Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PRESTON
Why had he said yes? As Preston pulled open the heavy wooden door and stepped onto the concrete floor sticky with spilled beer, he could only assume he’d suffered the mental break Dani was always warning he was heading for if he didn’t learn to relax.
Then he saw Harmony sitting at one end of the bar, long hair coppery under the red neon lights running along the shelves of bottles, a tall green drink and open book before her. She was reading pensively, as if the dozens of shouted conversations and intermittent blenders going and thudding of pumped-in music couldn’t touch her at all.
Right.
A guy with a beer in hand sidled up to her, saying something lost to the din. Harmony swiveled away on her barstool, never taking her eyes from her book. Eventually the guy moved on to someone else.
Preston drummed his hand against his jeans. Going up to girls in bars was something he’d stopped doing about five minutes into college, after dismal results, no matter how much his overly confident roommate Will had cajoled him to keep trying. Harmony had invited him, Preston reminded himself as he crossed the room toward her. Repeatedly. Obnoxiously. And while Dani had been only too happy to take Lacey after the GSA for one of their regular weekend overnights (Lacey considered the stargazing away from the town’s light pollution a treat), this wasn’t an actual date. They were talking business. All the flirtation was just L.A. schmoozing. It had to be.
He stopped a few seats away. “Hey.”
She lifted her gaze and a smile broke across her face, a gleam lighting her eyes, brighter than all the neon in the place. No schmoozing or falseness about it. It set a tingle whispering over Preston’s skin: True, true, true.
“Hey!” She hopped off her seat, leaving the drink and book behind, but Preston couldn’t remind her to take them because he was too busy almost swallowing his tongue. Harmony was wearing a clingy green dress that came down to her knees with a slit that reached up to the top of her statuesque thigh. “Let’s find a table!”
He decided following while he remembered how to breathe made the most sense. Yes, very smart. They were passing a speaker on a stand near a set of busy pool tables when feedback from a guy setting up in the corner for live music screeched across the room. Preston winced.
Harmony noticed and stopped. “Is this a terrible idea? The music’s going to be loud. I was looking up autism and all these sites mentioned sensory sensitivity?”
She’d leaned in a little, because it was loud, and he leaned back to answer. “No, it’s fine. Just if it’s sudden or jarring.” It wasn’t as if the library was exactly quiet most of the time. He’d probably need downtime to recover from the overstimulation, would probably veg out tomorrow until Lacey got home, but he could manage a couple of hours. “Music is actually the best, if everything’s in—”
Her eyebrows perked up with delight, as they both realized what he’d been about to say. Her smile curled wider. Go on , the avid flash of her eyes said.
He exhaled through his nose, lips pressed in chagrin. “Harmony.”
The tip of her tongue peeked from between her teeth as she grinned. “So you can say it.”
They found a small table right in the middle of the jumble of people and chairs and sticky tabletops sprouting glassware and straws. Preston’s knees brushed against Harmony’s as he folded himself into his rickety chair.
“Speaking of noise,” Harmony said, leaning forward on crossed arms, “I think what you’re dealing with at work is a very vocal minority. I checked out local social media and it’s, like, the same few Facebook accounts that have made any complaints about your youth programming. And plenty of people across multiple platforms sharing videos and pictures from events who seem perfectly content. We just need to help all of those folks get louder.”
The canned music cut out and the guy in the corner launched into a blaring piano rendition of a Maroon 5 song. “Oh. Good,” Preston said. “Louder.”
Harmony chuckled through a wry grin, but waved a hand. “That storytellers event you did? Seriously cool, and like fifty posts with significant positive engagement. None negative that I could find. And it looked like you had a diverse collection of presenters for that. People just don’t show up to town hall to say they had a good time, only when they want to bitch.”
She’d definitely been screwing around for much of the time she’d been staked out in the library. Putting on a show. Annoying the hell out of him. But right now it was clear she knew what she was talking about. “You found that all out this afternoon?”
“Hey, librarians aren’t the only ones who can do research.” She leaned back in her seat with a toss of her hair. “I contain multitudes.”
“Walt Whitman,” he said automatically. No. Reverse. Do not start talking about poetry at this business-meeting-slash-possibly-a-date. He knew from experience he’d ramble on too long and annoy people, and he wasn’t sure if this was a date or if he even wanted it to be a date, but if it was a date he was pretty sure he wanted it to be a good date.
And right on cue, Harmony threw back her head and let out a groan. He’d already fucked this up. “I looove Leaves of Grass . ‘I celebrate myself and sing myself’?” She dropped her gaze again to look him dead on, and it felt like an eggbeater stirring through his chest. “Come on. He’s such a weirdo and so good at nailing, like, just what you’d been thinking but hadn’t realized you’d been thinking. You know?”
