Page 38 of Always Been His

The Boston air slaps me in the face, and the only thing in my head is that I fucking hate this city. Hate the air. Hate the brick. Hate the parking lot. Hate the four hours up I-95 I’m about to drive with her perfume still clinging to my shirt.

She rejected me. That’s the sentence in my head. The only one. It sits in my chest like a hot coin burning through my flesh, but the worst part is the song. She sang a song about coming home. About lover boy. About waiting for her. She looked right at me when she sang it.

Then she got in a car and left anyway.

My chest is caving. Every muscle in my back is pulled too tight to crack. My jaw is locked so hard my molars are going to be flat by Bangor. I haven’t breathed all the way out since she got off that stage.

I will never forget this feeling. I will never forgive Sienna Rhodes.

10

SIENNA

PRESENT DAY

“Excuse me,” I say into the mic, the band behind me silenced and buzzing with excitement. “I’m so sorry to stop the party, but I heard the birthday boy, Dominic Russo, is a huge fan of Echo.”

Whispers roll across the crowd. I cover my eyes from the lights and squint across the bar.

“Can I get the birthday boy to the front of the room?” I ask, leaning into the mic stand.

The room immediately splits in half, ushering the birthday boy to the front. Dominic comes through the gap looking like a man who has been ambushed in his own life. He is in a black button-down rolled to the elbows and a pair of dark jeans, the kind of effortless put-together a man doesn’t pull off without a sister in his ear. Iris is at his elbow with her hand laced through his, dragging him forward with a grin on her face that says she has been waiting for this exact moment all night. His cheeks are pink with whiskey, his hair is half-mussed from dancing, and his pupils are blown wide, scanning my face the way a man scans a face when his brain hasn’t done the math yet.

He stops about three feet from the stage.

“You are kidding me,” he says, rubbing his jawline. “You are fucking kidding me.”

I tip the mic toward him and grin. “Happy birthday, Dom.”

“Echo, what…” His eyes dart to Iris and then back again, the math finally hitting him in one delayed wave. “Hold on. Hold on. You’re⁠—”

“The worst-kept secret in Maine.” I sigh into the mic, sweet and theatrical, the crowd already laughing before I’ve finished the sentence. “I am Sienna Rhodes, but tonight, just for you, sweet boy, Echo is a present from Grayson Douglas, who, by the way, is somewhere in the back of this bar acting like he had nothing to do with it.”

Dom’s head whips around like he can spot Grayson in the dark and put him in a chokehold. Iris is openly cackling beside him, one hand still locked in his, the other thrown back over her head in delight.

“You knew?” Dom shouts at Iris. “You two did this?”

“Of course I knew!” Iris grins. “Sienna is my best friend like for life.”

“Babycakes!” Dom says, pulling her into a bear hug, and pressing a kiss to her forehead. “Thank you!”

Iris’s cheeks blush a pretty pink, and she pulls away from him with her eyes lowered, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear.

The opening synth of ‘Pieces of Me’ bleeds in behind me, slow at first, the band reading the room and letting it build, and I lift the mic to my mouth and close my eyes for the first note.

The whole bar sings the chorus back to me before I finish the first line.

Every single person in this room. The Maine locals who have known me since I was eight. The Brown crowd Dom flew in for the weekend. The bartender behind the bar. The guy in the Hawaiian shirt who used to coach Grayson’s JV baseball team. Twenty thousand stadium seats has never sounded the way forty people in a rented-out backyard bar in Maine sound right now, screaming the bridge at me with their drinks in the air and their faces tipped up, and Dom on his knees in the grass in front of the stage with his hands pressed to his mouth.

This is the part nobody tells you about. The high. The reason I haven’t been able to walk away from it for four years even when I wanted to with my whole chest. The way the air gets thinner. The way my own voice comes back at me out of forty mouths. The way the song stops being mine and starts being theirs and somehow becomes more mine in the trade.

God, I miss it.

I miss it so badly I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. I want to fight so Nicki doesn’t bulldoze me anymore, but the truth is, I love to perform. I love my fans. I love being here on stage, singing songs I wrote. This feels like breathing to me. A big gulp of fresh air.

I roll into the bridge and lift my hand to my brow to shade my eyes from the lights, finally seeing Grayson carve his way to the middle of the crowd.

Both hands shoved in his pockets, his lips quirked into a smirk, and his head nodding slowly to the beat. It makes my heart race. Those crystal-blue eyes drip down my body like rain on a summer day. They catch on the dip of my waist where the cropped shirt rides up. They catch on the bare strip of thigh between the hem of the leather skirt and the top of my lace-up boots. They catch on the cord of my throat every time I tip my head back into the high note, and his mouth pulls into a thin line, and I feel every single second of it like a caress.