“Harmony,” I mutter against her lips, “we don’t have to do anything. Really.”
My physical reaction fights me, but I’ve suppressed it plenty of times before; I can do it again.
Loosening her grip, she says, “Do you not want to?”
“I always want to,” I tell her. “But with everything going on, maybe it’s best to just—”
Her tongue in my mouth shuts me right up. And then she motions for me to sit on the marble bench that runs along the shower’s interior while she stands facing me. I’ve got one leg positioned on either side of her while she strokes my length.
“Get on me,” I command in a tone more gruff than I intend.
To my surprise, she turns to face the opposite way and starts to lower herself onto my cock with her back to my chest. I guide her hips until she’s perfectly in place.
Fuuuuuuuck.
The seat is low enough that this actually works. Our angle is a challenge at first, but we figure it out, and move slowly. I feel her up with a hungry grasp on every body part, then rub her clit as she slides up and down. Soon, she comes in a flurry of spasmsand I suck on her neck while she rides them out. I go next, erupting from her glorious force.
I hold her, panting, until she’s ready to clean up, then we wash in silence, get out, dry off, and change into sleeping clothes.
Harmony and I lie facing each other, both of us seeming to wait for the other to say something. Neither of us does.
This might be one of those things, I think, where we have to let the situation breathe. It’s been a long day, so much has happened. Hell, we’re still processing our feelings for each other while also prepping for our albums’ release. Trying to come to terms with a new threat on top of all that is … too much. We need to sleep on it. Everything will look more manageable in the morning.
The last thing I remember is kissing Harmony’s forehead as her eyelids flutter closed.
When I wake up, Harmony’s side of the bed is empty.
All her things are gone, and so is she.
A cursive note on the hotel paper on the nightstand reads, “I have to do it. I’m sorry.”
I’m Letting Go of All I’ve Held Onto
HARMONY
Thewindonthebluffs whips my hair against my face. With no direct access to the private beach where Griffin and I had our staged date, I watch from the public viewpoint a few yards from the road as the sea crashes into the shore over and over at the bottom.
My fame prevents me from going to normal beaches if I’d like to be left alone, so, until I buy my own beachfront property, this will have to do.
The tide grounds me somehow. Its steady rhythm feels foundational, like a pulse. In high school, whenever I was having an emotional crisis, I always went to the beach, where I would lie on the sand and close my eyes and listen to the waves. The last time I did that was the summer before my first semester of college. I’d been auditioning forLucky Starsin multiple locations without success, and I was determined to make my next try my last, so I was feeling pensive. Because I’d arrived so early, there was hardly anyone there, and the sky and the sea both felt so enormous they didn’t seem real. Iremember thinking how small I was, how I wanted to feel big—not physically, just to matter more.
Everyone matters. I know that. That’s not what I mean. What I’m saying is, I wanted to do something that lots of other people knew about, something that would last beyond my life. It was part of the existential crisis I have every few years when I get a minute to think too hard about the universe and my place in it. Usually I spiral for a bit, and then I get absorbed in mundane things and forget again. I’ve learned to handle those episodes better with age, but when I was younger I wasn’t sure what to do with my desperate need for purpose, other than to let it fuel my wild ambitions. Thus, I honed my craft and put myself out there and clawed my way onto the stage.
For better or worse, never did I imagine this is what my life would look like in a decade.
The vast expanse of blue above and below still makes me feel small, but only because of its magnificence. Meanwhile, FM Sound makes me feel small because they’ve magnified my faults and exploited my insecurities.
I hope Griffin isn’t too upset. I know he cares about my happiness, but he doesn’t understand that I can’t be happy—not in this particular case. That’s why I have to distance myself from him for the moment. If I’d stayed at the hotel, he would have taken me to my favorite crepes place and expected me to come to my senses, tried to talk me into fixing this. Honestly, if given enough time, I’m sure he’d try to contrive an idea to still get my masters somehow.
God, I love him for that. And for everything else he is.
But because I love him, I want him to have a chance to pivot his career the way he’s always wanted to—he’s so close now—and he’ll never be able to do that if I let him encourage me to ruin it.
Plus, he’s the one person outside my family who has truly allowed me to grow, to take up space in his life. When I’m toomuch for other people—too “fat” or too “old” for the media, too clingy for past lovers, too melodramatic in my music—Griffin only wants more of me. He admires who I was but doesn’t dwell on it. He acts like he’s excited to see who I’ll become.
I think back to what he said on thePlay By Hearpodcast: “It’s really stupid to compare Harmony to her younger self. She was beautiful then, she’s beautiful now.”
I feel like he meant that in more ways than one.
