Page 43 of Yours, Finally

The place, until then only playing some background music, broke into the first karaoke song of the night. Someone started singing a recent pop song that had made the rounds on the radio.

Vi shifted her eyes to the stage, then back to me, and humor lit her sight. It brought a small smile to my lips.

She let out a resigned chuckle. "We can do it. Right? Just spend a casual, friendly night at karaoke. We'll sing a few songs, have a drink, then go home. We can totally do it. We're friends!"

I scoffed, allowing my amusement to show through. "Absolutely. We can be friends. I'll sing a song or two, you will, too, and we'll call it a night."

"Then when Gabe and Lina ask, we can tell them we had fun, and it'll be the truth. Nothing suspicious."

"Excellent." I snorted. "Get comfortable. I'll go get us drinks."

Twenty minutes later, with beers and a shareable plate of loaded fries between us, we searched the song binder for options.

Her eyes roamed the plastified pages. "I say we have fun. Let's sing a couple of songs and eat these fries— An innocent good time between adults who only have platonic feelings for each other."

I sighed. "That's what the doctor ordered. Getting joy out of singing in front of people. Let's add… zest."

"Zest! Joie de vivre! That's what we're here for. Nothing else."

"I think it's a boy band kind of night. What do you think?" I flipped through the pages and found B. "Maybe I'll start with Backstreet Boys. But we can do *NSYNC, or go older and do New Kids on the Block. Hell, we can even go British and try Take That."

"Let's make it a BSB night." She laughed. "If you sing something like ‘I Want It That Way’, I will not read anything into it."

I gave her a playful smile and found the code for the song. "Good to know, because I'm definitely singing that one first."

I texted the code and grinned at her.

"Oh, that's fun." Mirth still shone on her gestures. She flipped back to the B section herself. "I'm going to start with ‘Quit Playing Games With My Heart’. For no reason at all."

I let laughter explode out of me, loud and free, and the grin she offered in return filled me with sparkly, grateful awe.

I didn't even remember to be nervous, when we sang the songs while pointing at each other.

Drinks half drunk and plate half full, Vi took to the stage for her second song.

"This song is for no one in particular," she said into the mic, right before 'I Wanna Be With You' started playing, and she sang her heart out.

Even through lyrics about wanting each other and waiting, fully making fun of our situation, we had fun. We cheered, we laughed, and we kept choosing songs that we could have dedicated to each other on a late night radio show.

So I sang 'All I Have To Give', and she sang 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart'. We had a couple of beers, at the end, and finished all the food. It was a few hours of conversation and banter and laughter and, by the time we decided to call it a night, my chest was light enough to forget Vi and I had been stuck for weeks.

In fact, in my mind, I kept thinking of it as a date.

"Did you call a driver?" I asked her as we walked out of the building. "We can share mine if you like."

"I did. They'll be here any minute now."

"I'll wait. Mine will be here in about ten."

She nodded and gave me a brilliant smile; a free one, like she rarely directed my way. "How did you like it tonight? It didn't seem like it was that hard to sing."

"It wasn't." I grinned back. "I had lots of fun."

"Now we don't even have to lie, if Gabe or Lina ask."

"That feels good. We really had fun. We did it, Vi. We were friends tonight."

"Singing songs that we did not mean." Her smile widened.