Calling for Snow by Heather McPeake

Author:Heather McPeake [McPeake, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

16.

In the weeks that followed that kiss on the moonlit rooftop, I couldn’t tell if I was avoiding him or he was avoiding me. I always seemed to catch glimpses of him climbing into his car or disappearing through his door. We’d spent years like this, so I’m not sure why this felt any different, but it was. Different. I found myself lying in bed, breathing quiet, the way you do when you’re listening for murderers or monsters, and hoping to catch snippets of his sounds next door. There weren’t many. For the first time in four years, he was a model neighbor. Quiet. Unobtrusive. Using his own recycling bin.

I told myself, when I started plugging in headphones and listening to those playlists, that it was just for the sake of normalcy. His piano chords had always been the background of my life here, and too many other things had changed, but this piece was as easy to find as hitting play. These verses felt like a long-kept secret, one I’d dragged out a thousand times in my car or with those headphones on, while I was headed across town for a shoot or holed up in my office editing projects, so no one would overhear me listening to them.

At first it was an idle curiosity. Maybe I wanted to prove to myself that he was all those uninspired things I imagined him to be. The thing is, he was good. He had this way of writing songs that made you wish you’d written them. Songs that made you want to go for a late-night drive like you’re sneaking out and seventeen, that felt like sliding into a favorite pair of worn-out jeans, that begged you to sit with a glass of wine on your porch when a storm’s rolling in. They found their way into my playlists like a guilty pleasure, and any time they came on when Joss or Nate was nearby, I skipped the track, because I didn’t want to explain.

I would never tell him this. I couldn’t take the self-satisfied smile that would creep across his face. Heat rose in my cheeks even thinking about it. How many girls had done exactly this? Listened to these lines and felt they knew him? Felt like he knew them? Still, I always came back to it.

We’re all just bones and strings, beating hearts and unsaid things.

It was my favorite line. I found myself singing it in the shower and jotting it into the margins of my notebook. I told myself it was because he’d tucked it into a melody that you couldn’t help but lean into, like a well-laid musical trap, just another one of his tricks. Really, though, I knew why it got me. In those secret kisses he had crept into my bones, pulled my strings so tightly I could still feel that gentle tug, like he’d wrapped one around his fingers when they threaded through my hair and hadn’t let go, until it became this constant line of tension between us.

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