Chapter Eight. Sam #4
I’m not one to linger on the past. My mom is a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, and with every unexpected thing that has happened in my life—Ben chief among them—I have to believe it, too.
But nobody could have predicted what happened with that song we never meant to write. It wasn’t the song of the summer, but the song of the damn century. I couldn’t walk into a grocery store, a bar, or even the damn dentist’s office without hearing us.
Within a week of its release the entire atmosphere started to shift. When we looked out into the crowd at concerts, there were fewer TEAM THUNDER HEARTS and CANDY SHARD SUPREMACY posters, and more that said things like JUST FUCKING KISS .
Two years and I’m still stuck on the one time we did.
“I don’t have to wonder,” says Mackenzie, polishing off her ice pop with a blue-dripping bite. “I already know what would have happened.”
“What’s that?”
“You and I would have messed around and fucked everything up.”
I nearly choke on my last bite. Mackenzie is unfazed, like she’s reading out loud from a familiar book.
“I was falling for guys who didn’t want to commit; you were the ultimate commitment phobe. Basic relationship math says we were only ever going to hook up eventually, even though we were doomed from the start.”
It should be a relief that we were on the same page all those years. That I was right to steer clear of her. But despite everything, there’s some part of me that wants to be proven wrong.
I ease back on my palm, trying to seem casual. “You seem to have thought this through, so I gotta ask—was it good? The part where we messed everything up?”
Her eyes meet mine, but only for a moment. Next thing I know she’s taking in the rest of my face, lingering on my mouth, on my jaw. She’s never looked at me this long or this unapologetically. She’s never looked at me with a quick skim of her tongue over her bottom lip.
“Guess we’ll never know,” she says, opening her notebook. “Now that we’re mature, mutually supportive friends , and all.”
She’s already looking away, so she doesn’t see the flash of disappointment on my face.
“Well then,” I say, recovering. “So you do admit we’re friends.”
“On a trial basis,” she says. “We’ll see how long we can be nice to each other before we make anything permanent.”
“Sure. But to be clear, I wasn’t being nice before,” I tell her. “Just honest.”
Her cheeks flush faintly. “Careful there, or my ego’s gonna get big enough to match yours.”
“Damn, I hope so,” I say. “Better that than these god-awful matching hats.”
This time she puts the notebook between us so I can watch her write.
I pull out my phone to record, experimentally humming a few melodies to her words.
She goes perfectly still a few times, nodding her approval.
I repeat those lines, waiting for her to add a harmony, a sweet bite against my mellow tone.
Only this time Mackenzie doesn’t sing along. She just murmurs the words to herself and occasionally looks up at me for approval, scribbling down what we silently agree on.
We’re secluded, but enough people pass by that I figure she doesn’t want to call attention to us. “We could go somewhere else to write,” I offer.
She shakes her head, then closes her notebook abruptly. “I’ll, uh—type up the lyrics and send them over.”
I tilt my head at her. “This isn’t my first cowriting rodeo. That’s not how this works.”
Mackenzie’s already got her bag packed, easing herself up from the grass. “Sure it is. I’ll still be doing lyrics, and you’ll still do the melody. And we’ll just keep it like that.”
It’s surprisingly hard to keep up as she heads for the main path, despite the foot of height I’ve got on her. “We’ll both be singing on the tracks, though,” I remind her.
“Let’s just try it this way once,” she says, waving me off.
I stop just before we hit the main path. “I’m not letting you off that easy, Sparkles.”
She comes to a reluctant stop, too, shifting her weight uneasily. “I don’t know how I’ll sound yet,” she says quietly. “So I’ll sing it on my own. Then try it with you.”
When she looks at me, all the usual crackle in her eyes is gone. There’s only uncertainty, the kind I’m so unused to seeing in her that it stops me on a dime.
“It’s just me,” I tell her.
She’s still watching me. “I know,” she says, giving the words weight.
That’s just it, then. Whether we’re friends or rivals or something in between—it matters, what we think of each other. It always has.
It hurts to think she doesn’t fully trust me with hearing her new voice. But if I said anything in the past to break her trust, then this time around I’ll have to earn it.
“Once,” I relent. “I’ll send you some recordings by tonight.”
Mackenzie nods, relieved. Then she lifts herself on the tips of her toes and hugs me, hard and fast.
“Thank you,” she says.
My arms are wrapped around her before I can even remember our rules. Turns out I can’t be smug that she’s breaking them first. That’s the problem with Mackenzie Waters—whether she’s breaking rules or breaking my heart, I’ll never get enough.