So Not My Thing - Melanie Jacobson Page 0,76

had to do a two-step to catch up. “Clarifying what?”

“Doesn’t matter. You don’t believe her anyway, right?”

“Right.” I wanted to press him on whatever Heather had added, but the whole reason I’d left was because I didn’t want to talk about what she’d told us in the first place, so why was I pushing now? If anything, I should be changing the subject. “So those were good sandwiches, yeah?”

He looked at me like he couldn’t figure out why I was lurching from one topic to the other like a drunk tourist. “Yeah, good sandwiches. Thanks for telling me about them.”

“Yeah, sure.” It fell quiet, and I wracked my brain for something else to talk about as we walked but it was blank, and Miles’s mind seemed to be somewhere else completely.

When we stopped in front of the Turnaround, he stared at the front door in mild surprise. He blinked. “Want to come see the new addition?”

“Raincheck? I think I’m going to go up and unwind,” I said. “See you tomorrow, maybe?”

“Definitely.”

I kept walking around the corner of the building to take my back stairs.

“Ellie,” he called when I was halfway there.

I turned around to find him smiling at me, his gaze fully present again.

“You got it bad,” he sang softly. I recognized the melody immediately. It was an Usher song he’d covered on Starstruck. “You got it, you got it bad,” he continued, smiling slightly.

I froze like I’d just been pantsed onstage at a half-time show. “It’s not funny,” I ground out. Then I whirled and sprinted for my stairs.

“Elle, wait!”

“Go away, Miles!” Then I rounded the building and took the stairs two at a time, racing into my apartment and slamming the door.

But it wasn’t hard enough to keep the humiliation from following me inside.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chloe didn’t come when I slammed the door, so I knew she wasn’t home. I threw myself on my bed and stared up at the ceiling. Why had he made us go to that stupid tarot reader? And why did she have to guess right—and out loud—while he was sitting right there?

Worst of all, how could Miles tease me like that? The snatch of melody ran itself through my mind over and over again. I hated it. I was prone to earworms, and the only way to get them out of my head was to play them all the way through, but I didn’t want this one running through my mind. Every time the words played on their loop—You’ve got it bad—a new wave of heat stung my cheeks. It was like an old episode of Grey’s Anatomy—Chloe and I had binge-watched it last summer—when this girl came in for a surgery because literally every emotion made her blush and she hated it.

I hated this. A new wave of embarrassment tortured me with each repeat of the melody.

“Gah!” I shouted at the ceiling.

I shoved in my earbuds and grabbed my phone, determined to play the whole song and get it out of my head. I listened to it on repeat for an hour, and the whole time, I saw Miles in my mind’s eye, singing it to me with a grin.

I hated feeling so exposed. Hated it. It wasn’t fair that my emotions were sitting out there, all naked and shivering.

I ripped out the earbuds and went down to the club, letting myself in through the kitchen. I wasn’t even sure why I was down there other than wanting to take back some control. Maybe if I saw the “new addition” on my own terms instead of seeing it on Miles’s terms, it would make me feel like we were more even.

I saw it the second I stepped into the club space. The baby grand, sitting on the stage, glinting even in the dim light of the security bulbs. Miles had shown me the lightboard the other day, so I went to the back corner and found the switch labeled “Stage spot 1.” It sprang to life, illuminating the piano.

It was impossibly beautiful, a Yamaha in classic black, waiting for someone to play it.

I couldn’t resist.

I sat down at the keys and played a couple of chords, the rich sound vibrating through my chest. It sounded even better than it looked, like God himself had designed it and placed it on this otherwise empty stage, a single perfect object shining in the beam of light.

It was such a reverent moment that my fingers picked out an old hymn almost on their own, and it

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