Chapter Seven. Mackenzie #3
All these years later and here I am, finally getting the validation I wanted then. But it doesn’t ease the old hurt; it reminds me how fast it could come back. If I let him in, he could let me down again.
I could let him down.
Dammit. This is why Seven existed in the first place. An attempt to get all the men who let me down out of my system. To cure myself of feelings like the ones I had for Sam once and for all. It shouldn’t matter what he thinks, or what he wants.
What matters is what I want. What I want is another shot at this. What I want is to make music I’m not using to destroy something in me, but build something new.
I wasn’t ready two years ago when Serena asked. I wasn’t ready a year ago, when I could only trust myself to sing behind a fake name. Hell—I wasn’t ready a half hour ago, when I was determined to cut and run before Sam had a chance to speak.
But now I feel it spitting like a spark under my ribs. It’s fanning into a flame so fast that it’s burning the past away, burning everything away aside from one damning truth: I need this.
I need this more than I need to get over him.
“My voice sounds different now,” I tell him.
Sam’s grip tightens as he spins me suddenly and triumphantly, as if just by mentioning this, I’ve acknowledged the duo is happening.
“Twyla told me,” he says. She must have also told him not to dig, because he doesn’t miss a beat. “Everything about this is new. If anything, that’s a damn boon.”
This seems like a cavalier thing for him to say, considering what’s on the line. Which is why I have to ask my next question, for his sake as much as mine.
“If we go through with this, it might be our last shot. You’re not worried we’d fuck it all up?”
The question is as sincere as I’ve ever been with Sam. Our little show may have all been a game to him, but I’m all too aware of how fragile that line between real and pretend was, in the end. How many times I told myself I’d never trip on it, only to realize I was tied up in knots.
His grin softens, but his resolve firms. Enough that he pulls me in again, and we’re just barely swaying to the music. Enough that I forget people are watching, and that this is a performance of sorts, too.
“I’d rather chance fucking up a great thing with you than settle for a good one on my own,” he says into my ear.
It’s coming back together now—not the line between real and pretend I caught myself in, but the loose threads of a story that I know isn’t over yet. A story I can’t end on my own, or I would have posted Seven’s last song by now.
There are lyrics humming under my skin again. They don’t have the angst of Seven’s. But something hopeful and nostalgic, brimming and sweet.
I press them down into myself, clearing my throat. Maybe we bring out each other’s best, but he also brought out my worst. If this is happening, I have to protect myself.
“I have another condition,” I tell him. “No more love songs.”
His eyes flicker in momentary surprise, and then mischief. “I thought you said ours wasn’t.”
“It’s not.”
His jaw ticks, but his eyes are steady on mine. “No love songs,” he agrees.
I hold his gaze. For once, neither of us is playing at anything. The cards are already on the table, and we both have a lot at stake.
He squeezes my waist lightly, his voice barely above a whisper. “Say you’ll give it a shot, Sparkles.”
It’s near impossible to resist the yes on the tip of my tongue, but it’s dizzying, how fast it’s happening. I’ve let myself get caught up in the moment too many times to know whether to trust my instincts.
“Say you’ll stop calling me Sparkles,” I say instead.
“But I’m a man of my word,” Sam protests. “I only make promises I can keep.”
I tilt my head at him gamely. “Then what are you promising?”
His answer is so immediate that it’s as if he was waiting for me to ask all night. “We decide everything together. Not as rivals or lovers or puppets for some sideshow. But as a team.”
The final notes to “Play You by Heart” draw to a slow, satisfying end, filling every corner of the ballroom with a sweet warmth.
In the quiet that follows I can’t hear it, but I can feel it—lyrics I’ve never written.
Feelings I could never capture with words.
It felt like they were running from me, but maybe they were only waiting.
They needed someone who could understand the shape of them. Someone who would make them shine.
They needed Sam.
I draw in a breath, and even then, I don’t know how I’ll use it. A snap! echoes through the room before I get the chance.
It’s the strap on Sam’s mask, which falls to the floor.
There’s a hushed murmur in the crowd, the flash of an event photographer.
I’m just as stunned as the rest of the room, swept up in the planes of his face—how earnest and boyish he looks, when he’s caught by surprise.
How unexpectedly sweet he is when he isn’t posturing.
All traces of it are gone in a flash as he scans the room and firmly spins me away from him and into the crowd.
No—into Hannah, who is watching on the edge of the dance floor.
He’s giving me an out. He releases me so that I’ll spin right into her arms, where she’ll no doubt conceal me for at least as long as it takes for Sam to get off the floor.
People will speculate, of course. But there won’t be clear images of us together to give the speculation much weight. I can easily leave this party and pretend this conversation never happened at all.
It’s that thought that stops me on a dime, breathless in the middle of the dance floor. It’s empty now of everyone but the two of us. It only takes a quick sweep to understand why—midnight came and went. Everyone else’s masks are off.
I take deliberate steps toward Sam, watching his expression shift from confusion to surprise to something I haven’t seen in ages.
It’s the what if? at the heart of everything we pretended to be onstage.
I haven’t seen it in so long that I forgot the full impact of it.
The way it feels when Sam Blaze is looking at you like he doesn’t know how to look anywhere else.
Nothing could prepare me for the impact of the way he’s looking at me now—not as a rival, not as a lover. Not even as a teammate. But as some untapped energy, where we could be all of those things or none of them. Where we could push each other to be something we haven’t thought to dream up yet.
Sam reaches out not to take my mask, but my hands. He lifts them up to the edge of my mask.
My heart is in chaos, but my voice is calm. “I’d rather fuck up a great thing.”
We take off the mask together. I don’t know what Sam sees in my face, but his grin is brighter than every flashing bulb in the room.