Chapter Thirty-One. Sam
chapter thirty-one
SAM
I pack a bag for New Jersey. I coordinate with Lizzie and Kara so they’ll join me with Ben after the show. I schedule a car.
But I can’t get in it. I have no way of knowing what will happen at that showcase. I couldn’t stand it if something went wrong and I was a whole damn state away.
New plan: stay put until Lizzie and Ben get back so we can all head to Jersey together. I pull out my guitar to fill up the eerie quiet of Dad Side, ignoring the text from the unknown number on my phone for a good hour before opening it.
But the text isn’t a nosy question from an entertainment journalist. The label’s not letting her do your songs , it reads.
No context. It can only be Serena, who knows I don’t need it. They’d only ban our songs to force Mackenzie’s hand on Seven.
Stupid of them to underestimate Mackenzie, who no doubt has something up her sleeve. But I get myself to Terminal 5 within a half hour. Nobody is going to mess with her on my watch. The same way I’d step out of her way to do what’s best for her, I’ll step right into someone else’s.
The show is well underway, so it’s easy to slide in next to Lizzie and Ben unseen between acts. Lizzie’s mouth pops open in enough shock that Ben frowns up at her.
“Mackenzie’s about to go on and she’s his girlfriend,” he says, the duh implied.
I blink and Lizzie lets out a surprised laugh. Ben theatrically shushes us as the lights dim. None of us have had a chance yet to decide how to talk to Ben about the idea of me and Mackenzie, but as usual, this kid’s a step ahead of us all.
And so is Mackenzie. She walks onstage looking like some kind of dream, damn near floating with wild hair sweeping with every step, with the glitter on her boots catching the light. She’s timeless. The kind of star you only see once in a damn lifetime, if ever.
She’s got the audience wrapped around her finger before she even starts to sing.
It’s one thing to hear that angelic rasp of her new voice.
It’s another to watch the awe on everyone else’s faces when they hear it in real time.
It’s sweeter and bolder than the one she used as Seven, and just as unique as she is.
It was worth every damn minute I spent messing with the keys of her old songs to hear them new.
By the time Thunder Hearts hits the stage, I’m not worried about a thing. Mackenzie’s got this in the bag.
At least, until she announces the new website. That’s when I hear murmurs from the execs a few rows behind us. They’re drowned out fast by the cheers, but I’m not taking chances. I give Ben’s head a quick squeeze and murmur to Lizzie that I’ll be back, then slip for the door that leads backstage.
Maybe Mackenzie’s never had to avoid getting hauled off by security before, but I’m happy to lend past experience to help.
I’m halfway there when she starts the song. The opening chords to “Last” nearly stop me in my tracks. She wouldn’t play this. Not unless something went really, really wrong.
But she isn’t. Once I open the backstage door, I can hear her. The melody may be the same, but nothing else is. The strumming pattern has a new momentum. Her voice is brighter and more unabashedly Mackenzie . And the lyrics are flipped on their head.
It’s no longer a song of moments that will be “lasts.” It’s a song about all the moments she wants to last and last and last. It’s clever and beautiful and so damn us that I can’t help drifting into the wings. It’s not enough to hear her sing it. I need the whole view.
And then I’ve got it, when her eyes unexpectedly meet mine and light up like a damn firework. She lets out a happy, disbelieving laugh and yells, “Come here!”
I shake my head. This is her moment. I’m lucky to be right back at the start of when I first laid eyes on Mackenzie, in a place I’ll always want to be: watching her shine.
But Mackenzie starts playing chords, smiling at me until I recognize the progression. The opening chords to the song I wrote for her. One I’ve spent the past few days wishing I’d let her hear.
Please? she mouths.
As if I can deny this woman anything. She knows it, too. Her face splits into a grin before I take a damn step.
Mackenzie and I have shared the stage dozens of times. We’ve used them to tease and challenge and taunt. We’ve used them to pretend to hurt each other, and accidentally do it in the process.
But we’ve never done this. We’ve never shared this space the way we are now.
Not rivals. Not duet partners. But something built to last after the curtain goes down and the crowd empties out.
I walk to meet her slowly, savoring the hook of her smile and the gleam in her eyes, knowing that I’ll spend my whole damn life trying to find the right words to capture her and never come close.
By the time we reach each other, the crowd is screaming. If all the little tension we created onstage over the years was meant to rile them up, then this is the impossible resolution they were waiting for.
One I’ve been waiting for so long that there’s no helping it. The moment I’ve got her in my arms, I have to break one last rule of Mackenzie’s, and go on breaking it the rest of my life.
“I love you,” I say into her ear.
I’ll have my whole life to say it when I have her eyes on mine. Tonight may be a performance, but this is just ours.
She knows it, too. She burrows her head into my neck, but somehow, I feel the smile. “I love you, too.”
The words don’t change a damn thing. The feeling has been there so long that I can’t touch a single memory of Mackenzie where I didn’t feel it.
Still. It’s a hell of a feeling to get to say it out loud. To know that it doesn’t matter what happens next—not on this stage or any other place we set foot on in this life. It won’t change the part that actually counts. It won’t change us.
Mackenzie presses her lips to the side of my neck before she pulls back, eyes wet and her smile wide.
She grabs the mic off its stand, still close enough that the back of her shoulder is pressed against my chest. I wrap my hand into hers, steadying us.
She beams up at me before looking back at the crowd.
“It’s no secret that Sam and I have been writing songs all month. It’s a damn shame we won’t be able to sing my favorites for you tonight.”
She talks like she’s letting them in on a secret. The shift is quiet, but it’s there. They may have come here to see Seven, but she’s getting them in our corner.
“But Sam here—he started a song a few days ago.” She squeezes my hand before she lets it go, then pulls her guitar off the stand. “If he’s game, maybe we could sing it together for the first time.”
She offers me the guitar. I take it, strumming the opening chords and leaning into the mic stand beside her.
“It’s a song about a lot of things, really. About bad timing and better timing. About a man who saw all the wrong colors, and a woman who made everything golden.” I turn my head to meet Mackenzie’s eyes. “But most of all, it’s a love song.”
Judging from the look on Mackenzie’s face, there’s one thing that will never change: she may talk a big game, but nobody loves breaking a rule more than she does.
I can’t even hear the chords when I start to play, the way the crowd is screaming. We both laugh, our faces so close that I’m half expecting the curtain to drop, cut off the way we were that very first time we kissed.
But the show goes on. I sing the first verse alone. A man in over his head, in love too soon. Mackenzie takes over the second verse; a woman in over her heart, in love too late.
We sing the bridge together, with a line I wrote and Mackenzie perfected: Life is always changing colors, but what we have is golden.
The song comes to a close. The audience has reached a fever pitch, and it’s no wonder why. Mackenzie is so close that I can nearly taste her. So close that I can flash back to a hundred other times we were poised just like this onstage, inches apart.
I am stronger than the man I was, but right now I don’t have to be. I don’t have to resist this. I don’t have to pretend. I don’t have to be anything other than what I am: a man so in love and so damn lucky for it that I won’t take it for granted as long as I live.
The audience finally gets their damn kiss, and I finally get Mackenzie Waters’s heart.