Chapter Twenty-Six
Rafe
The next day, I’m in a recording booth in the studio, headphones plastered to my head and a weight still in my lungs. I’m doing my best to move through it, but there’s not much more I can do other than to throw myself into my music. It always seemed to work before, but now, it’s a temporary bandage to my heart as it bleeds out.
Sparrow texted me, and I responded. But the uncertainty of when I’ll ever see her again has me reeling.
We’ve gone over this song at least a dozen times, and each time, my studio sound engineer, Evan, has something to change or add. Some inspiration hits, and he’s ready to capitalize on it. Normally, I’d be down for the creative flow, but today, I just want to finish this song and keep moving.
In between recording sessions, I’ve been hurriedly planning a way to show Sparrow that I’m still here if she wants me. While I’ve sorted out the details, I’ve been doing everything I can not to hop on a plane. Her last message had me looking up flights.
And somehow, during the last song, the air has shifted. It’s almost like I can feel her near me, which I know is impossible. The click speeds up a bit, and I feel the energy pulse through my body. With Graham’s and Lily’s help (separately, of course), there’s a possibility that Sparrow and I may have another chance at this—a real chance from the start.
“Can we try it again?” Evan says, the sound of the click still keeping time in my ears.
I run my hand through my hair. “Are you sure? Because the last take felt like the best one so far, and I know that I’ve struggled a bit today, but I just want—”
“The full kind of love.”
I shake my head, the visceral reaction of hearing the angelic voice—her angelic voice—in my ears. I look toward the booth, but the glare isn’t showing me a clear picture.
“What—what did you say?” I ask into the void, a hint of desperation lacing my voice.
“Rafe.” I hear her again. “I want the full kind.”
I rip the earphones off my head and race out the door to the sound booth, where, standing near the digital mixer, is the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Her eyes are full, her chocolate depths swimming with hope.
I brace myself on the door frame and wait. Everyone else has left, sneaking away to give us a moment, no doubt. “Sparrow?”
She nods and takes a step closer, then one more. I do the same, and we’re now inches apart. My heart is hitting my rib cage, and for a moment, my voice is gone as I hungrily take her in.
“Rafe?” She reaches for me, and I feel the cracking in my heart.
I’d built a wall around it when I left her town, piece by piece, but now it’s falling, brick by brick. I can almost hear the demolition between my ribs. Since we seem to do the silent thing so well, I reach toward her and let out a deep breath when our skin makes contact. She inhales sharply, and then her shoulders drop. We’re home. I allow my palm to mix with hers and slowly slide it up her arm until my hand is curved around the back of her neck. She’s shaking, and I can’t help but notice I am too.
Her breathing is shallow, like she’s waiting to see what I’ll do next. Now that she’s with me, I wonder the same thing myself. I reach my other hand forward and almost moan when my palm moves over the curve of her hip bone and up and around to catch her waist. Holding her and feeling her near me has my spine humming. Her hand reaches out and brushes against my chest, settling over my heart. I grin at this. This would be where she would go first since she owns it anyway.
Not wanting to let her go but needing to see her fully, I slide the hand near her neck up, pushing the pad of my thumb across her blushing cheek to catch a falling tear.
When I lightly lift it from her face, I’m met with the eyes I’ve been dreaming about. Her eyes. The ones that are melted chocolate mixed with spun gold. Another tear falls down her face, and her eyelashes flutter. She opens her mouth to say something, but nothing comes out. Instead, she lets out a little cry, and suddenly, she’s clinging to me like I’m her favorite thing in the world.
Sparrow’s arms are tight around my neck, her body pressed against mine. She buries her face in my neck, her eyelashes brushing against my collar bone as she nestles in. She’s as close as she could possibly get to me, and I’m holding on to her for dear life. I nuzzle my nose into her shoulder and clutch onto her like she’s my everything. Because she is.
With one arm pinning her waist against me, the other caressing her, and my whole hand covering the base of her neck, I hold her.