What Preston suddenly knew was that he, or at least his speeding heartbeat, definitely wanted this to be a date. One where he wasn’t sure what he was necessarily supposed to say but felt okay reciting a line that had stuck with him: “Wicked rather than virtuous out of conformity or fear.”
Harmony made this little grooving, bobbing motion of her head. “‘Urge and urge and urge.’ Hot stuff. Damn, I need to find a copy somewhere and reread.”
Preston could feel a smile as sincere as Harmony’s spreading over his face. “I might know where you could get one.”
“I don’t have a card here.” She made a furtive look away. “I’m gonna go get us some drinks. Not margaritas—” She dropped a hand atop his, looking into his eyes again, as if divulging an important confession. “Sorry to lure you here under false pretenses, but someone bought me one before you got here and it’s not worth it.”
She slipped away through the crowd, leaving Preston’s hand feeling bereft of her warmth. He drummed his fingers on the table, shaking off the feeling. It didn’t really matter if he wanted this to be a date. Or for there to be more dates. Where could anything possibly go with someone like that? She wouldn’t be interested in anything serious with him. She was rich and beautiful and had a whole life far away from Brookville rubbing shoulders with important people. And he’d figured out in college he preferred to keep sex to committed relationships. Even if Harmony could help with his problems at work, even if they did make a deal for the festival, she was here through the fall at best. Better to keep this strictly to those matters. Easier to know where he stood, what to say, if he knew this was just business.
She came back carrying two short glasses with something amber splashed in them. But she didn’t sit. “One sec,” she said, looking over at the mob of people dancing nearer the guy at the beleaguered-looking piano, who had switched it up to old standards. “I see some Brookville movers and shakers moving and shaking over there. Operation: Win People Over starts now.” One sip, and she settled the drinks on their table.
“What are you going to do?” There was a group of women on the dance floor he recognized as the Weavers’ friends. Someone on the school board. Mason’s mom, Sarah. A few others.
“I have an idea.” She waggled her eyebrows. “Trust me.” He trusted her to get up to another of her antics, and part of him wanted to leave before he could find out what she had in mind and how it would definitely put him on the spot. Instead he made himself stay put and try his drink, a smooth whiskey.
She walked past Cheryl’s friends to stand beside the piano player, who was very good. Harmony dropped a folded bill into the glass set out on the piano, leaned one elbow beside it, and started saying something—no, singing along. The guy shot her a smile. In a minute, he cocked his silvery head, inviting Harmony to slide onto the bench beside him.
The women stopped and cheered as Harmony’s voice caught on the mic angled down at the piano, and the lyrics of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” carried across the space. One of them, that woman with the restaurant, raised a margarita and whooped. What the hell was Harmony doing? At least Cheryl didn’t seem to be here or Asher’s mom. An awkward confrontation wasn’t going to help anything. But neither would a sing-along. No matter how amazing Harmony’s singing was, because of course it was. What couldn’t this woman do?
Harmony’s satisfied gaze found Preston across the room, and along with the smoky-sweet richness of her voice it sent a jolt down through him, making him insanely grateful for the cover of the table. He threw back the rest of his drink, but the whiskey washed the same flavor of Harmony’s singing through him, like she was burning him up from the inside.
When the song ended, the women Harmony apparently had already made friends with during her short time in town crowded around her, gushing, and soon they were all behind the piano, singing Dionne Warwick.
Then, mouth open in song, she gestured at Preston to join them. The absolute menace. He ignored the first wave of her hand, but she kept at it, brows rising, mouth twisting in impatience. Fine. First he threw back her drink as well, because there was no way in hell he was doing this sober. He walked over with panic sloshing through him along with the drinks. Public speaking was bad enough. Public singing? Wasn’t there a nice serial killer here tonight who might like to murder him before he reached the other end of the bar? He still didn’t see how this was going to help. He didn’t want to make friends with people who wanted to ban books. He wanted them to not ban books.
And then it seemed like a reprieve was given, as the musician murmured into the mic about taking a quick five. Until Harmony reached forward and dragged Preston over to the piano. “What can you play?”
“What?”
“Do you know more than Bach or whatever?”
“Of course—”
She steered him onto the piano bench, fingertips light on his shoulders. To the musician on his way to his break she said, “You don’t mind if my friend plays something till you get back?”
“’Course not, lovely.” Which might have had something to do with how people were stuffing his glass full of tips but was probably just Harmony.
Harmony leaned her face down next to Preston’s, hands still at his shoulders, the soft curve of her pressing into his back and banishing his entire repertoire from his memory. “Play something they’ll know.”
