Jane blew gently on her steaming cup of tea as she peeked her head through the doorway of the library. She’d heard Adam moving about the house earlier. He’d come home early enough this evening to tuck in Adele himself and sing her a lullaby, and Jane had tried her best not to disturb them. It had been impossible, though, not to listen to the sound filling the house as he’d strummed his guitar and crooned in that sweet, high singing voice. She couldn’t resist going to look for him now, hoping he would be in the mood to sit with her in the library again this evening.

She found him nestled in one of the comfy leather armchairs with his feet splayed out in front of him on an ottoman. The skin at the bridge of his nose was wrinkled in concentration, and he was chewing absentmindedly on one of his thumbnails as he held her worn out copy of Jane Eyre in his lap.

He looked up and raised his eyebrows at her when she knocked softly against the doorframe to get his attention.

“Good book?” she asked, as she stood hesitating in the doorway.

“Not bad,” he replied, setting the book down and picking up his half-full glass of red wine. “But you know, you kind of left out a part.”

“What?”

“You know.” He was grinning at her mischievously. “How the nanny and the asshole father are, like— an item?”

Jane felt the heat suffuse her cheeks and prickle the skin of her neck and chest. She cast about for a suitably sarcastic reply, but her mind was a total blank, and she was aware of her blush deepening as the silence dragged on a beat too long. She knew he was looking at her, but she found herself utterly unable to meet his eyes. “Oh, right,” she mumbled. “That.”

“Yeah,” he said, chuckling at her from behind the wine glass. “That.”

She shrugged her shoulders slightly, opening her mouth to speak and then closing it again. “Um, honestly I didn’t think you’d make it that far,” she said at last. “Anyway, goodnight.” She turned to leave the room, but the sound of his voice calling after her stopped her in her tracks.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Jane froze where she stood, holding her breath and feeling every muscle of her body locked in paralysis. Every muscle except for one, of course – her heart was thrumming so loudly in her chest that she was certain he could hear it. Was he hitting on her? She had no idea how to react. It was one thing to flirt harmlessly while sitting safely on opposite sides of a room, but she had no idea how to handle anything more direct. Her only experience with romance came from reading novels. Actual living, breathing, attractive men – just one more thing she’d never really come into contact with, growing up where she did.  

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” she heard Adam say to her back.

Breathe, Jane commanded herself. She turned back around and screwed up the courage to meet his eyes.

He was smiling at her now with one eyebrow raised and that sardonic half-smile that brought out the dimple in one cheek. Dear lord, that dimple was even more prominent than usual. Had he shaved today? He never shaved. Jane brought her teacup to her mouth and took a gulp, choking slightly as she felt the scalding liquid burn the inside of her mouth. “What?” She tried to make her voice nonchalant, but the word came out more like an unsteady croak.

“The music?” he said, gesturing at the shelves of CDs. “We had a deal, remember?”

Jane smiled crookedly, mentally slapping herself in the forehead. Of course he wasn’t seducing her. She was making an idiot of herself. “Right,” she said, taking a step back into the room and looking around at the music collection. She ran her eyes across the rows of unfamiliar titles. “Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Why don’t you begin by putting away that damned teacup and having a proper drink with me?” he replied, as he lifted the wine bottle to refill his own glass.

She shook her head at him when he looked up at her again.

“What’s the big deal?” he said. “You’re off the clock.”

“I don’t drink.”

“Yeah, and I don’t read novels,” he replied, with a nod toward the book he had just set down. “Come on, I’ll get you a glass.” He started to get up out of the chair, but he was brought up short by the sharp note in her voice as she responded.

“No!”

Adam looked at her quizzically, taking note of the haunted expression that had just flashed across her face. 

“It’s just—I’m not trying to be rude. I just can’t drink,” she continued. “I’m sorry.”

