We’ve hurt each other, me in ways Maisy will probably never fully reveal to me. She didn’t decide to make an exit from my life without accumulating a few wounds of her own. We can root for each other’s futures without needing to be closely involved in them. In fact, it’s probably the way we can love each other best.
Maisy stands to go.
“Hey, Maisy?”
“Hmm?”
I clear my throat. “If that songhadbeen about you, how would you feel about it?”
She bites her lower lip, thinking. “I’ll probably always imagine it being a little bit about me anyway. So, I guess that means the way I feel about it is honest.” She cocks her head, like she knows I’m asking her from an introspective place. “Does that help?”
“Yeah,” I say, while an answer to a long-standing question takes shape. “It does.”
Chapter 34
August, Now
I could work through this next part on my own, but I’d rather do it with him. Especially when I see his text—come back to me now?—a little while after Maisy walks on.
I kept Liam at bay, just out of reach, while I was in school because I was afraid my music was tied to him, and I wanted to prove to myself it wasn’t. Then I pulled him back in at the start of the summer because I convinced myself I couldn’t write good songs without him.
But that’s not itat all.
Because I also wasn’t writing about Evan. I wasn’t writing about my sisters. Or Maisy, or my hometown, or my parents, or anything I ever gave a shit about.
I wasn’t writing about loneliness, even though “Lonely House” is still up there in my head, waiting to show me its final form. After “I prefer shadows,” I didn’t just cut myself off from writing about Liam. I cut myself off from every piece of inspiration in my arsenal. I focused on the technicalities of my education and starved the honesty that had brought me to it.
Good music doesn’thaveto hurt, but some of it will. I was trying not to hurt and numbing myself instead. And now, I’m trying to avoid recording so I can hide the evidence of my exposed nerves. I’m scared to show the world my soft parts.
But I think the point is actually that once you let a song leave you, you’re sharing the pain, splitting the burden of it. Somebody else accepts a piece of it, and then you’re not in a lonely house anymore.
When I make it back to our room, Liam’s pacing on the phone, fresh out of the shower, a towel wrapped low around his waist. He catches my eye when he hears the door. That raw pain is still there in his eyes, sending a frisson of tenderness through my veins.
He hums into the receiver, then mouths to me,Kayla. His sister.
The entire time we’ve been on this tour, I’ve never seen or heard evidence of Liam keeping in touch with Kayla, or Heather, or his mom.
Something’s going on.
I point to the bathroom and mouthshower, and Liam nods, then says into the phone, “Does Charlotte understand what’s happening?”
Charlotte: Liam’s niece.
My inner turmoil quiets as I scrub the grassy heat and sweat from my body, listening to the low cadence of Liam’s voice in the next room through the steady drip of water. It’s not that I think he’d mind me listening;I’dmind, given how rare it is for him to talk to his family.
He’s off the phone by the time I’m done. I towel off slowly as fog washes into the main room, and then Liam steps through it, walking toward me with a T-shirt in hand, his own towel swapped out for boxers.
“Will you put it on?” he asks in a murmur. It’s one of his. An oversized gray band shirt from another tour he worked on a few years back.
I nod silently, dropping my towel. Liam slips the shirt over my head, and I siphon my arms through the sleeves. He pulls my hair out from the collar and then palms at my nape, resting my head against his bare chest.
“I thought it might make it easier,” he admits, voice low, “for you to be wearing my clothes while we keep fighting.”
We should have fought more. For days. Weeks.
“Should I give you something of mine?” I ask.
“I am something of yours,” Liam whispers.
