Behind the Curtain - Page 23

“You say you barely know me, but I spilled my guts out earlier to you . . . all my deep, dark, boring secrets. Maybe you need to tell me one of your secrets. In the spirit of getting to know each other, and all,” he added fairly when she gave him an amused, doubtful glance.

Maybe he was right. She felt butterflies flicker in her belly. She inhaled to still the sensation.

“Okay. You guessed correctly. Yesterday.” She noticed his questioning glance and swallowed down her nerves. “I do write poetry. And music. And lyrics. I’m still amazed you knew somehow.” She met his stare willfully, despite her flaming cheeks. “I’ve never told another soul that before.”

“You haven’t?” he asked her slowly.

She shook her head.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a stupid, childish obsession.” The words burst out of her throat. “I don’t even know why I d

o it!”

“Yes, you do.”

“I do?” she asked, stunned by his confidence.

“Yeah.” He squeezed her hands under the water. “Think about it for a minute.”

She did, replaying the feeling she got when she finally had a few private moments to herself and could pull her music and lyrics out of the old toy chest stored at the back of her closet. She thought of how it felt when she finished a song to her satisfaction, and the rush that went through her when she finally got the perfect lyric or caught the exact nuance of meaning she wanted with her poetry.

Joy. That was what she felt then. Pure and simple.

“It makes me happy,” she whispered, a tremor of feeling going through her at the realization.

“Then it’s not childish or stupid. Far from it.” He leaned down and brushed his lips against her cheek. “I told you that you were an artist,” he murmured. She looked up at him and smiled shakily.

“Thanks,” she said.

“For what?”

“For being the first and probably only person to ever call me that.”

She felt his smile in the deepest part of her. “An artist isn’t something you’re called. It’s something you are.”

She swallowed back the lump in her throat.

“I really have to go,” she said reluctantly, noticing the position of the sun in the sky. “Tahi and Zara will be waiting for me at Crescent Bay South.”

“They’re covering for you?”

She nodded, avoiding his stare.

Among her cousins, she was typically the voice of moderation and reason, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t learned how to maneuver around her parents to function in the world. Still, she hated straight-out lying. Yes, she’d dissembled many times before in order to escape to the inland lake, but that’d been different than today. On those previous occasions, she hadn’t been misleading her family to secretly meet a guy that her parents would wholly disapprove of her seeing, especially under such intimate circumstances.

“So Zara and Tahi know that—”

“I came to see you today. Yes. I just didn’t tell them where we planned to meet.”

They both moved at once, starting to walk toward shore. Laila shivered when they reached the beach. They toweled off in silence, Laila glancing with furtive desire at Asher as he dried off. Now that they weren’t touching anymore, she wished they were.

“You’ll come back tomorrow,” he said suddenly, his intensity startling her. She turned and saw the seriousness of his expression.

“I . . . I don’t know if I can,” she said, thinking of her cousin Zarif’s visit. “The whole family will probably go to the beach, and my uncles and cousins will probably go fishing. We’ll do a cookout and everything. I’m not sure when my cousin is leaving.”

He nodded, but he looked strained.

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