His attention was caught by her choice of words. “I can’t drink.” Not don’t but can’t. He’d heard that before, often enough to know what it meant – almost always followed by a statement of the number of months clean and sober. It puzzled him, coming from her. It didn’t fit with the sketch of her background he’d pieced together through their conversations up to now. She’d grown up in an orphanage and then been hired to stay on there as a childcare worker after she’d reached her 18th birthday. This nanny job was her big adventure – her first time leaving the nest and venturing out into the big bad world.  How did a girl like that even have a chance to become an alcoholic? He suddenly recalled what she had told him about her parents a few nights ago. “No idea what happened to my dad,” she had said. “My mom – she was an addict.”

“It’s because of your mother, isn’t it?” he asked, the teasing tone gone from his voice now. “She was an alcoholic?”

Jane shrugged at him, not answering his question directly. “These things tend to run in families,” she said. “It’s just not a story I want to repeat.”

“Of course,” he replied with genuine contrition. “Sorry. I’m an idiot.”

She smiled at him and then turned away to look at the shelves of CDs again. “Anyway, the music, right?”

Adam set down the wine and walked across the room to stand beside her as she thumbed aimlessly through the jewel cases. She turned her head to look at him for a moment. “Why do you care if I listen to music anyway?”

She expected him to answer something about himself. Clearly pop music had played an important role in his life. She was taken aback when she heard his reply. “Because,” he said, “I think you’re talented.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.” He shook his head incredulously at the look of surprise on her face. “You’ve got a great voice.”

“I’ve got a hideous voice,” she said with a laugh. She’d always felt self-conscious of her singing voice, as much as she loved music. It was too low, too raspy. Not the way a woman’s voice was supposed to sound at all. No, a woman’s voice was supposed to sound high and clear, like that Julie Andrews in all of Adele’s videos.

“No,” Adam corrected, placing his hand on her elbow and looking at her seriously again. “You’ve got the most interesting voice I’ve heard in years. Trust me. You could be a professional musician. You should be a professional musician.”

She felt her cheeks starting to grow warm again at his touch, and she snapped her head back to look at the CD collection in embarrassment. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“You start by listening,” he said, removing his hand from her arm and following her gaze. “You can’t be original unless you’ve already heard everything that came before.”

“You mean, so you sound different from everyone else?”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Different, but not too different.” He started moving around the room, picking up CDs here and there off the shelves. “You listen. You figure out who your influences are going to be,” he looked up at her and smirked slightly. “And then you copy them.”

She laughed. “I thought you said original.”

“Nah,” he shrugged. “Nothing’s ever really original. It’s all just a big circle – pop music. Just a bunch of so-called artists retreading ground that’s already been covered before. That’s what people like to listen to. Something familiar, but changed up just a little.”

Jane wasn’t quite sure if he was joking or being serious. “So who would you suggest I copy? Maroon 5?”

Adam chuckled but didn’t answer. He stood back from her for a moment, screwing up his face in concentration as he looked at her appraisingly. She was so young. Twenty-two years old. The same age he’d been when Maroon 5 first broke through on the music scene. It was hard to remember what it felt like to be that young.

On a whim, he set down the stack of CD cases he’d been gathering and picked up a different one, popping it into the stereo and advancing the track. It was a Taylor Swift song from a few years back, 22:

We're happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time.
It's miserable and magical. Oh, yeah!
Tonight's the night when we forget about the deadlines.
It's time. Uh oh!

I don't know about you
But I'm feeling 22.
Everything will be alright.
If you keep me next to you…

Adam glanced over and saw that she was looking decidedly unimpressed. “No?” he asked.

She shrugged at him. “I don’t know. What is she complaining about? She just sounds bored,” Jane said. “If that’s the worst of her problems, she’s got it pretty good.”

He laughed. Yeah, Adam thought. This was no typical 22 year old, this one. That carefree party lifestyle had nothing to do with her. It was going to be a little harder than that to find a song that got through to her. “OK, something a little more angsty,” he mused aloud. “Some Avril Lavigne maybe?”

“Avril Levine? What is that, another one of your stage names?”

Adam grinned at her and rolled his eyes. “Lavigne. L-A-V-I-G-N-E. No relation.” He went over to the shelf and picked up Avril Lavigne’s debut album, skimming his eyes down the track list as he walked it over to the CD player. He stood still for a moment, chewing his thumbnail again as he had been doing when Jane first entered the room. Jane watched him close his lips and suck gently on the tip of his thumb, feeling her heart rate start to pick up again at the sight of it. What was the matter with her? Was she mesmerized by every little gesture of his at this point?

