at the card table in an open notebook. “Ideas,” he’d said once when I asked him what he was writing. But no matter what he was doing, when I made a small noise to announce my arrival, he always turned toward me, a slow smile growing on his face when he saw me. Maybe that smile meant nothing.
But it didn’t feel like nothing.
Sometimes, I caught him watching me as I studied whatever new change he’d made that day. Other times, I could swear he was staring at me, but when I glanced his way, he was doing something else. Looking at his phone or elsewhere.
Did I know Miles now?
I knew how he liked his coffee. That he laughed at stupid puns. I knew he was kind to the jobsite workers but firm with the contractor. I knew he obsessed over details and spared no cost when he found what he wanted for the club. I knew he loved the Saints and spent several hours a week mentoring the kids at Jordan’s music center. I knew he spent his free time looking at pet rescue sites because for the first time in forever, he felt rooted enough in one place to adopt a dog. He called his obsessive scrolling “window shopping,” and he showed me dog TikToks almost every time I came downstairs.
I knew that when he was thinking hard, his fingers tapped out chords on the nearest surface. I knew because I did the same thing. Usually, it was because I had an earworm and I was trying to figure out the notes. Lately, I’d had snatches of original melodies floating through my head. But when I watched his fingers moving across a tabletop, I knew where his head was.
Yeah, I knew him.
Love is a deep affection based on knowing them.
I felt a deep affection for him based on knowing him. And attraction was part of that affection.
A very strong attraction.
An attraction that made me slide my hands into my pockets and subtly shift away from him every time he was near. I didn’t want him to feel the heat coming off me or hear my heartbeats because they sounded so loud in my ears when he got too close. I didn’t want him to sense the way my lungs throbbed or how I could feel each individual hair on my head because the energy coming off him was so strong that it charged all my molecules.
So according to Siri...
“Dammit, Siri.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
I sighed and leaned against the head rest, watching more of the gray sky and brown water roll past. Then I rolled down the window and shouted the truth to the wind where it could be snatched up and carried away with no one else to hear it.
“I think I’m in love with Miles Crowe!”
The wind didn’t answer. Neither did Siri.
But neither of them had to say anything. The pit in my stomach said it all.
Chapter Twenty-One
The piano is here! Come down!
It was Miles’s usual afternoon text, and like every other day when he invited me down to inspect a change, I absolutely wanted to see it. But I’d been reeling since my epiphany on the bridge this morning, and if I ran down the stairs right now, Miles would see the truth on my face. How much I wanted him. I didn’t trust myself not to blurt it out.
For the first time in weeks, I texted back an excuse. Can’t today. Dinner plans.
The typing bubbles appeared and disappeared a few times on his end before a sad face emoji appeared.
Driving the causeway had made me an hour late for work, and that had put a ton of pressure on my schedule. Maybe that was why I’d done it; I’d wanted to force myself to be so busy that I couldn’t think.
I succeeded spectacularly and came home exhausted from running between appointments, barely making each. It hadn’t even worked that well. Miles was still the only thing on my mind, and I only knew of one way to deal with this that didn’t end up with me very, very drunk.
For the first time in almost two years, I pulled out my Moleskine notebook from my closet shelf. I’d been keeping song lyrics in it since middle school, but I’d written so few lyrics since I’d deleted my YouTube channel that I still had enough pages for fifty more songs. I hadn’t written in it since college.