And then the song lifted.
Because it isn’t a sad song. It’s joyful and warm. It swings and smiles. And here was Julian, the most contained man I have known in my life, starting to really feel it. His shoulders came down into the rhythm and his head began to move. His knee was bouncing under the keys. The locked-down half-smile cracked open into something wide and young as he sang.
And the crying and gasps around the room tipped over into laughing and clapping.
I was up off the couch and on my feet, clapping and swaying along, watching him do the thing he had kept locked away since he was nineteen years old.
Every time the song came around to repeatI love you, he stopped watching his hands and looked up. At me.
He sang those words straight at me, eyes on mine, then he’d drop his gaze back to the keys and pick the rhythm up again, knee going, shoulder dipping, gone into it while his family hollered him on.
Julian’s eyes lifted and found me and held, and I pressed my hand flat to my chest and sang the words to him as he sang them to me, with my eyes stinging.
I thought it was just the song. I thought he was lost in this moment for his family. I stood there loving it for him, and it never crossed my mind that he was telling me something out loud in front of every person he loved.
By the time he got to the end of it, the part that just repeats and repeats and dares you not to join, the whole room was in.
Tre went first. He started clapping on the beat and singing it too loud, and then it caught. Aunt Lorraine, eyes shut, hands up, swaying like she was three pews back in church. Kendra and Simone trying to harmonize and missing and not caring. Micah and Zhaire jumping in place. All of them singing it back to him, the same three words, over and over, and Julian carrying the whole thing from the bench with that grin on him, glancing up at me between the lines.
And I sang it too.
I sang it with all of them, folding my voice into the room, sending it to him the way everybody was sending it to him. Loving him. Singing him home. My throat ached with how much I loved this for him.
I did not once understand that he was singing it to me. That I was standing in the middle of a whole room saying it back to him and never once hearing what it was.
Then the songcame to the part where he dragged his hand down the whole length of the keys in one long sweep, a glissando that rippled from one end to the other, and the tempo picked up under it. And then it was just those three words.I love you,over and over, again and again, carrying the song out to its end. The whole room came in at once, clapping, singing it back and forth to each other, to him.
Tre was on his feet calling it the greatest karaoke night in Wade history. The women were all crying at once. Zion held his phone up over his head like he’d caught lightning on it. Aunt Lorraine had both hands in the air, face tipped to the ceiling, praising the Lord.
“My God, today.” She said it to no one and everyone. “The way that blessed my soul. Thank you, Jesus.”
When he got up from the piano, they were all moving toward him at once, hands out for his shoulders, his back, Simone trying to get her arms around his neck from behind the bench.
I stepped back to give them space to love on him. Watching from the edge with my whole heart up in my throat, the joy of it all had me frozen in place.
Which is why it took me a moment to understand that he wasn’t taking any of it in. Julian came up off the bench, and he didn’t lean into the hands reaching for him. His eyes were on me. Found me across the room where I’d backed into the edge of it. And he started to walk.
Straight through everyone. Past every voice calling his name and every palm trying to land on him. None of it slowing him down, like somebody had drawn a line on the floor between the two of us and all he had to do was walk it.
The cheering thinned out and the hands fell away.
“Julian, that was…” My voice was thick. “That was beautiful.”
He didn’t say anything as he stopped in front of me. Just took both my hands into his.
“Wait,” somebody gasped. “Wait, shh.”
He cleared his throat. “I haven’t touched that piano in years,” he said. “Haven’t let anybody hear me sing since before my mother died. Buried all of it with her and told myself it was gone.”
His thumbs passed once over my hands.
“But it wasn’t gone, Alyssa. It was waiting.” His voice lost a little control but he got it back. “For you.”
The smile was still on my face, but my face was covered in quiet tears.
“I need to say something to you. And then I need to ask you something.”
Taryn’s voice cracked, Simone let out a half-swallowed sob, and then there was hushing, a wave ofshh, shh,everybody pulling their own noise back at once.
