“You said you wrote a song.”
His eyes were on my breasts, and then they jerked back up to my face. “I did. But I think I want to kiss you again.”
His hands slid up into my stupid brown bob, and then he was kissing me for real. Slow and languid, as if we had all night to explore this. Rather than the few hours that my mom was away on her girls’ night out. I wanted to live in this moment forever. But I was scared. We hadn’t gone all the way yet. We’d barely done anything, and though I wanted it all with him, could see our entire future, I still hadn’t agreed to it yet.
“Okay. Okay,” he said with a laugh as I scooted back again.
I lay down on my bed and watched as he tuned his acoustic guitar. He shot me one heart-melting grin and began to play. The words falling from his lips.
Tears welled in my eyes as I realized that this wasn’t just a song; this was a song about me. This was about him seeing me. Really seeing me. Not just the weird girl at school, but the girl I was when I was with him. The girl that belonged to him.
His eyes left the guitar and fixed on my face. As we stared at each other across the short distance, I knew with teenage certainty that I would love him forever.
I blinked, and the memory dissolved in my mind. Campbell was still singing, but he was looking at me as if he knew exactly where my mind had gone. The same unshed tears that had come to my eyes at seventeen were there again today.
He ended the chorus and let the rest of the music fade away. He still stared at me. Waited for the moment to break or to see if I would give him exactly what I had given him that first night. My whole heart.
Except that my heart was no longer whole. It was a broken, shredded thing that he’d destroyed all on his own. So, though the music was a spell that lingered between us, it was also a lie. Because no matter how much he had seen me then, he didn’t even know me now. And he couldn’t fix any of that.
“Blaire,” he said with concern, reaching out for me.
I yanked away from him on instinct. I swiped at my eyes and rushed to the camera. I ended the recording and breathed heavily as I tried to get myself back under control.
“Do we need to do it again?”
I watched the video to see what in the hell had even happened. I hadn’t been singing or even lip-syncing. I didn’t even look at the camera. In fact, neither of us looked at the camera. He was playing, and then all of a sudden, he looked up at me, sang to me, existed for me. We had eyes only for each other. And then the moment ended. He’d finished singing, and a look of terror had come into my eyes. A rabbit seeing a fox.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
“That bad?”
I turned off my phone. “No.”
“Can I see?”
I dipped my chin to my chest, and then with a sigh, I handed him my phone to watch it.
After a second, he said, “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“We can do it again.”
I shook my head. There was no point. I couldn’t handle trying one more time. I probably couldn’t even use this. No one could look at that video and not see emotions swirling between us. Even if I were a great actor, which I was not, people would still say there was too much chemistry for us to fake all of it.
“It’s fine.”
“Blaire…”
“What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked to change the subject as I took my phone back.
“I wrote a new song,” he said slowly.
I turned finally to face him. “Okay.”
“It’s based off of what you said to me. About how, to me, you were only ever invisible or everything. That there was no in-between.”
“You wrote another song about me?” I said incomprehensibly.
“Yeah.” He ran a hand back through his hair. “I haven’t been able to write. Critics hated the last album, and I think they got into my head. Everything I’ve written since, I have absolutely hated.”
“They can’t all be bad.”
“My manager thinks they’re good, but what does he know? They all sucked…until this song.” He sat back down on the stool, fiddled with the guitar, and began to play.
It was the melody that he had been playing earlier that I thought was catchy. I’d missed the lyrics then, but I immediately decided the tune was going to be a hit. And then when he started singing, I actually sat down because it was so good.
I tried really hard not to smile as he belted out about the invisible girl who was everything to him. I tried to remind myself that it was just a song. I’d just happened to be the inspiration for it. It had nothing to do with me. But it was hard to differentiate. It was hard to hear him sing words that I’d said to him in hate sang back to me in love.