Page 102 of Two Hit Wonder

Then she stepped back up to the microphone.

"I've got one more," she said. "Something the band hasn't heard."

She felt Iona's attention sharpen. Felt Cam's head come up. Didn't look at any of them. Couldn't look at any of them. If she looked, she'd lose her nerve, and she was barely holding it together as it was.

The crowd went quiet. Waiting.

She closed her eyes and began to play.

She'd been writing songs for other people for fifteen years. Safe songs. Songs that could mean anything, sung by voices that weren't hers, attached to stories that had nothing to do with her own. She'd made good money. She'd won awards that sat in a drawer in her cottage. She'd hidden behind other people's names and other people's faces and told herself it was enough.

This wasn't one of those songs.

This song was specific. This song was undeniable. This song was about a woman with dark hair and blue eyes who laughed too loud and loved too easily and had somehow spent fifteen years carrying a torch for someone who didn't deserve it. This song was the one she’d been working on since she’d come back, the one she’d hummed accidentally in Iona’s kitchen, the one she hadn’t been able to write when she went back to Scotland.

This song was about Iona, and anyone listening would know it.

She kept her eyes closed. Her fingers finding the chords automatically, muscle memory and desperation working together. She sang the words she'd been too afraid to say out loud.

She'd spent fifteen years hiding. Protecting herself. Building walls so high that even she couldn't climb them. Convincing herself that she was safer alone, that love was dangerous, that wanting things too much would only end in destruction.

And now here she was tearing those walls down in front of forty thousand people. It was the most terrifying thing she'd ever done. More terrifying than the first time she'd stepped on a stage. More terrifying than the day she'd gotten sober. More terrifying than walking back into a room full of people she'd abandoned.

She was choosing to be seen. Choosing to be known. Choosing to say, out loud and in public, that she loved someone and wasn't going to run from it anymore.

The last chord faded into the air.

Silence.

She kept her eyes closed. Her heart was hammering so hard she thought the mic might pick it up. She couldn't move. Couldn't look. Couldn't do anything except stand there with her guitar and wait for the world to end, or begin, or do whatever it was going to do.

Movement. Someone stepping closer. The creak of the stage boards under someone's feet.

She opened her eyes.

Iona was right there. Right in front of her. Close enough that Maeve could see the tears on her face, the impossible brightness of her smile, the way her whole body was tilted toward Maeve like gravity had shifted.

"You idiot," Iona said, soft enough that only Maeve could hear. "You absolute idiot."

And then Iona kissed her.

Not a tentative kiss. Not a gentle kiss. A proper kiss, the kind that made a statement, the kind that said this is mine and I'm not hiding it anymore and I've been waiting fifteen years for you to figure it out.

The crowd erupted.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Backstage was still bedlam. Iona could feel the music in her chest. Actually, she could feel a lot of things in her chest. And she could feel Maeve’s lips on hers, the faint memory of it making her blood pound.

Someone shoved a bottle of water into her hand. Someone else was crying. Cam was doing some sort of victory dance that looked like she might be having a medical episode, and Ellie was wrapped up in Jake's arms so tightly that Iona wondered if she'd ever let go.

Ellie's kids were there too, all looking vaguely traumatized by the fact that their mother had just played to forty thousand people and also that two of their mother’s oldest friends had just made out on stage. Matt, who was twelve, kept making exaggerated gagging noises until Jake reached over and flicked his ear.

"That was incredible," Jake said over Ellie's shoulder. His eyes were wet. "You were incredible."

Ellie just held on tighter.

Cam appeared at Iona's elbow, phone in hand, grinning like a shark who'd just found a particularly slow swimmer. "You have to see this."