To her relief, he took his hand away from his mouth and selected a song on the CD. “See what you think of this,” he said over his shoulder, as she heard a slow ballad start to play.

I'm standing on a bridge.
I'm waiting in the dark.
I thought that you'd be here by now.

There's nothing but the rain.
No footsteps on the ground.
I'm listening but there's no sound.

Adam stood watching her as she listened to the music. Her face was blank – that expressionless mask she liked to hide behind. He waited to see if the lyrics would penetrate enough to get a reaction out of her.

Isn't anyone trying to find me?
Won't somebody come take me home?

He saw her chest rise sharply at those last two lines. Those words hit home, he could tell. It was a dark song. A song about being abandoned – about waking up one day and finding the person you loved most in the world had left you out in the cold.

It's a damn cold night,
Trying to figure out this life…

She wasn’t the only one who knew what it felt like to be abandoned, he thought. He remembered suddenly the first time he’d heard this song. He’d been out on the road, touring – back in the early days, when Maroon 5 was nothing more than an unknown opening act. He’d gotten some girl to take him back to her place, and she’d turned on the radio. This new single he’d never heard before had started to play as they were making out.

I'm looking for a place.
I'm searching for a face.
Is anybody here I know.

He’d tuned it out at first. Chick music, he’d thought to himself. But something about the lyrics had gotten to him. It had only been a few short months since that night in his cramped little New York City apartment, when the love of his life had decided to leave him – to shut him out in the cold and hide her face away.

He suppressed a shudder now, thinking back. Yeah, that’s what it felt like when he was 22. He hadn’t been a typical 22 year old either.

'Cause nothing's going right,
And everything's a mess,
And no one likes to be alone.

When he was 22 and the person he wanted most in the world walked away and abandoned him, there was only one thing that really helped to numb the pain. Not burying himself up to his eyeballs in work. Not drowning himself in endless bottles of red wine. No, it was always sex that worked best. Not that it was any replacement for what he really wanted, but at least it brought him in out of the cold for a little while.

He heard a sniff and looked again at the girl standing across from him now. She was struggling to control her face, to fight back the emotion that was threatening to expose itself.

 “It’s OK to be sad,” he whispered.

She looked up and met his eyes, and she saw the same suffering in them that she’d seen that other night in the library – the night when he’d told her his wife was dead.

“Are you sad?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She shook her head. She hadn’t cried about her mother in years. Not since she was a little girl. She hadn’t thought she had any tears left at this point. But somehow, seeing the misery and loneliness mirrored in his face now put her over the edge. She felt the silent tears start to fall and she raised one hand to swipe hastily at her cheeks. He crossed the few paces between them and put his arms around her, gently pressing her face into his chest as he felt her shoulders begin to shake.

Adam lowered his face and buried it for a moment in her mass of red hair. “You’ve got a lot to learn, little girl,” he heard himself whisper, and he recognized the words as soon as they left his tongue. The same words he’d said once, years ago, to a different little girl. A different Jane. The one he really wanted. The one who wasn’t here.

Won't you take me by the hand?
Take me somewhere new.
I don't know who you are,
But I... I'm with you.
I'm with you.

He just wanted to be with somebody – to connect with somebody for a little while. He knew it was wrong. Forget the fact that he was a married man. This wasn’t some random hook-up. This was his daughter’s nanny. This was a girl who had no one else in the world to turn to if this job didn’t work out. He knew he should stop. But he could hear the years of pent up pain pouring out of her as she sobbed into his chest. He wanted to show her there was a way to take away that hollow feeling, to fill it up with something else. Even if it only lasted for a little while.

He reached down and touched her face, tilting her chin up and then running his fingers back into the hair behind her ear. He saw the flush of color suffuse her face again as she looked up at him. He saw her eyes widen and her lips part.

“Just one kiss,” he lied to himself, as he brought his mouth down to meet hers. “One little kiss never hurt anyone.”