars. “Well, damn,” he whispered. “I thought it might take a little more convincing to get those words out of you, so I brought you a present. Don’t I feel foolish?”
“What?”
