I took the long road past WadeHouse and the long road past the high school and the long road that wound out toward the lake. I let the car do what it was built to do — quiet, steady, the low clean hum of an engine that wasn’t going to give me any trouble. I hadn’t realized how much energy I’d been spending on the noise of my Accord.
After a while I turned on the radio.
I knew the bass line before I knew the song. Anybody alive in the nineties knew that bass line — the slow patient strut of it, the small click of the snare underneath, Stokley already in the room before he’d opened his mouth.U Send Me Swingin’came up out of the speakers and I made a small sound that was almost a laugh, becauseof course.
“Mint Condition.” Then it landed. “You set my radio?”
“When I picked the car up.”
I let the song play, and I felt something I had not felt in three days — the small clean drop ofbeing okay.The fight was over. He had come. I had said my thing and he had said his. The hand on my thigh belonged to a man who had been hurt and wasn’t hurt anymore, and the song was one I’d been singing along to in cars since I was sixteen, and I was driving the car he’d bought me through the town I’d decided to make mine, and the part of me that had been holding three days of breath finally let it go.
I sang the way you sing in a car — under Stokley’s lead, on the background harmonies, on the chorus when it came around. I knew every part of that song the way you know the ones you loved at sixteen and never stopped.
Julian was looking at me.
I caught it from the corner of my eye. Not the road. Not his phone. Me. His hand on my thigh had gone all the way loose, and the small smile at the corner of his mouth had turned into something fuller.
I kept singing. The song ended. The radio rolled into the next one, and I knew the first three notes before I knew the song.
Prince.
The unhurried piano ofDiamonds and Pearlscame up out of the speakers and I let out a small laugh — the surprised kind, theoh my goodnesskind — and Julian’s thumb moved on my thigh, and I started to sing.
I was suddenly singing Prince in front of Julian, except the night hadunlocked something and Mint Condition had pried it wider and the man next to me had been watching me with soft eyes for ten minutes, and I got through the first verse without thinking.
Then, very quietly, he started to hum.
I didn’t turn my head. I kept singing. Julian was humming the bass line under my voice — low, the way you hum when you don’t want to interrupt someone but can’t help it — and it got slightly louder at the chorus, and when the second verse came, he came in.
Soft. Below me. The harmony line.
I almost stopped. I kept going, because if I stopped he might stop. So I sang the second verse and Julian sang the harmony underneath me, his voice low and easy andcompetentin a way I hadn’t expected, and when we hit the chorus we sang it together — me on the lead, him on the harmony — and something moved in my chest that I hadn’t had words for in years.
We finished the second chorus. The bridge came. Julian took the harmony up — one phrase, the line at the top of the bridge — and he hit it higher than I’d expected, and it came out clean. Held. The voice of a man who had clearly done this before.
I turned my head.
He was looking at me. Smiling.
“Julian Wade.”
“Mm.”
“You cansing,Julian.”
He laughed. “I run a record label, Lyss.”
“I know you run a record label.”
“My father was an award-winning artist. All four of us learned. Just because I don’t sing doesn’t mean I can’t.”
“You’ve been keeping this from me.”
He shrugged. “I don’t sing for people.”
I looked at him so long I almost drifted out of my lane, and I had to pull my eyes back to the road, andDiamonds and Pearlswas ending, and the radio was rolling into the next song, and I was sitting in the driver’s seat of the car my man had bought me with the small flush of having just beensung with,and I did not know what was about to happen.
Then another Prince song started.The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.
