Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Brooke

The Livingston lodge was alive with activity, more guests in now as we came into Christmas week, but even as the dining room table was filled with people, the only person I could see was Nicole next to me, laughing with those golden eyes sparkling like some kind of goddess. I wasn’t even getting sensory overload right now—like the only person in the world was Nicole, and none of the other noise around the table even existed.

Daniel Livingston, sitting across from us, laughed as he took a piece of turkey from the platter and said, “You two are like Velcro. Soon as anyone puts you together, you just stick.”

He wasn’t wrong. We’d tried to resist it, but the whole town did their best to put us together, and once we finally made contact, we stuck. The past week and a half—since that night at Nicole’s cabin, where we made love well into the night and eventually fell asleep tangled up together in her loft with a view over the valley—we’d been inseparable, me heading down to Smoky Mountain first thing every morning, where Nicole would greet me with my café au lait already made. If no one else was there, she’d toss in a kiss across the counter, too, and every time, my heart soared like it was the first time.

I glanced over and met Nicole’s eyes, sparkling at me, and I laughed. “Should have known better than to stick us together,” I said, looking back to Daniel. “You’ve got your wife and your book now, you’re too busy to be a part of the troublemakers’ gang. Now you’re a target instead.”

He scratched the back of his head. “Guess I’ll watch my back.”

“Oh, come off it, you two,” my mom laughed, leaning across the table—Mr. and Mrs. Livingston had invited the entire Carston family, and the dining room was packed full, Livingstons on one end and Carstons on the other. Nicole and I sat side-by-side in the middle, like little liaisons for the families. “You can try to big yourselves up as little gang bosses all you like, but you two were the absolute sweetest little kids then and you’re the absolute sweetest adults now.”

“Lou’s right,” Mrs. Livingston chimed in, waving a tall glass of wine around. “You all remember the dedications they made to each other at graduation?”

I wasn’t a blusher any more than Nicole was, but that one got even me. I looked down, heat prickling in my face. Signs you were secretly gay and in love with your best friend—I’d made a public speech at graduation at our little community high school and dedicated my success and my acceptance into my music program to Nicole. Barely thirty minutes later, Nicole put on her own public speech she’d been planning without my knowing it, and dedicated her success and her acceptance into art school to me.

“Two little peas in a pod,” Daniel laughed, eyes sparkling. “You still match up together like peanut butter and jelly.”

“Do you think about things in terms other than food?” Nicole deadpanned.

“Well, I know I’m biased,” my mom said, “because she’s my daughter and I think she’s the best thing in the world—tied with all my other children and grandchildren, don’t get competitive, you all—but I think we can all agree Brooke being back has brought a lot of life back into Mountain Crossing.”

“Hear, hear,” voices around the table called, and Nicole met my eyes as she lifted her wine glass.

“Hear, hear,” she said, quietly enough only I could hear, and it sent warmth through my body.

“Oh, and when’s the next album coming out?” my niece Ella said, twirling a forkful of food idly, and I sighed.

“I’m working on it, Ella. These things take time.”

Ella shrugged. “Can’t be that hard. You just pick up a microphone and sing at it. I can do that. Give me two hours and I’ll have an album.”

I sighed with a small smile. “Sounds like you have a great career as a pop diva yourself ahead of you, Ella.”

After we finished dinner, Nicole gestured me away from the table, and we slipped away from the crowds and into the blissful quiet of the upstairs hall. Only once we got into a commons room with a bay window overlooking the lake and a Christmas tree in the corner dressed in gold did she take my hands in hers, and after a quick glance around the room to make sure we were alone, she pulled me into a kiss.

“I mean,” she said, a twinkle in her eye, “I think if we just put you in a room for two hours with a microphone, the result would sound pretty nice.”

I laughed. “Unlikely. It’d be an hour fifty-nine minutes of me complaining about not knowing how to make music, and one minute of trying guitar chords.”

“I’d listen to it. I like your voice. I could listen to it forever.”

