The Sound of Us by Ashley Poston

that.”
    “And your dad?” As I ask it, his knuckles tighten around the steering wheel.
    “He disowned me when Hols and I moved to Nashville. To him, trying to make a career in music was like joining the circus. It wasn’t
respectable
enough. You ask him, I abandoned my family. You ask me...” He trails off. The lights of Ocean Boulevard flicker shades of blue and red over his face like a kaleidoscope. I wait for his answer, but he just presses his lips together and flicks on the radio.
    His own song, “Deep End” blares through the speakers and he quickly turns it back off.
    He clears his throat. “Silence is good, yeah? We don’t need music.”
    “I can hum something?”
    “Can you sing?”
    “I’m so good I can shatter windows.”
    He chuckles, and for the first time since the beach, he cracks a ghost of a smile. “So, I’ll hum a song, and you guess what it is, then vise versa. Just so we both know, I’m going to own this game.”
    “Are you challenging my radio heart?” I press my hand to my chest, aghast. “How dare you!”
    “I want to see if you’re the real deal.”
    “Oh, I’m real—” a strand of hair falls into my eyes “—
enough
.”
    I almost don’t catch the beginning notes to my dad’s favorite song tumbling from Roman’s lips. “’Born to Run,’” I immediately quip. “Bruce Springsteen.”
    “That was an easy one,” he relinquishes and waits for me to think of a song. I warble the first few notes of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones, and instead of guessing the song, he begins singing with me. His voice is light and liquid, like fizzy pop, much higher than his normal voice, but then we get to the main chorus and his voice drops an octave to a knee-buckling caramel sound. His hands beat the percussion against the steering wheel as he really begins to get into it. He winks at me, and I grin between the lyrics, and bob my head to the words.
    Show-off.
    We coast to a stop at a light, the windows rolled down. The tourists hustling across the crosswalk give us a curious look as we howl the chorus. A laugh bubbles up in my throat, and I successfully hold it in...until he does a terrible Mick Jagger impersonation, and I lose it in a fit of giggles.
    He slides me a cheshire grin. “So? Did I win? Huh?”
    “That was decent,” I reply, wiping the tears out of my eyes. “Your turn.”
    Thinking, he taps his finger on the steering wheel until it evolves into a beat. He ducks his head down and begins rapping.
    “Oh my God, that’s
so
90s. You’re showing your
sublime
age, Roman. ‘What I Got.’”
    “How the hell do you know that one? How old were you,
ten
?”
    I frown. “Do I really look sixteen?”
    “No, I was just being an asshole.”
    I flop down the visor and inspect myself in the mirror. Even at night, my pink hair glows. “Jesus, you can see me from space.”
    “Just means I’ll never lose you.”
    I slam the visor up again. “Surprising,” I reply, but all I can think about is the phrase
Just means I’ll never lose you.
    “But I
have
seen sixteen-year-olds who look thirty. Now, that’s scary. Ever been about to go down on a girl and realize she’s not even legal yet?”
    “Is this your way of saying you make poor life choices?”
    “See, now
that’s
being an asshole.”
    I punch him in the arm playfully and flick the radio back on, quickly turning it to the classic rock station. A sweet, slow power ballad drifts through the stereo. Almost instantly, my throat seizes. I want to turn it off, but Roman knocks my hand away from the knob before I can.
    “Name this song!” he demands.
    I swallow hard. Of all the songs in all the world, the radio had to play this one. It’s the song I wish I’d heard with Caspian that night, instead of “Crush On You”—the one I always wanted to...
    Well, the song I always wanted to fall in love to.
    And here I am in a minty green hatchback that smells slightly of ass, listening to the