Page 130 of Cadence
For a long moment, she doesn’t say anything, and that’s okay. She leans forward, forehead pressing gently to mine, eyes fluttering closed. I shut mine too, wrapping my arms around herand pulling her into my chest, sitting in the quiet, skin to skin, breath to breath.
“What about writing?” I ask, changing the subject to lift the pressure for her to feel like she owes me a reply.
Smirking, she tilts her head. “What about it?”
“I mean…how you got started.” I shift, trying not to sound like I’m suddenly paying attention because I’m invested in her now, because that would be bullshit. “I know we haven’t talked about it before, and we should’ve. Instead of me acting like an asshole and jumping down your throat, we should’ve been celebrating it, but—”
“But? Your ego was threatened,” she teases.
I half-huff, half-laugh under my breath, giving her waist a gentle squeeze and making her squirm without pulling away. She gasps, wriggling against me, her grin wide.
“I wasn’t threatened.” I match her smile. “I was intimidated.”
“You?” she asks, her eyebrows rising to her hairline. “Maddox Knox, intimidated?”
“The horror, right?”
Her smile dims as she looks down, her voice gentle. “I’ve done it since I was a kid. Writing short stories, angsty poems… I swear my high school teacher thought I had a problem because I kept killing off the main character.”
I rear back, my face screwing up. “Should I be worried?”
“Maybe,” she jokes, teeth clamping onto her lower lip.
I can’t resist, and I reach up, pulling it out with my thumb, dropping my hand to her chin and guiding her mouth to mine. She sighs, sinking into the kiss with slow, lazy strokes of her tongue.
“I was telling you a story,” she whispers, forehead resting on mine. Leaning back, I gesture for her to continue. “The poems moved to lyrics, and I was actually pretty good at it. Developed it a bit more during college, and one day I was showing Pennywhat I’d written, Dad overheard. Said one of his teams were looking for a new songwriter and asked if I wanted to give it a go.
“It was fun at first. Working with thesehugeartists who were selling platinum records and touring the world. I was starstruck that I got to work with them. But when it came out that I was the daughter of Kit Deveraux, the requests to work with me piled up. I should’ve been ecstatic. These celebrities wantedme. Only, they stopped caring about what I thought about the song and only wanted to know what the great Kit Deveraux thought.”
She pauses, inhaling slowly, her entire body seemingly deflating as she exhales.
“That made it lose its shine real quick.”
I nod, understanding more now, everything she did to keep her family and herself separate.
“I’ll only ever care about your opinions when it comes to my songs,” I say, trailing my finger lightly over her wrist.
She glances at me and bites back a smile. “Careful. Your sweet side is showing.”
Shaking my head, I grin. “Scary, isn’t it?”
We sit in the quiet, neither of us moving, simply staring at one another.
“Listen, about last night…” I clear my throat, reaching up to tuck her hair over one shoulder. “We didn’t use protection. I’ve never gone without before, and I haven’t been with anyone since we met…”
“I’m clean,” she whispers as her eyes meet mine. “And I’m on the pill. If that’s what you’re worried about.”
After a while, I stand, closing the fallboard of the piano, covering the keys and taking her hand in mine. “Come back to bed. You can play for me again in the morning.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Paige
Westayedathisplace for the next few days. Shut the world out, slept in late, cooked when we remembered. We read Penny’s diary one entry at a time, with me curled into Maddox’s side, reading out loud the parts that made me laugh, him taking over for the bits that made me cry. I told him stories he’d never heard, ones Penny wouldhateto know were being shared.
“She always did what she wanted, y’know?” I said one late night, the bedside lamp casting a soft glow over his features. “She found this baby skunk once, injured on the side of the road, and decided to bring it home. Dad went apocalyptic when it sprayed all over his home office. I swear he had to replace almost everything.”
He laughed, telling me things I didn’t know about my sister; about the person she was at work. And somewhere in all ofthat, the jagged edges started to smooth. The ache didn’t vanish, simply dulled.
