My Ex Is Engaged to My Stepsister, and I'm Still His Wife novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Booth

"Lock the door," I said.

Josiah locked it.

The vocal booth is four feet by six, lined in gray foam, with a stool, a music stand and a microphone on a boom arm.

I have sung in it a thousand times, and I had never once been naked in it.

It was eleven on a Tuesday night.

The engineer had gone home at ten and left me a key and a note that said don't break anything.

The control room beyond the glass was dark, except for the red light on the recorder.

I had pressed the button myself.

"You're sure it's recording," Josiah said.

"I'm sure."

"And you want it recording."

"I want to hear what I sound like," I said, "when nobody is making me sound like somebody else."

I took a little silver bullet out of my purse and put it in his hand.

He looked at it for a long moment.

"You bought this."

"On Nolensville Pike. The woman at the register asked if I wanted a bag, and I said no, thank you, I'm using it tonight."

He laughed once, low.

"Take your dress off," he said.

I took off my dress.

I stood in the booth in my underwear and my boots, in the flat dead hush of the foam.

My father's guitar sat on its stand in the control room, where I could see it through the glass.

Josiah walked around me slowly.

I could hear his shoes on the carpet and his breathing and nothing else.

Soundproof means soundproof.

"Step up to the mic," he said.

I stepped up.

"Sing something," he said.

"What?"

"Anything. Something you know all the way down."

I thought of his mother's kitchen.

I sang the first verse of "Amazing Grace," plain and slow, with no harmony under it.

It was the first time in six years I had sung a melody into a microphone with nobody's name over mine.

My voice came back in the headphones, bare and strange and mine.

Behind me, Josiah's hands came to my waist.

He drew my underwear down my legs, and I stepped out of it, still singing.

"Keep going," he said into my ear.

His hands came up to my breasts.

He unhooked my bra and dropped it on the stool.

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