Doing as I’m told, I place the bag of takeout on the corner before sitting at the table, folding my large frame into the slightly too small chair.
As she sits across from me, my phone buzzes.
“Feel free to get that,” she offers. “No need to pause your very important life on my account.”
“Iz,” I say, shoving my phone into my pocket.
“Isabel,” she reminds me.
“No one calls you Isabel,” I say as a lyric streaks through my mind, moving too quickly for me to catch. “And you can call me Jax if you want. You’ve never called me Jaxon before now.”
Izzy rips a page out of the notebook she has in her stack of papers and hands it to me with her pen.
Unsure what to do with it, I shoot her a confused look.
“Write your lyrics down,” Izzy says on a sigh. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’ve seen that face a million times before. It’s your ‘I have a brilliant new song idea’ look.”
I shake my head, pushing the paper back toward her. “I already lost it.”
“That’s what you get for not bringing your own notebook with you, I guess.”
“It’s just…I’m not used to it,” I say, staring at the spot on the side of my thumb where a much larger callus used to be. “It’s been…a while since I’ve been able to write a full song.”
Izzy’s face morphs into something like contemplation. “Why?”
“I’m not sure,” I confess. “The lyrics just…stopped showing up about eighteen months ago.” I tap the table, taking Izzy’s lead and avoiding eye contact.
She reaches forward and pats my hand in what I’m sure is supposed to be a completely platonic gesture of sympathy. Unfortunately for us both, my awareness springs to life, everyfiber of my being focused on the spot where Izzy’s hand is now covering mine.
“I’m sorry that’s happening to you,” she says, as if she’s completely unaffected by the energy now flowing between our two bodies.
I nod, forcing myself to pull it together. “The hardest part is that I promised the Lupus Foundation I’d write a song for their big fundraiser coming up, and it’s due to them…soon. Too soon.”
The sympathetic look on her face reminds me that Izzy’s not just some random person. She’s the girl who held my hand while I mourned when my mom passed away, the only one who knew how much my dad resented the fact that he had to raise me after my mom passed.
Luckily, she doesn’t know the truth I found out the night before my eighteenth birthday—that my dad not only resented me but actively blamed me for her death.
Before I let myself focus on that, I continue, “And, I mean, I guess if I don’t put a new album together soon, like really soon, it’s possible my label will drop me, and I’ll lose any semblance of control over my old songs, not to mention my entire identity.”
Izzy blinks a couple of times. “I’m sorry. That sounds like a lot. I’m sure you’ll get it done. You are a professional musician, you know.”
“Me?” I tease.
She pulls her hand away, and I feel inexplicably sad.
“I’ve written a few lines, mostly in the mornings when I got home from seeing you. Hey! Maybe you’re my lucky charm,” I joke, though even as I say it, I realize it might be true. I do tend to write after I’ve seen her, and this week has been absolute shit on the writing side of things. I don’t know if I have enough data to draw any conclusions yet, though.
Izzy takes it all in stride and does the most Izzy thing possible—she deflects with humor. “I actually have that impact oneveryone. Just last week, our accountant pulled out a tuba and started composing a song on the spot just from being in my presence.”
“Damn, a tuba? That’s the hardest instrument to compose on,” I joke.
“You’ll have to be careful spending time with me. You may not be able to sleep since you’ll have so many lyrics flying through that little brain of yours.”
“Fuck,” I say, running my hand through my hair. “I haven’t had that in years. I’d love to lose sleep because the songs were just flowing so quickly.”
I can tell Izzy wants to dig in more, but this isn’t about me. Instead, I ask her, “So, fake dating? Why’d you take me up on the offer?”
She pulls her hands through her long hair. “Well, like I told you before, I need a date for Bryn’s wedding. And the more I thought about it, it can’t just be any date. My family would know it was just a date. It wouldn’t get them off my case. I need them to believe I’mdatingsomeone,” she says.
