“Not a song,” she repeated. “Just … a begging letter, I guess.”
My throat tightened. I handed it back like I was returning a relic.
“Verse?” I asked, instead of the ten things I wanted to say.
“I don’t have one,” she said. “I have these.” She brandished a handful of scraps of paper. “They don’t go together.”
“That’s half the job, as you know,” I said. “What do they want?”
“To be taken seriously.” She laughed softly. “They want to stop being in a shoebox.”
Outside, the Book Bitches had gotten into an argument about whether angels have wings or were more high-tech these days and rode segways.
I pulled my guitar case toward me and opened it without ceremony. The guitar wasn’t my touring one. It was just my old favorite. My constant. I tuned by muscle memory while Skye paged through scraps she pretended not to be attached to.
“Let’s start from the middle,” I said, when Skye made a frustrated noise. “Write the chorus like it’s a promise you’re scared to make.”
“I’m not writing a song about me,” she said quickly.
“It’s not about you,” I said. “It’s about someone who sounds like you. Anyone who has ever felt like you.” I played a chord.
She made a face, but the kind you make when someone’s handed you a biscuit and you said you weren’t hungry. “Four chords?” she asked, resigned and fond. “You still a four-chord man?”
“When I’m trying to be honest.” I strummed a chord and built on it. I played it once, twice, let it settle. Her shoulders dropped a half inch.
“Give me the first line,” I said. “Not the best line. The first one.”
She sifted. Squinted. Chose. “I’m not the girl who held your chorus while the kettle learned to sing.”
“That’ll do,” I said softly, and my fingers found the chord without asking me. “Okay. Keep going.”
She shook her head, panicked and amused. “Don’t look at me.”
“I’m looking at the fire,” I lied. It was impossible not to look at Skye when she wrote songs. Her face lit from within, her eyes going soft and dreamy and somewhere else, and I wanted to follow her there, wherever her dreams took her.
We fought our way to a verse the way you fight through the brush to get to the water. Cursing and laughing when we got snagged. I threw words at her and she threw better ones back. We let the lines come when they wanted. We didn’t force it. I tried a melody. She shook herhead. I tried another and she nodded.
Outside, the light fell out of the sky and left us with the reflected glow of a village deciding to be louder than money. Someone brought fairy lights. Someone else had brought speakers and Esther was now standing at a table, headphones half on, pretending she was DJing a set at Glastonbury.
We stayed on the floor like heathens and built something fragile and stubborn.
It wasn’t polished. It didn’t need to be. It sounded like us fifteen years ago if we’d learned to apologize in the middle of a fight.
We opened another bottle of wine and ate the scones she’d baked for her now-departed guests.
Skye’s voice found the melody like it had been waiting to come home, but not showy. She sang like she was politely asking the words to endure her. When she forgot herself, her hand lifted out of habit, fingers cueing air. I matched it without thinking.
“Bridge,” I said, because we were doing this.
“I don’t have anything left,” she said on a half laugh. “There’s nothing left in the box.”
“Then write something you don’t have,” I said. “Write a line like a dare.”
She bit her lip and the moment stretched between us.
She spoke first. “If we come back, come back hungry, don’t feed us ghosts or bread made of lies.”
There she was. There was my girl.
