The Melody of You and Me (Lillac Town Series Book 1)

by Maria Hollis

  Jessie laughs at her reaction, and that’s when Chris notices the similar way both sisters smile with cute dimples forming on their cheeks. Instantly, Chris starts liking her even more.

  “I was just wondering since she made you come here with her,” she explains.

  “I’m just here for support, really.”

  “Good. I’m happy to know my sister has someone to guide her through things like this.”

  Chris nods in silence.

  Why is Josie taking so long to come back?

  She doesn’t think she can stay here with her sister and not make it weird after what Jessie just asked her. Shaking her head, Chris tries to change the subject with the first question that comes to her mind.

  “Josie told me you’re attending Lillac U this fall. What will you be studying?”

  “I’m going to do a master’s degree in History of Art,” Jessie says excitedly.

  “That’s cool.”

  Awesome, now she has nothing else to say to that. Her knowledge of both History and Art is probably less than zero.

  Fortunately, before she can embarrass herself even more, Josie comes back, practically bouncing with happiness. For the rest of the afternoon, Chris listens to childhood stories about both of them and half thanks her parents at first for never giving her any siblings. But there is also a bittersweet sense of the loneliness felt growing up being an only child.

  “Remember that time I got my leg stuck in a tree branch?” Josie says as she laughs.

  “That was a memorable moment, for sure,” Jessie agrees. “My sister here decided she needed to prove she was braver than me. So we had this super tall tree in our backyard that I would never climb because I’m so scared of heights. Then one day we woke up and found her there, leg stuck, waiting for hours until someone could come to help her.”

  “Totally worth it. Your face when you saw me up there was amazing,” Josie says.

  Chris laughs with them, admiring the way they seem to remember fond memories with such happiness and love, even if they are hard ones.

  In the end, she decides that if she had a sibling relationship like Jessie and Josie, she wouldn’t have minded that much.

  ***

  Once they say goodbye to Jessie, who is staying at a friend’s house for the week, Chris and Josie walk together through the streets.

  Chris is dreading the moment she will have to leave Josie, feeling giddy in her happiness after spending the day in her comfortable presence. From the corner of her eye, she can see Josie sending her a hopeful look.

  Maybe Chris should invite her to her apartment.

  Would that be a wrong step in this friendship?

  Mayte would be studying or hanging around anyway, it’s not like they would be completely alone there.

  “Wanna hang out back at my house? It’s still early,” she lets slip.

  “I’d love to.”

  Josie gives her a grateful smile, and Chris knows she made the right decision.

  Chapter 5

  When they enter the apartment, they find that Mayte is already there, along with some guy that Chris has never seen before. They are sitting together on the couch watching a movie on Mayte’s laptop.

  “Hey girls,” she greets them.

  “Hi,” the guy by her side waves.

  He looks like someone who just got out of a rock concert, with his dark clothes and his long black hair contrasting sharply with his pale skin.

  “Hey, this is Josie,” Chris nods to the girl who smiles at them, suddenly seeming shy. “We are just going to be in my room.”

  Josie follows her to the hallway and before she can turn to her bedroom, Mayte whistles to call Chris’s attention. Once she looks back, the girl raises one of her hands and makes a gesture with her fingers, closing and opening them in a V sign.

  After too many awkward situations, Chris and Mayte had agreed on this signal between them to check discreetly whether the other person needed some private time in the apartment.

  Chris shakes her head in negative and mouths silently you?

  Mayte goes back to cuddling happily with her date, mouthing back another no.

  ***

  “Ohhh, you are messy,” is the first thing Josie says as she enters the bedroom.

  Taking a look around her, Chris realizes that, as usual, her clothes are thrown everywhere, there are still notebooks and pens lying around, and she’s forgotten to dispose of the empty fast food containers again. Embarrassed, she realizes that maybe she should have at least prepared Josie for this.

  “Yeah, sorry about that?” she replies, managing to make it sound like a question.

  With a laugh, Josie sits on her bed as if she belongs there.

  It takes a moment for Chris to accept that Josie is here. In her bedroom. Sitting on her bed.

  The image was one she had imagined a lot. Probably more than she should.

  Now that Josie is here, messy brown hair flowing down her back and toned legs crossed on top of her dark blue covers, Chris is acutely aware of how badly this could go. Besides Mayte and Lily, the last person here had been Tabitha.

  Eventually, she decides to sit on the floor, leaving a respectable distance between them.

  “Are you hungry?” she asks.

  “Not really. I’m still full from all these cupcakes Jessie bought me today.” Josie makes a face, resting her hands on her stomach.

  “You really do love your cupcakes, huh?” Chris laughs, teasing her.

  From the bed, Josie rolls her eyes in amusement.

  “What’s your favorite food then? For some reason, I don’t see you as a candy person after you refused a piece of the best strawberry cupcake in the world.”

  “Pizza. I could eat it every day forever without complaining,” Chris muses.

  Josie’s eyes wander through the wall behind Chris’s head and then her mouth turns into an evil grin.

  “I can see that.”

  Turning around, Chris notices just what she is referring to. Right above her desk, a small poster says, kiss all the pizza, eat all the girls.

