“You don’t have to tell me.” Angie pressed her ear to Crowdwell’s wooden door. She listened for a moment, backed away, and nudged Sam along. “Here. He’s about to go on. There’s a seat saved for you in front.”
Sam always tried to listen to her intuition. Her mother, as bad a mother as she was, did give her one useful piece of advice:Always listen to your intuition. It knows more than you do.
She should have listened to her intuition when it told her not to enter Crowdwell’s. She should have listened when her intuition told her to get back in the car and drive to the rigid, expected security of Captain’s arms. Because nothing was the same after she stepped through the door.
The little shop was as darling as when she first visited, with its quirky mismatched shelving and overflow of unsold books. For this open mic night, the overhead lights had been turned off and the tables yanked into the middle of the room, facing a hastily made stage of cinderblocks and recovered wood from somewhere wet and mossy. Scents of beer and tea and paperback books filled the space, hovering over the smiling, chatting bodies assembled there. The stage was lit by a series of heavy-duty torches, the kind usually found at campsites. From the roof’s supportive beams, a hundred fairy lights hung, making a false night’s sky out of the building’s darkened ceiling.
When Sam entered the shop, no one turned their heads to the sound of the ringing welcome bell. They were all too focused on the man standing on stage, guitar hanging from his chest.
Daniel.
She froze. He was painfully beautiful, the kind of handsome she’d only read about. How no record label had yet snatched him up on looks alone baffled her, never mind how talented he was.
His beauty wasn’t the only thing stopping her, though it was a consideration. The way he stood halted her in space; she’d never seen him stand that way before. He was a confident guy. He rooted himself in the earth and led with his heart, letting it guide and direct him without fear of being hurt. Tonight, he swung his weight from leg to leg. He fiddled with the strap of his instrument. His shoulders bent in, almost as if they were trying to protect him. With the dim light in the audience and the bright lights of their makeshift stage, she couldn’t be sure if he saw her.
“I’ve been… Uh… I’ve been working on this new thing… I wanted to share it with… Uh… With you—” He stammered, struggling over himself.
He glanced up from his feet into the crowd. Half of Sam hoped he wouldn’t see her. She prayed she could go undetected until the house lights were full once again and the atmosphere was decidedly more sterile and unfriendly. It wasn’t to be. Their eyes met, and Daniel grew back into himself. His face broke into a smile. The look was so infectious, she couldn’t help but return it. She even gave a little self-conscious wave, a little something to say,I’m sorry I’m late. But I’m so glad I’m here. If he noticed the gown, at least he had the decency not to laugh. Not only did he not laugh, but he blushed. His hands started to strum. He nodded his head in her direction.
“This song is dedicated to the woman who inspired it.”
The introduction ended, bowing and giving the stage to the song. The song he wrote for her. It was an act she never could have been prepared for, not if she’d had a million lifetimes to defend herself against it.
I’ll write this song on the stone of her heart.
The song began with that lyric. A few simple, light chords, and those words. Daniel’s smoky voice and his expert playing carried the tune through the otherwise silent room, filling it with a single man and his guitar’s harmony.
He wrote me a song, Sam could have cried.He wrote me a song. No matter how many times she repeated the sentence, it didn’t make entirely perfect sense to her. She was going to deal him an incredible cruelty and he…he… He wrote her a song. A love song. His beautiful love song whispered long-rejected truths straight to her broken soul.
And for the first time in her life, Sam wanted to believe them. It actually hurt, how much her heart longed to listen.
Taking on a life of its own, the song grew into a beam of light. It wrapped itself around her and tugged, pulling her straight toward him. They were magnets. She was drawn to him, entranced and under his spell. Her feet carried her through the crowd, straight up to the foot of the stage. She couldn’t stop walking any more than she could stop breathing. The longer she walked, the closer to him she got, the more the world around her disappeared. Piece by piece, brick by brick, her universe collapsed until there was only Daniel and his song.
Sam was aware he was the only one playing, but if you’d asked her then, she would have sworn an entire orchestra had slowly joined him by the song’s rousing final chorus.
Like all songs, this one ended. The crowd clapped. And Daniel pulled Samantha into a kiss unlike any she’d ever shared with another person, not even in her most vivid, most crafted daydreams. It wasn’t a kiss. Rather, it wasn’tjusta kiss. It was like someone took the injured broken bird of her soul and breathed new life into its lungs, before setting it out to fly again.
It was official. Sam’s heart was out of its gilded cage. And she would not be capturing it again any time soon.
Chapter Fourteen
After that night, Daniel discovered that helovedkissing Sam. And he took every possible opportunity to do it again. Madonna was right. Itwaslike being touched for the very first time. So, when she’d gone into town one afternoon to find some books for a paper she was struggling to write, and Thomas had given him the rest of the day off, he set out to join her.
He had good news. News that just couldn’t wait.
After a bit of digging—okay, checking her very-much locked-down social media accounts, where she only had about five followers, one of whom was her brother—he discovered she was holed up in Weston Library, one of those big, imposing castles of learning that always intimidated guys like him, guys who’d decided money in his pocket was more important than a piece of paper on his wall. As he stood in its shadow and wandered its perimeter, peeking into the warped, imperfect windows for any sign of Sam, he tried not to think about how small he felt standing beside it.
The worst part was that he couldn’t even go in after her. All of these buildings—the Oxford colleges—kept their gates closed to plebs like him. They didn’t want his dirty boots on their floors unless he was going to pay two pounds to the tourism desk for the privilege. So, he parked himself on a public street—those were still free, at least—and searched for her through the windows.
There she is, he thought as she came into view. Only giving himself a moment to look at her (hey, he wasn’t a creep or anything), he still managed to take her in. Her long brown hair hung around her face, framing her smooth cheeks and wide eyes. She surrounded herself with a scattering of books, mountains of papers and pens. Her tongue tucked itself between her two front teeth and out between her lips, her forehead furrowed in concentration.
He’d never been in love before. He’d wanted it. Prayed for it. Tried and failed for it more times than he could count. Was it normal to be impressed by someone’s work ethic?
Scanning the pavement around him, he picked up a handful of stray pebbles and began to toss them across the fence.Tap. Tap. Tap, tap.
She looked up, her mouth wide with shock, and his heart went off to the races. She cracked the window and leaned out, disobeying the clear PLEASEDONOTOPENWINDOWSsign visible even from his place outside.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice hushed. After all, shewasin a library.