She smells like butter and sugar and every future I could ever imagine for myself that’s worth writing about. I whisper over and over again all the things I’ve been wanting and waiting to tell her. How much I love her. How much she means to me. How she deserves everything that I could ever give her. How I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make her believe how valuable she is to me. How she’s everything I could’ve dreamed of. I switch back and forth between French and English, knowing she’ll understand me. It feels good to be fully myself and have her still hold on.
We’re both a blend of two worlds that happened to collide. And now we get to create a new world together. One where she knows she’s my favorite forever.
When we finally release our hold enough to look into each other’s eyes, Sparrow reaches up and gently wipes the tears that have fallen down my own face. “Rafe, I’m so sorry,” she whispers, her eyes searching mine.
“I’m sorry too,” I whisper back, my voice rough to my own ears. I brush a section of her hair away from her face and slowly tuck it behind her ear. “I should’ve told you sooner.”
She nods but then says, “Yes, I was upset. But I do understand.” She reaches up to play with the back of my hair, her kindness pulsing through her fingers. “But I also should’ve told you how I felt. That night—when you left.”
I tip my chin quickly to show her I know what she means. My brow furrows. “Why didn’t you?”
She traces the line I’ve created in my forehead, and I don’t miss the way her fingertips trace the scar over my eyebrow. She focuses on it before her eyes drop to mine, the warmth in them removing any remains of fear I have as to whether or not she’ll let me close this time.
“Because I loved you too much.” A grin hovers on one side of her face, her dimple starting to shine through. “Oh, my darling Rafe. Do you still doubt how valuable you are?”
I don’t waste another second before I lean down and catch her perfect mouth with mine. It tastes even better now that love has been spoken between us. It’s sweet and soft until I feel her make a hum that vibrates across my bottom lip. I take the kiss deeper, lifting her up until she’s wrapped her legs around my waist. I set her on the nearby stool, her hand sliding on the console. A weird music mix is now playing throughout the studio, but I can’t bring myself to care as I allow my hands to rediscover the curve of her waist while her hand wanders across my chest and back before sliding up to play with the ends of my hair.
“Keep it PG, you two!” I hear from outside the door.
And we do (mostly). But we’re desperate for each other, the distance and space and honesty creating a new sense of excitement between us. After being starved of this kind of love for so long, we’re so darn hungry. It’s familiar and altogether new. It’s heartbreaking and healing. It’s her and I choosing to move forward. Together.
∞∞∞
We spend the next three days enjoying Nashville. Since Sparrow has never been and Evan has an extra spare room, I want to show her pieces of my world that she’s never seen before. We’ve been visiting every coffee shop possible for “research” and stopping by every ice cream shop and pastry shop possible. Sparrow even tried to convince one of the owners that they needed to add French muffins to the menu. They gave her their card.
Mostly, since I told Evan I’m leaving to head back to Birch Borough as soon as possible, we’ve been holed up in the studio. And it’s the best feeling in the world. I have my girl and my music, and it’s so much different than before.
Not wanting her out of my sight, Sparrow has happily agreed to sit in the recording booth with me, so I get to sing while looking at her. After all, the songs are really about her anyway.
When we finally land in Boston again, with her hand in mine, we take a ride to the North End before catching our train home. We wheel our luggage through narrow streets to get some fish and chips and look out over Boston Harbor as the sun sets over the ocean. With my arm wrapped around her, I realize this is what it feels like when you start to feel whole.
∞∞∞
When we step off the plane in Boston, the surprise of my life is finding my parents waiting with a car. I don’t know what methods they used to get the information on my travel plans, but it’s not beneath them to do such a thing. My mother dressed in an elegant dress, her hair long and flowing, her face familiar and yet hollow, despite the work she’s had done to imply that she’s much younger than her age. My father stands in a suit, his aftershave carried on the wind. I smelled them before I saw them.
Their driver opens the car door, and my father motions for me to get in. I move a step closer to them before placing my guitar case near my feet, shaking my head. They don’t even notice Sparrow, who has wrapped one of my hands between her own.
