Smiling, Aspen turned away from the cat, only for his expression to drop the second he saw my stunned face.
“Aw, man.” His eyes widened. “You didn’t know?” He stared at me a beat longer. “You didn’t know,” he repeated, his questioning inflection turning flat.
Jake liked me. Jake liked me. Jake liked me.The thought boomed over and over again in my head like little bursts of fireworks, glittery and bright.
Jake liked me!
But why didn’t he tell me?
“Why would he keep it a secret?” I demanded. “How could he write such a gorgeous love song like that and never—”
I wanted to tell you... that, he said. I thought he’d been stuttering or cutting himself off mid-sentence. He’d really been referring to the song when he blurted the last word out.
Hadn’t Jake always said that it was hard for him to tell people how he felt? That he said everything through song?
He probably thought I felt the same too, considering how I loved to listen to everyone’s requests on the radio.
Jake only stopped and switched gears when he thought I shut off hisoriginalconfession because I didn’t reciprocate his feelings.
Oh no, no, no, no,no.
Phillip and Leon appeared through the doorway.
Leon took one glance at me, and then turned to the increasingly guilty-looking Aspen. “What’s wrong with Lucy?”
Aspen squirmed uncomfortably. “She just learned Jake wrote ‘Lovely, Aren’t Ya’ for her.”
“You told her?” Leon screeched, before pausing and looking over at me, just as accusingly. “Hold up, you didn’t know?”
He made it sound like it was common knowledge. Did everyone know before me, the actual person the song was about?
I bit down on my chewing gum hard. “I can’t believe you all did.”
“Of course we knew,” Phillip replied, like he was offended I thought theywouldn’tknow. “Jake was completely lovesick over you. I used to call him Jake Mooney instead of Jake Moody.” He rolled his eyes. “And based on his working title, it was pretty hardnotto know.”
“Well, ‘Luciana’ is not the title now! All this time I’ve thought the song was about that girlfriend of his,” I moaned. “The timing checks out. Plus all the articles and message boards claimed it was about her too.”
Aspen blinked cluelessly. “Girlfriend?”
“Oh, she means Livie,” Leon said, hitting himself on his forehead with the heel of his palm. “No way was the song about her, no matter what she says. It was just a PR relationship made up by Livie’s manager and Marie. Livie got to claim she was dating a pop star and Jake got to establish his reputation as a bad boy heartbreaker without actually having to hurt anyone.”
I blinked at him. “It was all fake?”
“Yeah, she’s a reality TV star. Ninety percent of what they do is staged. I saw she even rehashed their ‘relationship’ recently, probably because she has a new season coming out and the song’s still everywhere.”
The girl I’d been wondering about all these years wasn’t Livie after all. It was me.
Theirony.
I leaned against the counter, propping my elbows up against the cold marble. “Why didn’t Jake tell me before he left?”
“Wait, he left already?” Phillip looked shocked.
“This is not how it happens at the end of our music videos,” Leon said, sounding upset.
“But we can tell you like him,” Aspen argued. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I-I—” I stuttered for a minute. “Why didn’thesay anything?”
