CHAPTER 47

It was not about hearing him sing.

It was about feeling him.

I knew the song. It was our song. It was an acoustic melody on the beach before it was an LA-recorded hit. It was his heart and my soul before it was America’s latest teenage jam.

It was something.

It is something.

And I listened. As he told me his heart beats for me the way I breathed for him, I listened. As he sung to me how his skin vibrated at my touch, I listened to him describe how mine buzzed for him.

And I was nineteen. All over again, I was a teenage girl, falling hopelessly in love with a guy with a guitar.

I was just a girl, falling innocently in love with someone who was just a boy.

I closed my eyes and fell away with the melody. He’d hum it so often. Finally I let myself remember. I let myself recollect how he’d hum random parts whenever our hug would last a minute too long. I let myself feel how he’d sing my name without saying it, and how every syllable of his unspoken words would cascade through me like a nev