The temperature in the room had changed ever so slightly.
They’d liked the back view quite a bit.
And she knew she could do this. She would charm them to the soles of their feet. She would win their cynical little dollar-sign shaped hearts. She would make them genuinelyloveher. Loveher. She would make them forget themselves and everything else but her voice, and for the next three minutes, she would pull them into the world of her song, a world in which she was the empress and they were the minions.
She knew how to do it, too, with a guy like Congdon:
She would take control.
“If you would be so kind as to give me a beat.” She slapped her hand on the table near the stage in an undulating, martial rhythm. “Bass, SNARE, bass bass SNARE. You know how to do that, right?”
Congdon froze. Then he nodded irritably to the other guy.
Who did as ordered.
He slapped his hand down on the table. Bass, SNARE bass bass SNARE. He had good rhythm.
She moved her shoulders into the beat, and then her hips, and she heard the music in her head as plainly as if her whole body was an orchestra.
And opened her mouth to sing.
She loved the acoustics in that room and today they really loved her back more than ever.
She sang to those two men as if they’d broken her heart and won it all over again. She sang her songs to them as if Eli himself were standing there, and she knew in that moment of pure epiphany that he might as well have been, because he seemed to be with her all the time, anyway. She understood now that his love was the filter through which she saw and felt everything.
Her voice all raw emotion, turning notes into playthings, leaping octaves as effortlessly as she and Jonah and Eli used to skip the stones over Whiskey Creek.
And the sound of her own voice rising in that room seemed to fill her soul like a sail.
She felt invincible and euphoric and utterly peaceful.
And for the duration, those two men did not so much as twitch a hair.
She recognized thrall when she saw it. It meant they wanted to absorb every single particle of sound.
And she released the last word of the song like a sigh, which trailed into vapor on an impossibly high note.
It rang in the room.
She closed her eyes briefly. And when she opened them, like a fragment from a dream, Giorgio emerged from the kitchen and casually handed her a guitar and slipped back into the shadows.
I’ll be damned, she thought. It was the Alvarez acoustic Dion had been repairing.
Eli must have coordinated that little loan from behind the wheel of his squad car. And somehow gotten word from Dion to Giorgio before Giorgio left his apartment above the music store for work.
You areneveralone,Eli had said to her.
She realized the two men hadn’t said a word yet.
She slung the strap of that guitar around her neck as tenderly as if it were a lover’s arm, and in a way it might as well have been Eli’s. Both of those men shifted in their chairs and Wyatt Congdon actually reached with his free hand to touch the back of his own neck as if he could feel her hand on him.
She looked at them in silence for a moment.
Congdon’s pale eyes thoughtful, his assistant’s fixed and stunned. In a good way.
But there was something she needed to do.
She stepped down from the stage. In the silence, her boot heels rang like gunshots as she moved toward them.
