I turned to Samirah now. “Where is he?”
I swung around, feeling frantic and lost and . . .then I heard it.
Every single person heard it. We all turned at the same time and looked towards the stage.
CHAPTER 72
I rushed over to the stage where Mark was busy tuning and strumming his guitar in front of the mic. The sound was loud, floating through the speaker. When I finally reached him, I was totally out of breath. A few people had run with me, including Faizel and my sister.
I stood in front of the small stage and shouted, “I didn’t say yes to him, by the way!”
“She didn’t. She didn’t,” Faizel added, equally loudly.
“I swear. I didn’t say yes to him. I didn’t even know he was coming. Please believe me,” I pleaded, looking at Mark. I couldn’t help the tears that were welling up in my eyes now. I was waiting for him to say something to me, something bad, something . . .
“I know,” he finally said, smiling. His voice came to me loud and echoey through the speakers. And anyone who wasn’t watching this, was definitely watching now.
“You know?” I asked.
He nodded at me.
“Then . . . Then . . . why did you leave?” I asked.
His smile grew. “Are you kidding? That was the cringiest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” Mark looked around. “Sorry, Kyle. No offence, mate.” I smiled. He sounded so Australian right now and it made me laugh. And then a tear slipped out my eye and down my cheek. It wasn’t a sad tear.
“What’s going on?” my sister asked next to me. “Who’s that?”
I turned to her just as Samirah managed to waddle up to us.
“He’s right, though,” Samirah said, totally out of breath, reaching for Faizel’s shoulder to steady herself. “Cringiest thing I ever saw in my life, and I like big romantic gestures!”
“It really was.” I nodded in agreement.
Mark gave his guitar one loud strum and everyone turned back to him. “As cringe as it was, though, it did make me realize something.”
“What?” I asked.
“It made me realize that I hadn’t really told you something, yet. Something I should have said to you this morning.”
I smiled and my heart started skipping beats. A whole lot of beats. “What haven’t you told me?” I asked expectantly.
“Something fairly important.” He looked cute and coy now. “And it made me think of doing something equally cringe.” He strummed the guitar again, and a small crowd had now gathered around us. Andy was there with her phone in the air, and a few other phone wielders from Kyle’s posse too.
I looked at the phones and then back at Mark. “They’re still live streaming,” I said, in case he was about to do what I suspected he was about to do.
He shrugged. “I know. And I’ll probably regret doing this . . .” He looked up at the people filming. “But fuck it! Right?”
“What are you doing?” Faizel asked.
“The grand love gesture,” Ian said, coming up behind me.
“Who is that?” my sister asked, pointing at Mark. I was just about to answer her when we were all stunned into silence by Mark singing.
The song.
My favorite song in the world. The song that had gotten me through the darkest times of my life. That had spoken to me when no one else had. And he was singing it,to me.Despite the fact he didn’t want anyone to know who he was, he was singing it to me. This beautiful, soft acoustic version of the song rang out around us and started drawing an even bigger crowd. His eyes were locked on me, though. Only me. As a teen, I’d imagined this moment a million times over in my head, and now, it was actually happening.
And it wasn’t because I was a someone with a million followers; he didn’t care about that. He just cared about me. Not the me who was somebody to everyone, but the me that was only a somebody to a few people.
