The faint note of hope in his voice makes me want to cry. “It is.”
“Right.” He swallows hard. “You wanna know when I first fell for you? Like, really fell for you?”
My heart flutters sluggishly. It’s painful, but not painful enough to keep me from nodding. “Okay.”
“Right.” Jake looks at me. “It was a few months after you showed up. I was cutting class with Will. We had double history, and we were hungover?—”
I snort because, of course, he was.
“—Anyway, we couldn’t deal with Mr. Caffrey banging on about the Tudors for two hours, so Will and I camped out behind the music wing.” A smile touches his lips. “Then I heard music. Most of the music that came out of that place was godawful, but this wasn’t.”
My chest goes hot. ‘Music wing’ was an overly fancy term for what was essentially a glorified shed with a keyboard in it, but my parents only let me go to Pukekohe High because Mrs. Kingston, the music teacher, was a former first chair with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. She hated me and pretty much everyone, but she was a brilliant flautist, and she taught me everything she knew.
“Will and I were supposed to be lying low, but the more I listened, the more I had to know who was playing. So, I risked sticking my head up, looked in the window and…” Jake’s face goes dreamy, his gaze seeming to slide through me and into the past. “It was you.”
I stare into my scotch glass, and as much as I want to blame the heat spreading through me on liquor, I know it’s not responsible.
“I always thought you were hot,” Jake says in a rapturous voice. “But when I saw you playing… it was like my head broke open. You were standing in the middle of the room with your hair out and your jumper off and your flute up and you… you looked like an angel.”
I can’t find a single thing to say. I close my eyes and imagine Jake watching me through that window. At the time, I was probably miserable about the latest snarky thing Mrs. Kingston had said about my breathwork. I wish I’d have known he was there.
“Anyway, I was worried you or the music teacher would see me, so I ducked down. But Will and I sat in the bushes for, like, an hour. Just listening to you.”
“Why?”
He shakes his head like I’m being ridiculous. “Because it was perfect. I was sweating through my shirt, had a massive headache, and you made everything better. I’d never heard classical music before, but…”
He shakes his head again, and I think I understand. Classical music has always suffered from the same stigma as poetry, oil painting and opera. People dismiss it as pretentious rich-person bullshit. Most of the time, that’s fair, but all the artistic traditions hold real truth and beauty. It’s why they’ve lasted so long.
“I can’t believe that Will Sharpe listened to me play without booing,” I say.
“He loved it,” Jake says plainly. “So did I. I cried in front of him. Cried like a fuckin’ baby and I didn’t even care. I didn’t know music could do that. Make me feel it right here.” He presses a hand to his heart. “I still do every time I listen to you.”
My own heart throbs painfully. I sip the last of my scotch and try to keep my face blank and my mind on dog shit, Jenny Wallis, and the point of no return.
“Will bailed after a while,” Jake says. “But I couldn’t leave. You were so shy, I’d barely heard you talk. But right then, it felt like you were talking. More than talking. It wasn’t your voice, it was like your…”
Soul, I think dully.The flute is how my soul speaks.
“It’s nosurprise you got where you did with music. It was the same as when you see some kid playing starter rugby, and you can just tell he’s gonna be an All Black. You just know. Anyway, I stayed outside the window until you were done playing and I watched you leave, and I just…”
He looks at me, his eyes yearning for me to understand what he’s not saying.
“Wished you hadn’t heard me play?”
He shakes his head violently. “I already liked you. I thought you were sexy and all that, but after I saw you with your flute, it was like I was… I dunno…obsessed.”
I want to make a joke, brush his words off, but Jake’s expression is so raw, still so desperate for me to understand whatever his teenage self was feeling, I can’t.
“Okay,” I say. “You liked me. That’s?—”
“You don’t get it. I’d never felt that way about a girl before. I didn’t just like your face or your body or whatever. I likedeverythingabout you. How you talked. The way your mind worked. Everything you said was so fucking interesting. I wanted to ask you a million questions. And I thought you were fucking hilarious.” His gaze darts away and back, red rising in his cheeks. “I know, it sounds bad, but I didn’t know girls could be funny until you.”
I frown. “Small problem: you said it yourself, I barely talked. And I was definitely never funny in class. So where did this fantasy version of me come from exactly?”
For the first time since I showed up, he grins, a flicker of the man I remember from all those hours in bed. “Your blog.”
My stomach drops. “What?”
