His eyes settled on me and grew wetter by the second.
I squeezed his shoulders. “I know, nothing about our situation is ideal…”
He choked up a laugh that could have easily turned into a sob. “No, it truly isn’t.”
“But I’ll soon have my degree, and I want to be with you. Maybe our music will make enough money for us to travel the world in a tour bus. Or maybe I’ll end up working at the hotel here in Seastone and come home to you every evening. Either way is fine with me. As long as I can be with you, I’ll be happy wherever I am.”
Alex clung to my hands, resting his head against my shoulder. He sniffled. I lowered my chin onto his head, but just then, he slumped forward and burst into tears.
The joy I had felt vanished in an instant.
I opened my mouth to ask if what I had said was so far off base that I hadn’t even realized it—but I stopped when he buried his face in my chest. After all, these could be happy tears, or they could have nothing to do with me at all.
Maybe confessing my feelings had opened the door to something he had kept buried. He had a troubled past with his family. Despite all my disagreements with my parents, I had never felt unloved. He, on the other hand, had been thrown out of the house, disinherited and shunned, told never to contact them again.
He squeezed my hands and pulled himself closer. “You don’t… have to give up… your dream of traveling the world for me,” he sniffled. “I can move to Las Vegas, too, or wherever you end up. I’ll find a job anywhere.”
“Hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to turn your whole life upside down, either.” I wrapped my arms around his back. “We’ve already taken a million steps in the last month. From here on out, we can take it one step at a time. I’ll finish my degree. You can visit me. We’ll work on our music. We’ll talk on the phone every day. It’s only six months. And after that, we’ll see. I have to start looking for jobs anyway. It could be in Seastone to make things easier.”
“Even then, that doesn’t mean we have to stay here forever. I don’t want you to do things just for my sake.”
“But what if I want to do them for you? What if I want to live my life foryourhappiness?”
He lifted his head. “Then I’ll devote myself to doing the same for you.”
Our lips met in a brief kiss. I pulled him closer and buried my nose in his hair.
“I think we should go inside,” I said. “Because I already know you’ve gotten ideas for at least two more songs while we were talking.”
“That’s not true.”
“Only one?”
“Maybe three.” His chuckle turned into a sob. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t exploit our feelings like this.”
“That’s not exploitation.” I pressed a quick kiss to his forehead. “Music is how we work through them.”
I lay backon Alex’s bed, the euphoria still washing over me. The sun beat down on my face, only partially blocked by the blossoming cherry tree in the backyard. Two days had passed since our night at the hotel, and we had barely slept, using every second to finish the demos for our album.
“Ten songs. In one week. I still can’t believe it.”
Alex, sitting on the floor in front of his laptop, peeked over his shoulder. His eyes sparkled as his hand rushed forward and grabbed my right ankle. “Don’t act like we’re done.”
Wiggling around, I pulled my leg up but didn’t actually try to get away from him. His touch energized me every single time. He leaned against the bed, resting his arms on the mattress, and tugged on my feet.
“If we want to release this, we still have to master it in a real studio. Or at least pay someone to do it for us.”
I stopped struggling and sat up, pushing my feet closer to him and wiggling my toes. “I’ve heard the word ‘mastering’ before, but…?”
“It’s the process of fine-tuning things so the songs sound more or less the same no matter where you play them.”
“Right,” I said, letting the conversations of the past few days ruminate through my mind again.
We had discussed ways to share our music with the world. We could try to get a record deal—though not with the label I had turned down years ago, because those bridges have definitely burned—but from what we gathered online, any music label would need us to already have some sort of online following as proof of concept these days.
That, on the other hand, would be hard to achieve without uploading at least some of our songs to streaming platforms. If we had to do that, though, we might as well release the full album ourselves and see if we could get a record deal for the next one.
Uploading content to all the major platforms was luckily pretty straightforward. Besides the legal aspects, like discussing how to handle any income generated from the streams, making them available wasn’t an issue. Plus, Nora had offered to help us create some content for social media.
