Page 100 of No Longer Just Neighbors

He says it so simply that I believe him, and somehow that means more than all the praise that came before it.

I close the laptop before I can get overly emotional.

“I need air.”

Zander smiles. “That sounds dramatic.”

“Don’t ruin the moment.”

“I’ll try.”

We take our drinks outside and settle on my porch.

The night is clear enough that I can see more stars than I ever could from my old apartment in San Francisco. There’s still some traffic on the road, but not much, and somewhere a few houses away a dog is barking.

Zander stretches his legs out in front of him while I tuck one foot underneath me.

For a while we don’t talk about the cover at all. We just sit there with our shoulders touching, letting the night settle around us, until Zander finally says, “You hear things in the music that I don’t always know I put there.”

I glance over at him. “I can’t tell if that’s a compliment.”

“It is.” He’s not smiling now, and something in his tone makes me realize he means it.

He looks toward the street instead of at me. “When I write, I don’t sit down and decide what every line means. Half the time I don’t know until later. Sometimes somebody in the band points something out, or we play it live, and it suddenly feels different.”

I wait.

“You do that too. You’ll say something about a song, or draw something from it, and I realize you understood what I was trying to get at before I did.”

“Maybe because you put more of yourself into the songs than you realize.”

He looks at me then. “Probably.”

I smile, but he doesn’t look away.

“I mean it, Ruby. You understand the music in a way I didn’t expect.”

I look down at my drink, turning the glass slowly between my hands. “I listen to a lot of it.”