Right. He knew plenty of songs by heart. At least one, almost certainly. It was simply difficult to call any to mind when said mind was currently occupied, studying the possibility of that being Harmony’s breast resting against his shoulder. His hands hovered over the keyboard, trying not to clench. “Like what?”
“I don’t know, something from the nineties?” There was no question that was Harmony’s lip grazing his ear, delivering warm honeyed breath over his skin. “Quick, before the party breaks up.”
There was this big songbook he used for a fun exercise with older students, full of pop songs going back to the sixties. He dropped his fingers to the keys and played the opening hook of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.”
He almost stumbled over the melody as those around him broke out in squeals. They sang off-key but enthusiastically through that song, while Harmony pretended to know the lyrics and did this incredible little wiggle-dance shooting finger guns at them all and hyping them up, and then a couple of Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande numbers he’d learned for Lacey. When Preston turned the instrument over to the guy back from his break, Harmony pulled him next to her, in a linked line with her new friends, and thank god by then even more people had swarmed around to sing and dance, because of course Harmony had made this happen somehow, had drawn people to her like moths, and in the crowd it wasn’t so bad to gently sing along to songs he knew or hum while he tried not to think about her hand still on the small of his back or her hip sometimes swaying against his thigh.
Eventually someone declared they were buying the group a round, and he didn’t want to seem rude so he ended up squeezed around a table drinking a shot of something sharp and a too-sweet bright green margarita.
Harmony had retrieved her book— Girl, Serpent, Thorn , he could see now, a young adult Persian fairy tale that was in fact one of the titles on Cheryl’s list for banning—and was holding it to her chest and yelling something to Libby Reed and Bonnie Kelton, from the school board and PTA, at a nearby table. Her expression looked like she’d just taken a bite of the richest chocolate or something, eyes rolling up behind her languid lids.
He knew he should probably talk with those around him—knew he was staring instead—but soon, as always, Harmony’s enthusiasm had everyone’s attention, as she moved on to gushing about the twinkle lights strung around the black rafters overhead and blown-up photographs of full moons caught in tree branches lining the back of the bar. “Local watering holes like this are always the most fun,” she said, reaching out to grip the arm of a woman at the next table. “This reminds me of one time I was sharing a helicopter ride out of Coachella with Phoebe Bridgers and she told me about going to a little club after Glastonbury with First Aid Kit, and, well, long story short, we all ended up in a dive in L.A. singing karaoke of Madonna songs at 2 A.M .” She raised her brows. “The pilot did an amazing ‘Take a Bow.’”
Harmony leaned forward, into the rush of awe from the group—wide eyes and squawking mouths, everyone talking over each other plus the music and the noise of others around them shouting to be heard—as if she could swim in it, crowd surf on it. “’Course, any karaoke machine can’t hold a candle to our Preston on the piano!”
It was like she’d held up a mirror and redirected all that attention and goodwill to him. People raised their glasses and patted his arm and cheered. Preston lifted his drink in return before hiding behind a syrupy gulp of margarita.
Someone at another table started yelling about when Sara Bareilles came into her family’s restaurant back when she’d lived in Northern California, and Harmony’s eyes met Preston’s. For one moment—only the space between beats of throbbing piano music—the bar seemed suddenly silent and empty. Nothing but the quirk of Harmony’s brow and the slightly dizzy smile he felt answering it.
After that, and another round, things seemed to get hazy. He rarely drank, and never this much, not in ages. A few beers during dinners at Dani’s, sure, but he was the sole caretaker for Lacey most of the time; it would be irresponsible. Besides. You weren’t supposed to drink alone, that’s what they said. And he was always alone.
Except now he wasn’t, in this bar and this blur of impressions, listening to Harmony regale the group with more stories of the festival circuit, name-dropping celebrities to a chorus of gasps. Feeling someone pull him along when the group took to the dance floor again. Hearing shouts about how amazing his playing was, how they always knew he was fun, which was how he knew he was really drunk. Noticing Bonnie still over at the tables, tentatively flipping through pages of Harmony’s book. Wondering again, as Harmony gyrated her hips at one edge of their ring of dancing, about where things might lead if he ever dared to follow that pale strip of skin revealed between the vivid green of her dress. Finding with surprise when the music slowed that green teasing against him, under his hands, as someone danced close, her own hands resting on his chest, silver light thrown from the dance floor strobes threading through her golden hair, the smell of licorice and whiskey stronger than all the tequila and sweat and noise.
Pondering, as the room began to swing in three or four directions rather than only spinning a little, if he could sit down before he cracked his head against the concrete.
Those hands gripped him hard, bearing him up. His head nestled instead against a soft shoulder and that luminous hair. “Timber,” Harmony said.