You should’ve done the oranges and pinks of Your Email Didn’t Find Me Well
I swipe them away and go back to Instagram.
‘Okay, I’m starting to believe this is real now,’ a few say, while others gush about how we’re a gorgeous couple.
I’m glowing, apparently, but I don’t feel like it. I’m exhausted from all the planning, with tour rehearsals, wondering whether we’re getting results and the worry about whether tickets will sell out. We’re not splashed across the newspapers but we’re pretty high up in the digital editions for our ‘normal’ date night.
‘I put some of your toothpaste on my teeth,’ Luc tells me when he leaves the downstairs bathroom. ‘I hope that’s okay.’ The weirdness from last night’s almost kiss lingers in the air.
I nod. ‘Coffee?’
‘You keep coffee in the house now?’
‘I have a cafetière and sometimes I drink it.’
Luc’s jaw drops and holds his hands to his face like he’s a children’s entertainer.
‘Shocking, I know,’ I add.
‘Please,’ he requests politely. He gestures to my notebook open on the kitchen island. ‘What are you working on?’
‘Oh, nothing really. Either a song for the next album, or maybe something for someone else to use.’
‘You never slow down, do you?’ Luc’s eyes crinkle in the outer corners. ‘You work so hard.’
‘That’s why you’re currently here,’ I point out. ‘Because of me trying to elongate my career now I’m a geriatric popstar.’ I push the stick down on the cafetière.
‘Will you sing it?’ Luc asks. ‘If it’s not going to hurt your voice too much.’
It’s been a long time since Luc was with me in the early stages of writing, where I would sing snippets of early versions of songs fromSweethearts Inside at Night. A fever dream of Luc suggesting something from a line I was struggling with, and it would work.
‘Sorry, I didn’t want to push boundaries,’ Luc apologises, and my mouth goes dry.
I pour two cups of coffee and walk towards the kitchen door.
‘Where are you going?’ Luc asks.
‘To the piano, you coming?’
He jumps up and follows me out the door. We stride up the stairs to the piano in my music room. ‘It’s a piano song! Sie, are you going to break my heart?’
‘With the song, or…?’ It’s a bad joke, and we both know it.
I sit at my keyboard. ‘This tune has been going around my head in a loop,’ I tell him.
The song’s melancholy tune plays through the room and the hairs on my arms stand on end.
‘Especially in, erm…’ I trail off. ‘Especially in those early hours after Mimi told me…’ I stop speaking and take a deep breath, the tune continuing in the background. ‘That I needed to stop living my life the way I wanted to live it.’
My fingers caress each key, playing the tune softly, slowly, sadly. It doesn’t escape my notice that this set-up is exactlyhow we worked on songs forSweethearts Inside at Nighttogether: Luc on one side of the room, me at the piano.
I shake off a chill and close my eyes. My voice joins the mix with the chorus, a hollowness, a kind of gapping where I’m not really sure of my own song yet, where I’m trying to preserve my voice. I mess up a few notes and grumble an apology under my breath before starting the bar again.
When I open my eyes, Luc is staring at me, mouth agape. He hesitates, mouth wobbling, seemingly unable to find the words. He shakes his head. ‘Sienna, that was incredible.’
‘As my friend, you have to say that.’ I’m vaguely aware that the word stings somewhere deep in my stomach.
‘No, as your friend, I have to be honest,’ Luc insists, a glassy look washing over his eye. ‘And, as your friend, I am telling you that is going to be one of the best songs you’ve ever written when it’s finished.’
