Chapter Twenty-Five. Sam
chapter twenty-five
SAM
I’m no stranger to embarrassment. When you’re in a punk rock band it’s part of the job description. I’ve burped mid-song. Stuck my foot in it during interviews. Even mooned half of Madison Square Garden trying to pull off baggy pants.
But my son figuring out how to open my Voice Notes app while I’m stuck in Lincoln Tunnel traffic might take the damn cake.
“That’s you!” Ben pipes from the back.
It’s all terrible lyric ideas that should never see the light of day, but like any parent, I know if I flinch, he’ll only want to hear it more.
Sure enough, he skips ahead—straight to the quick recording I made in the park after that night in Boston with Mackenzie, and then to the one where I tried it with a guitar at home.
I say something then that I haven’t said in all my years of fatherhood. “Want me to turn on Thunder Hearts?”
“Noooo,” Ben protests. “I wanna hear this.”
Damn. That was the one and only card I had up my sleeve.
“It’s not finished,” I warn.
Ben turns it up. “I don’t care.”
And then Ben does something he hasn’t done in all my years of fatherhood—he goes completely, utterly silent for a full three minutes. We’re fully in New Jersey by the time the recording stops, and I can feel Ben’s curious eyes on me in the passenger mirror.
“Is this one of the songs you’re doing with Mackenzie?” he asks.
“Nah,” I tell him. “Just something I’m playing with.”
Ben’s brow furrows like he wants to say something, but can’t puzzle out how. “I think she’d like it,” he decides.
“That’s what I’m hoping,” I say. “I wrote it based on one of her songs.”
Ben’s face lights up. “Like how Mackenzie said she wrote some of the first Thunder Hearts songs trying to be like you?”
I bite down a smile. “Did she say that?” I ask.
When I catch Ben’s face again, it’s red enough to rival a tomato. “That was supposed to be a secret,” he says.
I try not to laugh, but the way he’s wiggling like a criminal in his booster seat is making it hard. “ That’s the big secret she told you?”
His head bobs guiltily. “She said that’s why I should listen to more Candy Shard,” he says.
My throat goes tight. I’ve never minded if Ben doesn’t like my music, or anything I like, for that matter. But knowing Mackenzie is the one responsible for Ben singing snippets of Candy Shard songs like a pocket-sized punk these past few weeks makes my chest warm.
“You can’t tell her I told you,” Ben adds quickly.
I wink at him in the mirror. “I won’t,” I promise.
Even if I weren’t a dad of my word, Mackenzie and I don’t have the time to spare.
We’re running up so close on the deadline for the last song that when I told Mackenzie I was dropping Ben off in New Jersey for his cousin’s birthday party, she sent me a screenshot of the address to Hannah’s lake party a few miles away.
Turns out I did score that invite in the end.
It’s anybody’s guess how much writing I’ll be able to do with Mackenzie in a swimsuit drinking one of those cherry-flavored drinks that turn her lips all red, but miracles happen every day.
We arrive at Kara’s sister’s place a half hour later, where cousins from all sides of Kara’s and Lizzie’s families are tearing through the backyard. I open the car door for Ben, who spills out with his backpack full of baked goods from Sugar Harmony and sunscreen and baseball cards.
“You’ll let me listen to the song again when it’s done?” he asks.
I ruffle his hair.
“You bet,” I tell him. “Your moms are coming by in a few hours after they drop off that wedding cake, but I’ll be home when you get back tonight. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Dad.”
I wave at the aunts as they collect him. I’m plugging in directions to Hannah’s lake house when a bunch of Tick Tune notifications pop up on my screen. The app is back, and the name Seven is at the top under the list of artists who have new songs up.
Guess I was right about her working with the app, then. No doubt she goes public first thing tomorrow morning. Good luck to her, whoever she is—it’s going to be rough launching a career when half of Tick Tune’s artists have it out for her.
I hit “play” as I pull out of the driveway. Three minutes later, I’m a goddamn wreck.
