Finnley smiled as though I’d handed him a poem.
Milo grinned as if I’d handed him a blowtorch.
Zane looked pained, then delivered exactly what I asked for.
Of course he did.
Sebastian’s tone rang like a bell in cold air. All four together turned the phrase into something shimmering and fragile.
An unhelpful lump moved through my throat. “Yes, like that. Hold it.”
Except they didn’t.
Milo tried a run. Zane snorted. Finnley apologised to the air for ruining the moment. Sebastian muttered something about discipline.
“Break time,” Max declared in a cheerful voice, before my eye twitched. “Five minutes.”
I checked my watch. We’d been at it forty minutes. It felt like two days and also five seconds. I hadn’t had coffee or water.
I’d had twelve tiny heart attacks, however.
I picked up a water bottle and drank from it, noticing the faint taste of someone else’s lip balm. I put it down quickly.
The room fractured into small clusters. Milo performed a dramatic retelling of his audition for a captive Liam and a politely smiling Elliott.
Zane leaned a chair back on two legs, scrolled his phone, and made dry commentary on the comments he saw. “Someone on TikTok thinks they invented harmonies today.”
Oliver and Sebastian unlidded a Tupperware of cut fruit because Sebastian had packed a snack like an overprepared ballet mum, and Oliver had brought little wooden forks.
Max drifted back to where I sat. “You’re vibrating,” he said.
“I’m fine.” Another technical truth.
“You get this way when you care too much,” Max said gently.
I shot him a look. “I care a normal, healthy amount. Like any person who creates a ten-voice a cappella group and decides their first piece should be an operatic rock epic.”
Max laughed. “Okay, Captain Clipboard. What’s the plan?”
“Isolate, rebuild, then full run. If they don’t lock today, they at least need the muscle memory of fighting for it.”
Max nodded. “You’re good at this.”
“I amnotgood at this.” If that were the case, I’d have gotten us to where I wanted.
“Youare,” Max repeated, his tone kind. “You hear the shape of it before the rest of us. That’s a leader thing.”
“I don’t—” I bit off the rest, because the room was already coalescing back around me, several pairs of eyes turning like iron filings to a magnet.
The magnet happened to be me. I’d asked for it, I’d built it.
Now I had tobeit.
“Back in,” I said, clapping once. “We’re chunking. Bars one through twelve, then twenty-two through thirty, then we attempt the ‘Galileo’ gauntlet, at which point any of you who make a bat squeak unironically will go time out.”
Milo grinned. “Kinky.”
We went again. And again. I discovered new micro-obsessions: the way Julian angled towards Elliott when he sang, protective despite the snark; the way Liam’s breath reset the room; how Oliver’s ear twitched at dissonance; how Zane’s humour always spiked right when someone needed it; how Finnley physically swayed into a chord like a plant toward light; how Sebastian’s eyebrows conducted from his forehead.