Page 19 of Guitars and Mistakes
“No you’re not! If you were, you wouldn’t have answered me!”
Dammit. He was right, but I hated that he knew me that well.
I stood up and stomped toward the door, half angry and half amused because it was mostly impossible to actually stay angry at a guy who was always so happy. And so oblivious. I threw open the door doing my best to scowl, though, because if nothing else, Matt needed to learn to pay attention to signs that said people didn’t want to be disturbed.
“What?” I snapped.
Then I saw who was standing behind him.
Matt gave me a sly and entirely too-proud-of-himself smile. “Oh, nothing. Just figured you’d be in here moping around and thinking about writing. And I remembered that you always do your best writing with a partner.”
He stepped aside to reveal Lila Potter looking awfully country in a jean skirt and cowboy boots, her top white and flowy. She cocked one perfect eyebrow at me and then looked past me into the room. Moments later she was actually brushing past me and strolling in like she’d been invited. She sat down, poured herself a glass of whiskey, and grabbed one of the guitars.
When she glanced up again, she looked like she had every right to be there.
“So,” she said. “What are we writing?”
LILA
“Ithink…” I said, jotting something down, then scratching it out and jotting down something else. “I think if we use something like this, it works better.”
Rivers strummed out the line of notes he’d just created and hummed, then sang the words I’d written. They weren’t a lot different from what we’d had before but I’d changed them to a different order and it felt more right.
“You’re right,” he murmured. “They sit in the music better that way. But what if…” He reached out and scratched out one word, replacing it with something else, then played the line again. When he turned his smile on me it was beautiful. Almost cherubic. “That’s it,” he murmured. “That’s it right there.”
I returned a gentle smile of my own. “You’re right. Now we just have to get the bridge done.”
“And we’ll have a whole song,” he finished, glancing down at the paper.
I looked down as well, and frowned at what we’d written. It was another love song, there was no doubt about that, but it was sort of disguised with anger and hurt and heartbreak. Lots of darkness with some love shining through. The hope of love, I corrected myself. The story of a boy and a girl who had known each other for ages and had lived through the worst pain possible but had come out the other side and managed to find each other again.
A couple that had separated and thought they’d lost each other. Cut off contact. Found other ways to live. Pretended to forget the other existed. Only to come back together in the end like they’d somehow planned it that way, although neither had thought it was possible. It was a story of young love and mistakes, miscommunications and betrayals, and the loss that came about when you didn’t appreciate what you had. It was a story of growing because you were forced to and learning how to stand on your own two feet when the person who had been your foundation was suddenly gone.
And that part broke my heart. Mostly because I could see how much it was breaking Rivers.
In the end, though, the lyrics had the couple finding each other again. Scuffed up and bruised from having been forced into the world on their own and not quite the same people they had been when they’d known each other before, but undeniably drawn together like magnets. Two people that life couldn’t keep apart.
Two people who had fought to find their ways back to each other, because they knew in their hearts that was where they belonged.
It was a redemption story made song, and I thought it was probably the most dramatic thing I’d ever written. Not that it had been all me; it had Rivers’ fingerprints all over it. And I wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to him to give him so much depth. Who had he been before he broke into the music business? What had helped to build him into the person he was?
Who had hurt him so much that he didn’t know how to believe in his own value?
Or was I just imagining that part of him?
“Give me a story from your childhood,” I said suddenly, letting my thoughts become words without bothering to think about it. “Something no one else knows.”
His mouth quirked, but the smile didn’t touch his eyes. “Something no one else knows? So that would mean something only I know?”
I returned the small smile. “I guess that would fit the definition, yeah. Though I’m not stuck on those parameters.”
He thought about it for a moment, his face going completely blank and then even darker. Whatever he was remembering, he didn’t like it much, and for a moment I thought maybe this had been a bad idea. But then he found something he did like and gave me a quick flash of a smile.
“I learned how to play guitar by studying books,” he said. “I didn’t have anyone to give me lessons but I was convinced that I needed to know it. So I went to the library every day, found books on music instruction, and practiced.”
Okay, that hadn’t been what I was expecting. “Did you have a guitar?”
“No way. No one to buy me one.”
