Fortunately, it wasn’t that hard while I was staring at the water. There was something about the hypnotic sound and movement of the tides that fed my soul and always had. I remembered Mary Goodman, Rafe’s mom, saying that staring out at the water helped her keep things in perspective.
“No matter how big a mess I might’ve gotten myself into, honey, the Gulf is big enough to wash it clean so I can try to do better.”
Looking at it reminded me that no matter how many people knew my name or my music, I was still just a collection of atoms. A grain of sand on the beach, just like everyone else. What mattered were the things that connected us. That made us a force strong enough to hold back the water.
Like music.
Like love.
Like bone-deep rage-lust that made you wanna simultaneously kiss your former friend until he melted into a puddle and shake him until his teeth fell out.
I propped my feet on the balcony railing and stared out at the setting sun, wondering why the hell it was that Rafe Goodman got to me like no one else in the world ever had. The statistical probability of Florida breaking off and floating away into the ocean was higher than the chances of us ever being anything to each other again… so why washethe guy I kept coming back to and comparing to every other guy I slept with?
“We bring out the worst in each other,” Rafe had said. Andfuck, he was so, so right, because here I was feeling jealous of my sister—myhospitalizedsister—because Rafe keeping her secrets felt like him choosing her instead of me all over again.
But he was so, so wrong, too, because nothing in my life had been in harmony from the day I cut him out. No matter how murderous he made me, no matter how we scratched and bled each other, when I was with him, something in my soul sighed and whispered, “Ah,thereyou are!” And I was pretty sure it always would.
We were engaged in a lifelong game of Fuck, Marry, Kill, where he was my first and only answer in every single category.
I froze. Then I jumped up from my chair and ran back into my room. My suitcase lay untouched on the floor, but I grabbed my guitar and dragged it outside along with my beaten-up notebook and a ballpoint pen from the desk.
By the time the sun set a few hours later, I was plucking out the melody of a song and fitting it to some lyrics that started out as a giant fuck-you… and had maybe ended as something else entirely.
How could you be the answer to every question?
The secret in my confession,
Give me comfort with your aggression,
After all this time,
How is it still you?
They weren’t great lyrics. Heck, I wasn’t even sure they werepassablelyrics, but after months of zero inspiration, months of feeling like I’d neverwantto write another line of a song again, even that abysmal offering felt like a victory worth savoring.
Figured that Rafe was the catalyst for that, too, didn’t it? He might be an asshole, but there’d never been a time that he didn’t make mefeel, and now was no exception.
The stars were high in the sky by the time I put my guitar down, and my eyes found Lyra by instinct. One of the first constellations I’d ever learned to recognize.
“That collection of stars right above us reminds me of you. See that tilted rectangle shape? That’s Lyra, and the bright star on the end there is Vega.”
“Which?” I narrowed my eyes, trying to see what Rafe saw. “The ones that look like a bent coat hanger?”
Rafe snorted and turned toward me on the blanket, his face so close I could feel his breath on my cheek.
“It supposedly looks like Orpheus’s magic lyre. It created magic music that made people feel joy and sadness and hate and love. All kinds of shit, just like you do. When his wife died, Orpheus played his harp and convinced Hades to bring her back to life, as long as he had faith and walked out of the underworld without looking back for her.”
“Huh. He looked back, didn’t he?”
“Obvs.” Rafe rolled onto his back again, but his laughter on the warm night breeze surrounded me. “The happily ever afters never get turned into constellations.”
I sighed.
But when I crawled into bed that night, despite feeling like I was trying to swim upstream on my own, I felt more hopeful than I’d felt since the day those damn paparazzi pictures got posted.
The air near Whispering Key was magic.
* * *
