The Anatomy of Emotion

Chapter Three

March—Cannes

Corin tilts his head to study Maeva's face as his song opens. Her eyes gleaming, lips parted and cheeks defined with slashes of hot, hot pink. He can't help but think of his lyrics as he watches her. Her skin pale and soft like January snow, lips a cold pink that never leaves winter but hints at spring coming the next month. The kinked strands of her hair look like silk, and he knows they feel like it too. He knows how warm she is in contrast to how cold she looks. The next line speaks of damages, and he remembers thinking about her as he had written it. He doesn't know nearly as much of her pains as she knows of his, but he had always felt there was something that fostered her coldness and her introversion. Though nothing influenced Maeva except Maeva, and the more he had thought about it, the more he thought she might have done it to herself.

Corin feels like his eyes might roll back as her voice touches his ears. Leaning a shoulder on the wall, he nods his head along to the song and tries to focus on what might be wrong. A little hitch in her second section. Cameron's shitty bass jam that they hadn't figured out. His own shitty singing where he had fucked up his breath timing in one of the choruses. Maeva sings through the third section. There is something distantly heady about hearing his voice intermingled with hers through the headphones, like remembering an erotic dream two mornings later. He pops his headphones off.

"Do you hear it?"

"Mhm. You're rushing," Corin picks up the music and points to her lines staggered between his, "it sounds like you're timing your start too early, so the rhythm with my notes is off. Are you breathing?"

"Not really. Once at the beginning of your line here."

"I think you're missing your starting point," he taps his finger beside hers, "I know there isn't a rest here like on the others, but that's because I'm supposed to trail out, and they almost overlap, but not quite."

"Alright. What do you suggest then, song boy?"

"Think of it like blending your paints, trail them into each other. You know what, let's do it once before you start the recording again, I might have fucked up on the track."

He sits on the table, and Maeva comes and sits beside him, folding her legs into the lotus position. Her knee brushes his hip. He tries like hell to ignore it. Her knee, her scent, the arc of her neck as she tilts her head to see the music.

"Where are we starting?"

"I'll start here, excuse me if I sound like shit for the first few lines," he clears his throat.

"Ever the professional," she rolls her eyes.

He glares at her, lets his temper color his voice, "her lipstick stings like acid rain, dissolving away my sense of restraint."

She looks away from him to the music, and he catches her lips rubbing together as he goes on.

"The streetlamps burn through the cloak of the fog, concealing the violence, I've been stung by the wa—"

Maeva opens her mouth to sing, but stops before the first vowel gets out. Little lines form between her brows.

"See, you're in a hurry," he smirks, "listen to the professional, as you sit in his massive beach house in his million-dollar recording booth. He knows of what he speaks."

Maeva grumbles and runs her hands through her loose hairs.

"Dammit, what is wrong with me? It isn't that hard, why can't I concentrate?"

Something smug and egotistical inside him thinks he might know, but he just shrugs.

"You're stressing yourself out too much. Here, look up," Corin shifts so he is sitting cross legged in front of her.