Fuck.
“Between…?” I asked, admitting I hadn’t been paying attention.
“Are we breaking or are we powering through?”
“How’s your voice?” I asked Josh.
“I’m good.”
“Then I say let’s get this shit done.”
We spent the next hour laying out one of the other songs Josh wrote the night before and re-recording one we’d done yesterday after figuring out we wanted to change the key.
After we got through those two songs, Josh called for a break to rest his voice before heading to the kitchen to make some tea. Kevin stepped outside to call his wife, and Max walked off to the bathroom. Left alone in the room, I decided to check in on Amy.
When I walked through the door, she looked up at me and smiled before pulling her headphones down and resting them around her neck. I sat next to her on the couch and, to hide the fact that I did it because I wanted to be as close to her as possible, I immediately asked her how it was going with the backing strings.
“I think I have it,” she said. “I just need Josh to send me the file from the acoustic run-through so I can lay it overwhat I have to make sure it works.”
“Can I hear it?” I asked, and she looked away and shifted like she was nervous. “Hey,” I placed my hand gently on her arm. “You’re brilliant.” I said, trying to reassure her. “Josh came in here with words on a piece of notebook paper, but you? You gave it life.”
She nodded once and smiled.
“Thank you,” she said, and then we just sat there—my hand on her arm and our eyes locked. I could feel her pulse thrumming under the thumb that was resting against her wrist and breathed a sigh of relief knowing that her heart was hammering as wildly as mine.
She looked away first, smiling and biting her lip before removing her headphones from around her neck and placing them over my ears. I needed to adjust them a little to fit better on my giant head while she turned her attention back to her screen.
“Ready?” she asked, and I gave her a thumbs up. She pressed play and I closed my eyes, ready to let the music she made take me somewhere else.
It began with one deep, vibrating note from the cello and then dropped out again for a while before coming back in and dropping out again. It was haunting and lovely. Even without Josh’s vocals, I could already feel the emotion of their lyrics in these notes.
A few beats passed and then layers of higher notes from the violins came in and goosebumps covered my skin. The chorus of notes built and built into a beautiful crescendo—and then they stopped. Just when I was about to open my eyes to see if it had been the end, the cello came back in for one last long, sweeping note as the hair on my arms stood at full attention.
I opened my eyes and looked over to see Amy staring expectantly at me. I pulled the headphones off my ears and shook my head in disbelief.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, and she smiled wide.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
I had never wanted to kiss someone I didn’t know as badly as I wanted to kiss her in that moment, and I probably would have tried if Josh and Max hadn’t come back into the room.
“Hey, Josh,” Amy said as he set his cup of tea on the side table beside one of the recliners. “Can I get the file from the last run-through? I think I have something.”
Josh went back into the tracking room and grabbed his laptop. Once he found the file, he AirDropped it to Amy’s laptop, and she put her headphones back on to match everything up. It took a few minutes, but she removed her headphones and said, “Alright, I think this will work.”
We got her laptop connected to the Bluetooth speaker Josh brought with him, and we called Kevin in from outside before we all gathered around to listen.
She’d kept the first verse and chorus as they’d recorded it—just Josh’s voice and Max’s guitar. The first cello I’d heard came in as the first chorus ended and faded back out right before she started her verse. After her first two lines, it crept back in again, sounding incredible beneath her lower register.
The violins came in as Josh began the second chorus, and built through that chorus and the bridge, before dropping out again leaving just their voices and Max’s guitar until Max hit his last chord at the end and the cello re-appeared.
Goosebumps covered my body again as that last note hung in the air. No one spoke for a long moment, letting it settle in the air around us as long as possible.
“Wow,” Max said on an exhaled breath.
“It’s incredible, Amy,” Josh said. “Absolutely perfect.”
