Love Song (LGBTQ+) (COMPLETED)

16. Hearer

"It feels like just last night, she opened my eyes.
It feels like just last night, I filled myself with all these lies. . ."
_ _ _ _ _ _ _

What began as Grace's voice soon turned into a soft, muted male voice singing lyrics that were familiar to me. They were lyrics I looked at every morning, they were lyrics that had been ingrained into me, and they were lyrics that I saw in my mind every time I thought of her. Her gorgeous, feminine cursive were entrusted to that piece of paper, placing the very words that spilled from her mind.

Those words followed me everywhere, in my mind and on the piece of paper they were written on. They belonged to her, every single word of that unfinished song. All I was doing was keeping it safe for her until the day she wanted it back. That piece of paper was her own, and it was going to stay that way, at least that's what I wanted. Instead, I was hearing another familiar voice sing the words Grace had put together.

As my eyes opened, I was hit with the sound and sight of soft waves hitting the dock. Above me lied a small, dark red blanket that I'd never seen before. In a state of grogginess, it had taken a couple of seconds to realize that I was outside and lying down in the same spot that I had sat down in the night before. When had I fallen asleep? Clearly it wasn't the smartest idea to fall asleep out there, but I had already done it. It was what it was.

I rolled over and found Jay a couple feet away, strumming on a acoustic guitar as he sang her lyrics. "How do you know those lyrics?"

"Jo found this piece of paper by the doors in the lounge room. She thought it was mine." he waved a wrinkled piece of paper in between his fingers. "Seems like it's yours, though. You write them?"

"Do I look that talented to you? I wish." I pushed myself up, watching the blanket fall from my shoulders.

"I dunno. Maybe you are." I could hear Jay stand up as his footsteps forced the wood to creak. "Maybe you are, and you just need to be taught. Who knows, maybe you're more talented than whoever wrote these lyrics."

Jay sat down next to me and looked for a moment as his dark eyes seemed peer inside, reading past any barrier I still had up. Propping up the guitar on his lap, he began to lightly smack the guitar with the tips of his fingers and then strumming before giving it a patterned touched. With every smack and strum, a smile began to spread across his face as his head bobbed with every slap that hit the body of the guitar.

_ _ _ _ _

A moment of silence passed as he held out the piece of paper that held Grace's message on it, along with his newly added, unwanted lyrics. The smirk on his face had said it all, acting like he had thought he sung another hit. What he had gotten wrong was that only Grace could have gotten the message across to me with those lyrics, from him they had felt fake and forced out, disingenuous. As talented as he was, love songs weren't his thing. Jay had already shown that he'd rather write about blowing his head off than talk about a girl he misses plenty of times.

"Don't ruin her music." I looked away.

"Yeah, that was pretty bad. Not going to apologize, though." I felt his foot stomp on the dock. ". . .Wait, her?"

His additions to the song weren't all that bad, at least to an audience that hadn't known any better. It would've sounded like a love song, and if it was from Jay, the general masses would've flocked to it just because of that alone. He seemed to know it, too. That what he just sang lacked meaning to him and he only sung the empty words that came to mind, in the exact same way I had spoken to other people for the past year.

If Jay was anything at all, he was an artist, and all artists have an ego. His narrowed eyes told me that he didn't like hearing that from me, yet he also knew he couldn't deny it.