There it was again—that little pang deep down in my stomach. As perfect as everything was with me and Nicole, as much as Mountain Crossing with her felt like a dream, I was still due to wake up from that dream before long. This was our last week together, and we hadn’t discussed what happened after this—just kicking the can down the road.

Nicole knew me well enough to drop her voice and say, “Is everything okay?” when no one else would have been able to pick out that something was bothering me. I turned away.

“I didn’t know you redid this room into a common space. It’s beautiful.”

“The downstairs can be a bit loud. Sometimes people want this space for a little bit more… quiet, you know?”

I breathed in deep before I found myself pulling my phone from my pocket. Without saying a word, I put on one of my favorite Christmas playlists, and of course it was Silent Night that came on. I set the phone down on a table, turning the volume up to fill the room, and I turned and offered Nicole my hand.

“My producers always told me I have two left feet, but I learned a little bit about dancing,” I said.

She beamed, putting her hand in mine. “Well, aren’t we suave, Brooke Carston?”

I snorted. “Hardly. Then I’d say something like, any chance I could have just one dance from the most beautiful woman in town?”

“You can dance with yourself all you like.”

“Well, now who’s smooth,” I said, but she followed me through the steps as we danced around the room, just holding each other close, breathing in the subtly sweet scent of her. “Thing about shutting me in a recording studio with a microphone—actually recording an album is only half the battle. Maybe a quarter, at most. Producing, mastering, that might bring it up to a third. The rest is busy work—meetings and managers and publicity events.”

She rested her head against my shoulder as we danced. “What about just going indie or something? You sound like you can’t stand the labels.”

“What, embrace the singer-songwriter lifestyle?” I sighed, just focusing on the steps. “I don’t think I’ve really got what it takes for that,” I said, finally.

“Oh, nonsense. You’re amazing.”

“No, I mean it. I don’t understand publicity, marketing… any of that.” I shrugged. “It’d be fun, but I don’t know how much money I’d make, you know?”

She planted a kiss on my shoulder as we turned to the music, and it made my heart flutter. As much as we’d spent the past week and a half getting into much more intimate things than that, it was all the little gestures like that that made my head spin, made me wonder what it would be like to run away and just stay here like everyone wanted.

“Let’s take a crack at that song of yours together,” she murmured against my shoulder.

“What song?”

“The one you’re always working on. I know that look on your face. I see it when you’re hunched over your laptop, and so when I see you making that face other times, I know you’re still working on the song in your head. Share it with me. We’re a power team.”

There was something really deeply fascinating about being known to the degree Nicole knew me. It was a little terrifying knowing I couldn’t hide anything from her, but the fact that all she did was support me and guide me through all those things she saw in me—it felt like skydiving, a terrifying sensation but finding deep down it was safe and secure the whole way through. Learning to trust her through the freefall.

“We’re a power team when it comes to causing problems together,” I said, and she laughed, stopping the dance when the song came to a close and pulling me into a quick kiss.

“And we’re a power team at fixing them, too! You trust me, right?” She batted her eyelashes at me, and I scrunched up my face.

“Oh, put the eye-batting thing away. You know I’m weak to that.” I sighed. “All right. We’ll give it a look together. I need my guitar, though. Tonight?”

She squeezed me. “I don’t have any other plans, and if I did, they’d be way less important than you. Let’s go right now.”

That was another thing about Mountain Crossing as opposed to Charlotte—people here didn’t really have plans, they had suggestions. And even more surprising, people treated each other as a priority. Nicole made me feel important enough, compared to the crushing pace of life in the industry, I kind of couldn’t get enough of it.

We snuck out through the back to get to my car—if we were caught slipping out to get away together, they’d assume we were eloping—and the next thing I knew, we were down at Smoky Mountain, where Nicole unlocked the front door and locked it back behind us, turning on just the dimmest lights. A few minutes later, she and I sat at the corner table with the guitar on my lap, my laptop open on the table, my café au lait on the table next to Nicole’s peppermint tea and a cinnamon roll big enough for the both of us, and she listened with that intent look on her face as I played through the tabs I had.

