“I wouldn’t go that far.” This room is perfectly cooled, but I blame the overhead lighting for the way I’m certain my face flames ten thousand degrees of overheated. “Not like you can, at any rate.”
“That’s bollocks.”
He puts a British accent on that, then treats me to the sexy timbre of his rolling laughter. Without waiting, he launches straight into a song. It’s not something I’ve ever heard before, but one I know intimately because I’m the one who wrote it.
All I can do is gape. Stare. Fangirl in a starstruck manner. This isn’t how I would have ever imagined the tempo, let alone the sound of the song. It’s unmistakably Wilder’s style, but also something brand new. It’s his voice, but this song isn’t anything like any of his others. It’s mine. It’s also his. It’s a darned freaking star shooting across a purple black velvet night sky, a once-in-a-lifetime astounding event that leaves you breathless and speechless and awed, even if you can explain it scientifically.
After he’s done, all I can do is blink back the hot tears stinging the corners of my eyes. I’m not sad or happy. I’m beyond either of those emotions. The tears are inexplicable. I’m just…moved.
I’m in love with everything about this man.
I guess that’s probably a natural reaction when someone turns the deepest secrets of your heart, splayed out in a starburst on paper, into something that transcends thought or genre or anything rational.
“Here.” He slips the guitar strap off his shoulder and holds the instrument out to me. “You play this, and I’ll play the piano. Sing it with me?”
I take the guitar with wooden hands, slinging the strap over my shoulder for safety because I don’t trust my hands. I also don’t trust my legs. They have one job, which is to hold me up, but I’m not sure they can properly do that at the moment.
Wilder is a hard act to follow, especially for someone like me, who learned how to play guitar late in life, from an app. I’m never going to have the innate, instinctual ability that he does. When I play, it’s basically shit, but even on my best day, it’s technical. I can’t make the guitar come alive like Wilder does,and my voice? For the love of the most feral honey badger, I’ll just leave that there.
But when Wilder slides in behind that glorious, sleek, grand piano and plays an intro, nodding at me as a cue to join him, he makes it seem easy.
My voice blends with his on the chorus and stands alone when he stops singing, but doesn’t stop playing.
It’s another miracle.
That Wilder can make me sound and feel like I know what I’m doing. Like I’m gifted. He can take something ordinary and turn it into something transcendent. We’re not recording anything yet, but even if we were, and he played it back and I sounded like a total trainwreck, the experience would still be etched into me as some of the most beautiful moments of my life.
When he asks me if I want to capture it, just for fun, I don’t turn him down. We play together again, and the second time is even better because I know what to expect. It still doesn’t sound scripted. Wilder sings every song of his like it’s the first time. You can listen to his music on a recording, and it’s the same thing, but seeing and hearing it live changes it. It brings the song to life. You can know it by heart and even play it perfectly yourself, but seeing Wilder up on stage, it’s a different experience. That’s theevery time is the first timedeal.
After we play, I get to stand there and watch as Wilder picks up the bass and plays it. He moves to the drums after. I know nothing about drumming other than the fact that it’s way harder than it looks. But he makes it look easy and sound perfect. Well, not perfect to any real drummer, I’m sure, but a different kind of perfection for being flawed andhis.
He stands up after, like he didn’t just accomplish the craziest feat in the world, and strips off his long-sleeved shirt and the sweater vest, but sets the suspenders back in place.
Then he walks over to the middle of the room, picks up a mic, and belts out the rawest vocals.
The hair on my arms stands up. My neck too. And places I didn’t even know I had hair.
By now, he’s covered in a slick sheen of sweat. The drumming worked it up, but he was well on his way there from hammering out notes on the piano and moving around with the guitar and bass. He can’t be still when he sings. He’s fresh off his tour, doing high-energy three-hour shows two to three times a week.
Sweat glistens off his carved abs, his biceps, and his pecs and shoulders. It also runs down his forehead and temples in clear rivulets.
I officially haven’t made it to the point where I stop finding sweat attractive. On Wilder, I’m not sure it won’t ever be a thing. I’m never going to reach thatproperbenchmark. I could be geriatric, and I’ll still find it attractive on him.
Nothing takes me out of this perfect moment of watching Wilder create a masterpiece from something I first put into the world than thinking about my age and then thinking about his. My thoughts quickly avalanche straight into a craptastic storm. I’m over here, melting into a giant puddle of womanly goop, and that makes me different from anyone else, how? How many women has Wilder seen charmed over the years? How many women has he watched fall in love with him when he’s up on stage? How many women have run at him, screaming his name? How many would die for just a few minutes of his undivided attention? Well, that’s extreme. But like sell their souls to any and all devils? Also extreme, but probably true.
The point is, what makes me special? Why is Wilder here with me right now instead of any one of those women? There are intelligent women out there. He meets talented, rich, gorgeous, and successful women just about every day. If I hadn’t written those songs, would he even be here? Would I? Would any of thishave happened, or would we just have gone our separate ways at the end of the tour?
“What’s wrong?” he asks with a frown.
I’m so up in my head that I failed to notice that Wilder stopped belting out lyrics. How long has he been observing me while I’m having my little inner meltdown slash pity party over here?
I blink, shaking myself and wishing that was enough to clear my head. “Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. You look like someone just gave you the most insanely delicious box of chocolates, but they’re all the gross kinds you don’t like, and you’re disappointed beyond measure.”
Okay, what? How does he know I love chocolate, but that I’m also a chocolate snob, and anything beyond milk chocolate or anything with any sort of fruit filling is enough to make me gag? Throwback to my childhood when my mom thought dark chocolate could cure a number of woes, and forced it on me when I was already feeling not so great.
“It would be far more tragic to get the world’s most perfect coffee and then spill it before you can even take a sip,” I reason, à la distraction.
