The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (The Devils #2)(51)

I laugh. “God, you’re the worst.”

He just grins. “That song is such a trainwreck.”

I’m still laughing, still terrified, as I make my way up to the stage. Which isn’t even a stage, really, just a two-foot-high platform big enough for four people at most.

A guitar is placed in my hands and I mess around tuning it simply to drown out the noise in my head. I’m tempted to simply play something old, something from the 70s that my father taught me. Fleetwood Mac, maybe, or The Eagles. It’s an older crowd. They’d like it and I could slink away.

But Josh is right. This is a chance to be that other version of myself, the real one I’ve spent so many years hiding, so I start with one of the songs I used to play, an original I submitted which led to my first record deal but never made it onto the album. Not sexy enough, Davis said. I should have known right there we had painfully different visions for my career, not that it would have mattered. I was hungry and desperate back then. I’d have sung anything if it led to a record deal. I was tired of being broke, yes, but mostly I wanted something to throw in my mother’s face after the years she spent telling me I was wasting my life.

I’ve played it so often that it comes now with no thought, but there are goosebumps on my arms. When the words are your own, it’s like standing naked in front of the world with no idea if they’ll cheer or boo at the end.

I play the final notes, and the applause comes fast and loud and sharp. It’s the sort of applause that comes when you’ve surprised people, in a good way. I remember this feeling from when I was a teenager, and the quiet hope that accompanied it: that maybe I was slightly less useless than I’d been led to believe, than I’d allowed myself to believe.

Before the applause starts to die down, I turn and try to hand the guitar back to the musician, but he waves me off. “You play way better than I do,” he says.

I hesitate, but then I glance at Josh and he smiles at me, and that’s all it takes. I sling the guitar strap over my shoulder and face the crowd again.

I play two more of the early songs, and then, with a deep breath, I strum the first few chords of the new song, trying to get a feel for it again.

I’ve played around with it, of course, but I’ve never performed it before and the two things are night and day. I’ve always kept the vocals simple and spare, whispered almost, because I’ve been singing them in hotel rooms, terrified of being overheard. “Umm, this is something I’ve been working on, but it’s a little rough,” I warn the crowd. “Bear with me here.”

My heart beats hard. It’s not simply that it’s mine. It’s that this song is more earnest and heartfelt than anything I’ve ever sung. It’s about knowing exactly the life you’d choose if you could step out of the one you were in, and it reveals more about me than I’d like to share.

I begin tentatively, still considering ditching out even as I begin to sing. But toward the end of the first verse, it suddenly starts to feel right. As if I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing, and it can’t go wrong because…I love this song. I love it more than I’ve ever loved anything, and in a way, it doesn’t even matter if anyone else feels the same.

The crowd is on the edge of their seats. I can feel the excitement in the air. Those baby fine hairs on the back of my arms stand on end as if electrified as I head toward the chorus. And then I look at Josh and realize something: I wrote these words about him. I thought I was writing it about my career, about how I’d choose a different life. But no, it was simply him. He’s what I would choose.

The song is still brief, since I’ve only got two verses. It ends quickly and then people are jumping to their feet, clapping for me, and it means more than any standing ovation in a sold-out arena ever has because they’re actually clapping for me. For Ilina Andreyev, the nobody daughter of a fuck-up who is falling for the wrong guy.

“That was amazing,” says a woman, gripping my arms as I walk off the stage to get back to Josh. “Don’t let all that talent go to waste.”

I smile at her but I’m shaking, so high from the experience I feel like I can barely put one foot in front of the other. I stumble forward, past all the back pats and the shoulder slaps and fall against Josh, standing near our table, like he’s home base, like nothing can hurt me if he’s near.

His arms wrap around me. “You were perfect, Ilina Andreyev,” he says quietly.

I could argue that it could have been better, that I went into the first verse too late, but I don’t. In an imperfect life, it—and this moment—are as close to perfect as I’ve ever come.

We walk back to our wing slowly. The breeze rustles through the palms, the crickets chirp. I wish we were running in the morning but our flight leaves too early.

“So what are you gonna do?” he asks as we walk into the elevator.

I blink up at him, unable to imagine any question he isn’t the center of. Am I going to tell him how I feel? Am I going to think about him every single day after we leave here? “Do?” I repeat.

“With the song,” he says, and something inside me deflates. But really, what did I think he might ask me? “Are you going to push to add it to the new album?”

I give him a sad smile. In order for that to happen, I’d have to fight for it, and then it would get turned into overproduced garbage, and I’d have to share the writing credit with four assholes the record label brings in to ‘help’ and it’s my song. Plus, it would never be a single. It would be the song everyone skips past to get to the next Naked. “Nah. It would never work.”