  How did she forget about that small detail?

  Her blue eyes go from one corner to the other, finding all the things she used to decorate her bedroom when she moved in with Mayte a few years ago. There is a pansexual flag pinned to her wardrobe and another poster behind the door with the quote Hearts Not Parts.

  With a sigh, she pouts and turns back to Josie, who seems to be in the middle of a fit of giggles.

  “What? You probably have silly things like that in your dorm too,” Chris accuses.

  Josie stops to breathe for a few seconds and then her eyes seem to shine with something different. Her gaze is sexy and teasing now, making Chris want to kiss her senseless. It’s almost like Josie is doing it on purpose to mess with her.

  “Tell me something about yourself. Something I don’t know yet,” Josie says in a soft tone.

  It takes Chris a moment to think. She finds it hard to open up to new people, but she wants to do it anyway with Josie. She wants everything without being afraid that she will lose this friendship and be left heartbroken and alone.

  “My first crush was Aladdin,” she blurts out.

  Josie falls into a fit of giggles once more.

  “No way! Come on, he is a cartoon character.”

  “Hey, I was five!” Chris tries to explain. “Then there was Wendy from the live action Peter Pan.”

  When she thinks further about it, both Wendy and Peter definitely caught her attention at the time. She isn’t sure if she wanted to be Wendy so that she could kiss Peter or vice versa. Maybe both.

  “Oh, she was adorable,” Josie replies, nodding in agreement.

  “Who was your first fictional crush?”

  Josie moves to lie down on her stomach, and Chris tries not to think about the fact that the blankets will smell like her later.

  “There was this Filipino show called Encantadia where these four sisters had to fight in a fantasy land. T
hey had to keep gems of some kind safe or whatever,” Josie rants excitedly. “Let me tell you, that was a great gay awakening. I had a crush on all four of them at different times.”

  They laugh together for a moment about this.

  “So you are Filipino then?” Chris asks curiously.

  “Yep. I mean, I was born here, but my whole family came from the Philippines when my sister was two. Are you from here?”

  “Most of my family was born and raised in the U.S.,” Chris says with a nod. “Quite boring, apart from a few relatives who are Irish and French.”

  “Cool! I have an uncle who married a French lady. Let me tell you, her accent made me feel things,” Josie says, wiggling her eyebrows up and down.

  “You are terrible.” Chris laughs and crosses her arms.

  She wishes they could stay like this forever.

  Just the two of them; telling stories and sharing secrets without a care in the world.

  Josie brushes her hands along the carpet until they bump into something solid under Chris’s bed. She looks down, pulling out a black case to the floor in front of them, wrinkling her face in confusion.

  “What’s this?” she asks, opening the zipper.

  “That’s just my guitar.”

  For some reason, Chris feels the urge to hide the instrument back under the bed. Seeing it in Josie’s hands, she feels like someone is touching her very soul. In a way, it’s almost as if all her secrets are being revealed.

  “You play?” Josie asks in amazement.

  “Yeah, music is my thing.”

  “What kind of music do you like?”

  As she says the words, Josie’s fingers run softly through the strings, barely making any sound.

  “Everything,” Chris answers simply.

  “Everything?” Josie raises her voice incredulously. “Come on, you can’t just like everything.”

  “I do!” Chris insists. “It’s not just about the lyrics or what kind of bands and singers I listen to. It’s something about how the right music at the right time will make me feel so powerful. It just depends on what I need. There is always a song for every emotion that can help me get through something. No matter how bad things get in my life, music will keep me going.”

  When she finishes her explanation, Chris finally looks up at Josie. The girl stares at her with a shy smile, searching her face as if looking for something there.

  “I know that feeling, too. I’m a ballerina.”

  No way.

  “You are? I didn’t know that. Why are you studying business then?”

  “Ballet is actually my main passion and what drives me in life,” she explains. “The ballet world is still a privileged white one; it is full of petty behavior. So what I want to do is to open my own school one day. That way I could teach young girls in a different way, a more inclusive way per se.”

  “That’s a nice dream to have,” Chris replies.

  “When you grow up hearing that you are not tall enough, not skinny enough, not white enough, you always wonder about how the world would be if you didn’t need to conform to all these ridiculous standards. At some point in their lives, everyone has thought like that. I’m sure that you have your own dreams too.”

  “Ha! Not really,” Chris replies, after hesitating for a moment.

  Well, fuck it. Josie will find out one way or the other. She might as well hear the whole story straight from her.

  “I dropped out of school last year,” she says and lowers her eyes in shame. “Since then, it’s been a lot of nothing in my life. My parents were assholes about it; my ex-girlfriend said I was just feeling the need to be a rebel. None of them understood. After two years of forcing myself to keep going, I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

  She stops talking and picks at her short nails for a while, feeling anxious about finally letting this out. Once she gets the courage to look up, she finds a new expression on Josie’s face. She isn’t being judged. Josie’s eyes show compassion and understanding.

  “With all due respect, your family and your ex suck,” she says.

  Chris nods in agreement, finally able to fully accept that.