“Jesus,” I mutter. Maybe it’s for the best that you can only listen to a song once a day. This new one is beautiful, but sad enough to make Mary Poppins drive into a ditch. The kind of sad that makes me wonder if it needs to get cleared by the FDA.
Maybe we won’t know who Seven is until the sale goes through tomorrow, but this much I already know: Whoever she wrote the song “Last” about broke her heart so bad that it’s about to break anyone who listens right along with it.
It’s devastating. It’s transcendent. It makes me hope that after she finished it, she put a hit on the guy she wrote it about.
I pull up Ben’s Thunder Hearts playlist to shake the despair out of the car. I’m still playing it on full blast with the windows down when I roll up to Hannah’s lake house.
Mackenzie’s sitting on the railing of the deck, wearing a bright pink bikini that glitters in the sunlight. She bounds up when she spots the car, her lips stained red from her drink and her hair blown out from the humidity. She looks sweet enough to take a bite out of and wild enough to let me.
I stop the car and she leans into the window, smelling like cherries and sunscreen. She lowers her sunglasses, her eyes sparking with delight when I almost lean in and kiss her. It’s such a reflex already that it feels like highway robbery when I can’t.
“Can’t” might be an exaggeration. But we don’t know everyone here. Better not to risk any rumors about us when we haven’t been an us long enough to talk about it.
Although it’s hard to remember anything we should talk about, the way that bikini top seems one light gust away from sliding off her shoulders.
“Nice tunes,” she says. “But aren’t they a little too sparkly for you?”
Nobody can see us from this angle, so I slide my finger under one of her glittering bikini straps. “Turns out I’m a big fan of sparkles.”
She leans in closer, licking the flavor off her lips. “Good. Because if I get my way, they’re about to be all over you.”
I’m already too riled up for my own damn good by the time I park the car. I jack up the volume on “Neon Love” right at the part where Mackenzie lets out a belt powerful enough to wake the dead. Sure enough, half the patio is looking over at us now.
Mackenzie clearly hasn’t noticed, because her fingers are digging into the back of my shirt before she’s fully pulled me in for a hug.
“You’re lucky I can’t make that sound anymore,” she says, “or you might be hearing it right in your ear later.”
“Well, damn. That’s a challenge if I ever heard one.” She feels like sunshine against my skin. I just barely resist the urge to lift her up from the ground and into a kiss. “But funny thing is—I do miss hearing you sing those songs.”
Mackenzie stiffens. “Well,” she says.
I ease back. “I’ve got something for you,” I say.
She raises her brows. I give her ass a playful squeeze low enough so the patio gawkers can’t see, then turn back to my car to grab the beaten-up folder in the front. It’s the one I used to keep on the floor of the stage with our setlist in it during shows. She tilts her head as I hand it to her.
“Open it,” I say.
She does. I watch as she pores over the old songs, suddenly self-conscious as her finger traces the notes I left by them. New chords and patterns. A few notes in the margins— slower bridge? and try with piano .
She looks at them so long and so silently that I’m damn near sweating when she looks up at me, her cheeks bright pink, her eyes sparkling.
“Did you—” she manages, before letting out a breathy laugh. “Sam, did you rearrange all my old songs so I could sing them again?”
“It’s a work in progress,” I admit. “I haven’t heard enough of your voice yet to know if I did any good.”
Mackenzie’s eyes drift between me and the folder and back to me again, her lips parted, her expression unreadable.
“You don’t have to try it if you don’t—”
The rest of the words are cut off by Mackenzie leaning in and kissing me so deeply, so resolutely, that I kiss back on instinct. To hell with it. We know everyone here, and I spent too many years resisting her not to give in to every inch of her now.
When she pulls back, she digs her fingers into the back of my shoulders. “Thank you,” she says.
She’s so close to tears that I give her hips a little squeeze. “Well, you told me some of those lyrics were secretly about me,” I say. “Be a downright shame if you weren’t still singing them just because they weren’t in your range.”
She steps back from me, twisting a finger under the strap of her bikini. The way the light is hitting her every curve makes it look like the sun was just put there so she could shine in it.
