Oh, yeah. Yeah. He let the weight of his hips press into her, capturing her mouth again with his, sinking into the scent and texture of her. Yeah. This was a far better way to spend the night than arguing.
Also, if a man was falling, the curves of her body felt like a really nice, soft place to land.
Chapter 20
“Layla!” Her mom’s delighted voice on Matt’s borrowed cell phone made Layla’s whole body relax with comfort and happiness.
She felt young again when she talked to her mom. Safe. Happy. Like the old days, when being a fluttering yellow kite high up on the end of a string was a little girl’s dream come true.
In some ways, it was like talking to Matt—the sense of security and the happiness. And in some ways it was completely different. Matt made her feel…adult. Like she should plant her feet against the ground and stand, let her roots sink in. Grow. It was time to grow.
“I was wondering when you were going to call, sweetheart. Didn’t your tour end last week? Did you go check out that land?”
Layla sat on a great flat rock tucked under a cypress on the hill behind her little house and Matt’s, reached by a ten-minute walk up a root-ridden trail through the pines. From it, she could see all the valley: the stretch of roses, the rooftops of the little village and the steeple of the church at the far end, the limestone cliffs rising at the other end, and the slopes patched with lavender fields and small vineyards and silvery olives rising on the other side. “It’s beautiful here, Mama. It’s like…it’s like living in a song. Or a painting. You’d love it.”
“Maybe I can come join you there for a couple of weeks!” her mother exclaimed happily. “Wouldn’t that be fun, sweetheart? A vacation in the south of France together? I turned in my final exam grades yesterday, and I’ve got the usual round of end-of-semester meetings and workshops this week, but after that…”
Layla pulled her grip exerciser out of her pocket and worked it absently, with restless fingers. “I don’t know if I can stay.”
“More concerts?” her mother asked, her voice somewhere between happy for her daughter’s success and concerned. She’d been the one person in whom Layla had confided how stressed she was getting over the touring and pressure, how she couldn’t find a song anywhere in her, how she was starting to break down.
I can’t do this, Layla had sobbed to her on the phone only a month ago, in a moment of crisis. I think I’ve slept twenty hours in the past week. Concerts and interviews and always on to the next town and I CAN’T WRITE. I don’t have any more songs, Mama. I think maybe I killed them.
“Nooo. I’m due in the studio in two and a half weeks.”
“So you’ve got some material?” her mother said, delighted. And then a little sad: “I miss hearing you around the house, working on your songs. I don’t even know what you’re doing on this next album. But I know it will be fantastic, sweetie.”
“I’ve got…the beginnings of material,” Layla said. Her stomach knotted at the thought of trying to turn it into a full-fledged album in only two and a half weeks. All her joy and excitement in the burgeoning of new songs got crushed like a shiny sheet of aluminum in a tight fist. She took a deep breath, using the stress relief techniques that she’d been trying to acquire in the past year, ever since her career had turned from this happy, dreaming thing into this ambitious, successful monster that ate her up like a juicy peach and forgot to spit the stone out so she had even a hope of re-growing. “This is a great place to work,” she said.
And it was. Remembering that made her smile a little, despite the visceral force of the memory of all those expectations.
It was a good place to work, but it wasn’t a good place to be temporary. As if the water and the nutrients were buried deep in the soil. You had to sink your roots in properly, to get it all.
The thought of sinking roots in deep again eased that crumpled aluminum ball of stress even more, made it feel less permanently crumpled, less metallic…maybe more like crumpled silk that could eventually be smoothed out again. If she let it. If she gave it enough time to relax.
“Then maybe you should stay and work there,” her mother said quietly. “Layla, sweetie. There’s no point reaching your dreams if you yourself are no longer around to enjoy them. If you can’t be happy, if you’re losing who you are…”
“I want to be able to write, Mama,” she whispered. “It’s like if I can’t, then…I’m not me.”
Except…it was exactly as she had told Matt: when she was flirting with him, when she was sinking her hands into the incredible sensory overload of those sacks of roses, she rarely thought about whether or not she was producing songs at all. That absence of pressure to produce was so…innocent. Like she had been only a year ago, writing so many songs because her life was so full, and that was the only way she knew how to process it. Not as if writing songs was her only reason for being, but more as if it was just her way of being. Pulling life into her and letting it come back out as song.