I’m so wrapped up in the music I don’t even notice when Rush finishes and Hollis grabs a bottle of water from the mini-fridge before heading in.
“Scoot over, Red,” Rush commands and I make room for him on the couch. With the four of us we’re squished together, but at least I don’t react to any of these three like I do Hollis who makes my very blood boil.
“Red?” I ask him. “Because of my hair?”
He grins, stretching his fingers. “That and your fiery personality. I can already tell you’re a force to be reckoned with.”
“I’m glad you’ve noticed,” I joke.
“Shh,” my dad hushes us.
Inside the booth Hollis takes a seat on the stool, sliding the headphones over his ears and angling the microphone toward his mouth.
He waits for the thumbs up from my dad and then the background music begins to play. The beat wraps around Hollis’s voice and I’m lost. Drowning in it. I feel the song in my soul. It pierces right through me.
Hollis closes his eyes as he sings.
“They say she’s bad news, no good for me.
They say to stay away but I say no.
Those midnight eyes will drown you, they say.
They say, they say, they say.
They don’t know those midnight eyes hold a promise.
A promise of something more.
Where they see darkness I see light.
Her midnight eyes are my salvation.
My promise.
My promise of something more.”
My heart jumps as he sings. His voice is not at all what I expected. The song softer and more a ballad than the rock I expected. With his raspy melancholy tone it’s perfect. Chills snake up my spine and I shiver. Beside me Rush gives me a small smile as if he knows what the song is doing to me.
But he can’t know.
He can’t know how it breathes life into me.
How I feel every word reverberate through my body.
“Be afraid, they tell me.
Those midnight eyes will swallow you wide.
She’ll swallow you whole.
Lies, they’re all lies, lies spoken from fear.
She uses her beauty as a weapon, those midnight eyes piercing the soul, but I see her.
I see her, the real her, the true her.
They can say what they want to say, but I know, ohhh I know, those midnight eyes will never hurt me.”