“I wanted it to convey something,” I said, after playing through the first time. “Quiet, I guess. Hard to convey the idea of quiet with a song.”

“I get the feeling quiet has a personal meaning in this case.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Guess so. Quiet is like…” I sank back in the sofa, staring up at the rafters overhead. “Quiet is loud. In the quiet, you hear all the little sounds that make up the background, and you can lose yourself in it. Quiet is noticing the things that were already there all along, but the world was so big and so busy and so loud that you missed them all. You know—I have really sensitive hearing,” I said, not even following what I was saying anymore. “It’s never quiet for me. I hear the littlest things in the world, and when sounds all add up, it gets to be too much. But when it’s what other people would call quiet—that’s when you start to actually hear, you know?”

She tilted her head. “You start to actually hear once it’s quiet?”

“It’s like those people who go from riches to rags. You have millions of dollars, and what does a fancy luxury car mean to you anymore? What’s a little yacht here, a designer dress there? But you lose it all, and suddenly, when someone gives you their old junker car that takes a few tries to start, you actually get to know that car. You really see it.”

“This isn’t sounding like a good thing so far.”

I nudged her side. “Run with it, Nicole. You own a million different things and you can replace them on a moment’s notice, then none of them really mean anything to you. Once all you’ve got is that old junker and you’re hoping it holds on for dear life—I think then you really experience having a car more than you ever did when you didn’t give your collection of cars a second thought.”

“You learn to cherish the sounds…”

“Really fully experience them.” I breathed in deep. “It’s quiet out here in Mountain Crossing. But it isn’t silent. You hear the birds, you hear snow crunching. Somewhere far in the distance, you hear children laughing. You hear the wind over the mountain. I think my auditory processing is a gift as much as it is a curse sometimes. I think it’s just the universe telling me to find the beauty in one little thing, instead of trying to have it all and losing sight of everything in the process.”

She sank against my side, running a hand down my arm. “Brooke Carston, if you think you wouldn’t make it in the indie world, I’m afraid you’re more wrong than that time you told me I’d fall in love with Johnny Winslow.”

I laughed. Deep down, I’d said that because I’d been jealous of whoever got her, and I’d been looking for someone to resent. Of course, I wouldn’t have told her that, and I wasn’t going to tell her now it was because I’d been in love with her. “If I’d known you were gay then, it would have given me some very confusing feelings.”

She leaned in and planted a kiss on my cheek, staying there draped over my side after. “No need to complicate things anymore.”

I turned back to my computer. “Just because I read too much into things and come up with poetic explanations for everything doesn’t mean I’ll make it as an indie.”

“It’s the same with what you said about Silent Night,” she said, trailing her fingers down my side. “To you, the most important thing isn’t having the world. It’s having one little thing that means the world.”

I fell quiet, looking down at the floor. Outside, laughter and chatter, and the faint sound of Silver Bells playing, rolled by along Main Street.

“I think you’ll make it as an indie artist because you have no other choice. You have a beautiful, unique soul that’s unlike anyone else’s, and trying to squeeze that down to fit into a label’s idea of what music should sound like… I think it does an injustice to all the things you are, Brooke.”

Nicole and I pulled together like gravity, two celestial bodies orbiting around one another. I wondered how on earth I could fall in love with a woman when I’d only just seen her again this month, but it was obvious I’d already fallen years and years ago. Back when I’d met her at kindergarten, offering her a dandelion I’d dug up from the corner of the playground telling her she was pretty and I wanted her to have a pretty flower—maybe it had been love at first sight.

“Maybe,” I said, quietly. “So… let me try some things for this song I don’t think my producer would like, and you can tell me if it’s any good.”

She squeezed my arm, smiling at me and meeting my gaze with those sparkling eyes I’d spent so many years gazing into. “That sounds amazing, Brooke Carston,” she said, and I was inclined to agree.