“Well, then we better go find some place where we can test it,” she says, eyes sparking with mischief. “I’m going to put this in my car and come find you so we can— rehearse .”
It’s a good thing everyone else is already tipsy, because I can’t wipe the grin off my face to save my life.
I drop off the baked goods Lizzie and Kara sent me with, stopping to talk to old friends from our touring days.
I wander out to the pool, where there’s a huge spread of food from one of Hannah’s parents’ restaurants that Grayson is helping restock while her sisters tease him for wearing neon-blue swim trunks from Hannah’s line.
I don’t spot Mackenzie, but I don’t see Serena or Hannah, either.
I decide to wait before I call so I don’t interrupt anything, but as I head back into the house to find a bathroom, I hear them.
They’re in a room at the end of a hall, and Mackenzie sounds so panicked that I head toward the door on autopilot.
“But I deleted it,” she insists. “How the hell did it go live?”
“Did you delete it?” Hannah asks carefully. “Or did you just unschedule it?”
Her voice is so cautious that I stop before I reach them. They don’t want to be overheard. But I can’t just leave when Mackenzie’s next words sound like she just ran a marathon.
“I—I don’t know,” she says. “Why?”
Serena’s the one who answers. “Tick Tune was down because they were preserving all the songs before people deleted them. When the app restarted, it didn’t just restore them all. It pushed everyone’s drafts live, too.”
I’m at the edge of the door now, completely still as my head spins itself in circles trying to process.
“So your seventh song went live,” says Hannah.
The rush in my head stops, snagging on those two words: seventh song .
“No. An early version of it went live,” says Mackenzie miserably. “The video that had one of Hannah’s pieces in the frame.”
“But it’s deleted now, right?” Hannah asks.
“Probably not fast enough,” says Serena grimly.
“Fuck,” says Mackenzie. “Fuck.”
Serena is sympathetic, but firm. “Take a breath. We were going to have Seven go public as a last resort anyway,” she says. “We’ll just pretend this was intentional. I’ll get Isla on the phone right now.”
It feels like I’m underwater. I’ve heard the words. I know what they mean. I just can’t make them real.
“Yeah.” Mackenzie’s voice is dazed. “But first I have to tell Sam.”
It’s the way she says my name that makes it snap into place. Mackenzie doesn’t hate Seven. Mackenzie isn’t worried about competing with Seven.
Mackenzie is Seven. She has been this whole time.
“Sam still doesn’t know?” Serena asks.
“It’s been so crazy,” says Mackenzie. “I didn’t want to tell unless there was something to tell.”
There’s a pause long enough that I think they’ll head for the door.
I step back, then think better of it. I have no idea how the hell to process all this, but this much I know: the rest of the world is not going to wait for me to figure it out.
If Mackenzie thinks she’s been exposed as Seven, there isn’t a second to waste on deciding what to do next.
“Well, there probably is now,” says Serena. “Are you going to get him?”
When Mackenzie speaks again, she’s so quiet I can barely make it out.
“It’s the song. I wrote it before Sam and I started working together. If he knows it’s me, he’ll figure out it’s about him.”
Next thing I know I’m headed for the closest door that gets me outside. I run both hands through my hair, leaning against the wall at the back of the house, breathing hard.
I did this. I’m the guy she should have put the hit on. I’m the guy who made her write “Last.”
I spent years trying not to hurt her. I was goddamn smug about how many years I resisted temptation, about how I’d never be like the men who broke her heart. And it turns out I’m such a fuckup that I hurt her more than any of those assholes combined.
The worst part is that even after all this, Mackenzie couldn’t bring herself to tell me. Not about the heartbreak. Not about the song.
And not about this entire side of herself she’s been hiding behind the whole time.
My phone rings in my pocket. It’s Lizzie. She’s talking before I can say a word.
“It’s Ben,” she says. “How fast can you get back to the house?”
Everything else falls away in an instant. I yank my keys out of my pocket and run.