  Neither girl says anything for a few minutes. Each one is silently lost in her own thought. It’s a comfortable silence until Chris starts to wonder if maybe she over shared or if Josie wants to ask her more about dumping university. Once she’s told people that she’s dropped out of college, she’s always get asked the same questions.

  What are you thinking about doing now?

  Are you really sure you don’t want to go back?

  Because she obviously needs to know where to go from now.

  Chris watches as Josie holds the guitar at a new angle and plays with the strings.

  “Can you play something for me?” she asks.

  Chris winces at that. She never liked playing in front of people, feeling shy at the idea of others being able to see a different side of her. When she plays, the world ceases to exist, and all of her nervousness disappears. All that is left is a deep state of peace.

  “I don’t know…”

  “Please?”

  Josie’s eyes seem to shine in a sweet and inviting way.

  It’s been less than a month, and this girl already has Chris wrapped around her finger.

  Taking the guitar from Josie’s hands, she positions herself more comfortably against the wall and tests the strings for a minute or so. Her mind runs through all the songs she’s been learning lately, trying to find the best one to suit the moment. After a while, she finds just what she needs.

  At first, her fingers dance hesitantly, almost shyly around the strings. But on the second try, she’s able to add the lyrics too. The words roll off her tongue sweetly and melodiously. Focusing only on the movement of her fingers, she goes through the chords attentively so as not to make a mistake or forget any of the lyrics.

  Once the song is over, she realizes Josie is still listening.

  Turning to her bed, she finds the girl looking seriously at her. A second later, Josie gives her the most mesmerizing smile Chris had ever seen in a person.

  “That was wonderful,” Josie whispers, almost as if speaking aloud would break this magical moment. “You are beautiful when you play.”

  Chris gazes back into those deep brown eyes. Her heart skyrockets inside her chest and her fingers start sweating around the strings of her guitar. The room suddenly feels too small and warm for her. She can’t even hear Mayte and her date in the next room. All that exists is Josie and her captivating face.

  One of her fingers slip on the guitar, and a discordant note comes from it. Startled, she jumps, and Josie laughs at her. The moment is gone. Chris rolls her eyes with amusement and puts her guitar back in the case.

  When Chris sits up again and turns around, Josie is already getting up.

  “I should go, it’s getting late,” she says as she gathers her purse from the bed.

  Stay, Chris almost says.

  You make me feel like I’m a full person again.

  She shakes the thought away and guides the girl out of the door. In the living room, Mayte and her date are still watching the same movie on her laptop, with popcorn and beers between them.

  “Going already?” Mayte asks.

  “Yeah, work will be busy tomorrow,” Josie says. “I’ll see you around.”

  She waves at the couple and follows Chris to the hall outside. Closing the apartment door behind her, Chris stands against it, hiding her hands in her jeans pockets.

  “We should do this again another time,” she says uncertainly.

  Josie nods with surprise.

  Was she expecting something different?

  They had a good time. Didn’t they?

  “I wish we could spend some time in my dorm too, but my roommate is also spending the season here for summer classes, and she is super annoying about visitation rules,” Josie explains. “I don’t want to be a bother in your house.”

  “No, no!” Chris waves h
er worries away as if they’re nothing. “I don’t mind at all. I mean… We, we don’t mind.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Why is this so awkward?

  It’s just a goodbye for the night. It’s not like they won’t be seeing each other tomorrow, and the day after that and after that and…

  Josie suddenly leans closer.

  Expecting a kiss on the cheek, Chris keeps her eyes open in waiting. It’s only when Josie kisses her on the lips that she realizes what is happening. It was only a peck, but even so, it makes Chris’ insides quiver and her brain to go into overdrive.

  “Sorry!” Josie exclaims when she notices the shock on Chris’s face.

  Oh, no. She is totally going to send the wrong message.

  Do something, Christine!

  Kiss her back. Say you want her.

  “It was nothing really,” she says instead. “I should have moved my face, it’s my fault.”

  Josie tries to smile, but it never reaches her eyes.

  Great. Now she fucked up big time.

  “Goodnight, I’ll see you in the morning,” Josie says and turns to the stairs.

  ***

  With a thud, Chris’s head hits the door when she closes it behind her.

  “Are you okay?” Mayte asks from the couch.

  Chris only groans in response.

  She moves from the door and starts pacing around the room, anxiously. After a few more seconds, she stops and throws her body on the green bean bag chair in the corner. Mayte and her date stare at each other before the girl clicks pause on the movie and turns to Chris.

  “Want a beer?” metal head guy says, pointing to the cans at the coffee table.

  “No, thanks.”

  “What happened? Tell me everything,” Mayte demands.

  Chris takes a deep breath before answering.

  “I’m not even sure myself,” she replies and stops for a second. Then, everything comes out in a rush. “Sometimes, I think there is something there between us, but then I just get scared that I’ll ruin it all like I always do with everything in my life.”

  Silence falls upon the room.

  From the corner of her eye, Chris can see Mayte staring at her anxiously, as if she wants to say something but isn’t sure if she should. But then she sighs and says nothing.