“Anyway, Miss Conceited, you remember the prompt for today?” His eyes stayed closed, head back against the stone.
“Unfortunately, I do. You set this whole thing up. You know what music means to me.”
“I set the whole day up, Spot. Keep up. What do we need to do?”
“I’ll get you back, don’t worry. But we need to build a playlist of five songs,” I said. “For each other. And we gotta say why.”
“Want me to go first?”
I had mine ready. And if I’m honest, some of them had been there for years. Songs I used to press play on when I needed a reminder of my happiest times and some of the hardest. You needed both.
“In My Mind. Heather Headley.” I looked at his face.
“Do you know it?”
“Not like you, probably. Tell me.”
The mud made everything slow, even my breathing. “Remember that dinner your mama called.”
“Yeah, I remember. Of course, I remember that night.”
“What you don’t know is that I saw the play with Bianca before you did, Cane. They weren’t hiding it. You just weren’t looking.”
“Why didn’t you speak up?”
I turned my head and leaned back. “In My Mind is about a woman watching the man she loves go on without her. Holding somebody else’s hand while her whole heart stayed right where it was and his too.” I let that sit. “I had your soul, Ducane. Your people hated that more than they hated where I came from.”
“I’m sorry, Skye.”
“I stayed hopeful, but Christmas reinforced what I already knew.” I shrugged and sank deeper into the mud. “It is what it is now.” I glanced over at him. “Your turn.”
He worked his jaw. For a man who argued for a living, he chose his words carefully when they mattered.
“The Moon and The Sky. Sade.” A pause. “You know why.”
I did. It was a whole song about somebody who pushed a good love away and finally understood they were the one who broke it. His picking that for me wasn’t about the sky in my name. It was a confession.
“I didn’t book this trip to find you, Skye. I didn’t even know you’d be on that plane.” He looked at the steam instead of me. “I booked it because my body gave out on me.”
I sat up. The mud shifted around my chest. “What do you mean, gave out?”
“It’s handled.” He said it too fast, the lawyer in him reaching for the version that sounded smaller. “My blood pressure. Stress. A couple of dizzy spells in court. My body basically told me to sit my ass down.”
“Ducane.”
He exhaled. The real version came slower.
“They put me on a heart monitor for a week. I had to reevaluate my life and the people in it. Shit, those not in it as well.” He looked at the steam instead of me. “I scared myself, Skye. That’s the truth. I kept thinking, what if this is it? What if I die and the last thing I ever did was pretend I was okay without you?”
I reached for his hand across the tub.
“No one knows about this but my doctor, Lola, and… now you.”
Now you.
He hadn’t told his mother. Hadn’t told Carter. Hadn’t told a soul who shared his last name. Yet somehow, he’d told me.
That meant something.