“What are you doing here?”
My father looks bored. I would think he didn’t care except for the bit of red coloring that’s now creeping up his neck. He’s irritated, but he can’t lose his cool in public. There could be a video taken, evidence obtained by anyone carrying a cell phone, which is ...everyone. We don’t normally have our standoffs in public, so I decide to use this to my advantage. There’s no way I’m getting into the car.
“I have a train to catch.”
“Yes, you do,” my mother says, her accent creeping through her words. They don’t like to speak French in public, and I’m tempted to speak French just to spite them. But they’re the reason I was in America and learned how to get rid of every trace of my French accent. It’s possibly more annoying to them than anything else. “You’re coming home with us. To Paris.”
I shake my head again. “Quit doing that,” says my father, his jaw clenched.
“I won’t be going back to Paris. Not without the woman I love.”
Their eyes briefly scan over Sparrow, and I feel a growl in the back of my throat.
“The woman you ...?” My mother takes in a breath. “Noémie is getting married! You can’t possibly be thinking of breaking up a wedding. Especially all these years later!”
I shake my head and roll my shoulders back. “She’s not the woman I love.”
Suddenly, it dawns on my mother that I’m speaking about the woman beside me. Her posture stiffens. They are controlling if nothing else.
“Another one to steal your songs, hmm?” My father raises a brow, smug with himself for trying to get a jab in while I’m already vulnerable. Too bad for him that he doesn’t realize how much my past doesn’t affect me the way it used to.
I wrap my arm around Sparrow’s waist. “She would never. Are we done here? If you stay much longer, you’re going to get soot on your clothes.” At my cue, a bus pulls up nearby, releasing some passengers, the smell of exhaust filling the air. My mother waves it away like she does all her problems.
“When are you going to come to your senses?” she asks.
“When are you going to stop following your thirty-three-year-old son around, trying to get him to do what you want?”
My mother leans back. I’d feel bad for her, except her narrowed eyes tell me she’s already plotting another way to strike. And this is how it goes. Back and forth, back and forth. They’ve built me to fight with them, and I’m suddenly ...tired. I’m not doing this anymore. I’m a grown man, and whether they like it or not, I can make my own way.
Sparrow hasn’t said anything, her presence enough to clear my mind. I lean down to pick up my guitar without letting go of her, finally ready to say goodbye to the people who can’t get out of their own way.
“If you would just do what you’re told, we wouldn’t be having this problem.” My father steps closer to me, his anger radiating through his own designer suit.
I nod. “You’re right. We wouldn’t be having this problem. We’d be having another problem.” I pull my shoulders back and grip my guitar case’s handle and Sparrow’s hand tighter.
“What problem is that?” my mother whispers.
I look at her with a bit of empathy. I don’t know what happened in their lives to make them this way. They don’t seem to realize they’ve created my desire to run. “Me. You don’t see me. You never have.”
She scoffs, her heels clicking on the concrete as they hurry toward me. I notice the hollowness around her eyes, the crease lines that should be more prominent but have been smoothed by years of surgeries and treatments. For a moment, I wish for her to hug me, to tell me that I’m worth their attention, just as I am.
Instead, she rolls back her shoulders and looks at me, a chill settling behind her eyes. “You didn’t want to be seen. Isn’t that the real problem?”
I lower my gaze. “No, Mom.” I never call her Mom. “The real problem is that you still think an image is the solution. And loving me means outsmarting me. Outperforming me. That my love is a game that you have to win.” I look at her, compassion filling my frame. “Except, I never wanted to play. The only thing I’ve ever want to play is music.”
We turn away from them and have only walked a few steps when I hear my dad’s voice pierce through the chilly air. “Do you know what you’ve lost?”
Without looking back, I project my voice to be loud enough for them to hear even though I’m facing the other way.
“No.” I shake my head, looking into Sparrow’s eyes. “I know what I’ve found.”