“What’re you playing?”
He doesn’t look up, only allows his fingers to perform their faltering, hesitant dance across the keys. A discordant note chimes, and he sighs. “Nothing in particular. Just messing with a few things. Couldn’t sleep again?”
Her throat tightens. He could’ve asked if she had another nightmare. He could’ve asked what it was about. There are tear stains on her pillow. He would’ve noticed her crying in her sleep.
“Yeah,” she says. “You either?”
He shakes his head, and January crosses the room to sit beside him on the stool. There is so little distance between them. She’s acutely, painfully aware of every curve where his body almost touches hers, every inch of space between their skin. It is not electricity between them—it is something much deeper. More powerful. More painful. She feels the ache of it pulling at her bones.
She leans her head on his shoulder, and feels his entire body relax. His fingers dance slower.
“What were you thinking about? Before it happened?”
January can’t help the hitch in her breath. She doesn’t have to ask what he means when he says it. She already knows, and the moment he says it, it plays again, a silent movie in her mind.
Stop.
Rewind.
They are in the car, and nothing has happened yet.
“I was thinking about the first time I ever performed. My first concert.” Rebuilding the memories takes effort. She has to dismantle the wreckage and the car, piece by piece. She erases Loch, Deja, Justus. Out of tune violins overlay Lourdes crying, until finally they play alone. Taylor is the hardest to replace; undoing her feels a little like killing her again.
But when she’s gone, so is the car, and January is not remembering the moment that keeps her from sleeping. She remembers being smaller, visibly afraid, her cello older and a fraction of its size now and loaned instead of owned. Her dress is blue instead of black. Sparkling, like her mother’s eyes when they picked it out. A loose hair dangles from her bow. Her right leg bounces furiously while she waits in her seat, the chair next to her empty.
“I was nine. Second chair. First chair threw up and started crying and wouldn’t go on stage. She had a solo.” January smiles and reaches to tap out a few notes beside Loch. She chases his fingers with her own. “I can’t even remember her name now. But our teacher told me I was first chair now. So I played first chair. Sight-read the solo. I got a standing ovation.” She sits straight up, laughs again, harder. Loch stops playing and turns to face her.
“What?”
“Nothing, I just remembered that after I walked off-stage, I threw up, too.”
His smile is sudden, and the brightness of it floods her system like sunlight breaking through darkness. “January Lennon, don’t tell me you were nervous.”
“Never.” They sit there, grinning at each other, until she breaks away first, resuming her toneless, random playing. The keys bow beneath her fingers more forgivingly than her cello strings.
“What about you?” she asks. “What were you thinking about? Before?”
She can’t play when he smiles like that.
It’s a crooked smile, accompanied by a warm flush across his cheeks— it stains the tips of his ears, too. His eyes drop again to the keys, and his fingers race across them to lace with hers, using her hand to play. “You. I was thinking about the first time I heard you play.”
“On the driveway? That wasn’t even my best work, Loch.”
His laughter comes from his chest, deep and warm. “No, that wasn’t the first time. It was weeks before I met you. I can still see that, too, though. In the auditorium. The others had just left the practice room; I heard them leaving, that’s why I came out. I needed a break, and the interruption was a good prompt. But when I was walking past the auditorium, that side door was open, and I heard this just. . . gorgeous cello solo. And I looked in, and there you were. You were wearing a romper. Blue. White flowers. Ruffly around your, ah, cleavage.”
“Of course you remember my cleavage,” she teases, bumping her shoulder against his.
But he looks over at her, and his eyes are so arresting, so disarmingly sincere and vulnerable that January is immediately anchored in place.
“I remember everything.”
She tries to swallow around the knot in her throat, but settles for uneven breathing and twists her hand in his grasp so that she is no longer his puppet, and they are simply sitting there, holding hands. She shifts on the bench, pulling one leg up and half-turning to face him, and she holds their hands in her lap. He makes no move to pull away.
“What else?” He cocks his head. “I mean what else from that day. What else do you remember about me?” she elaborates.
He considers her for a minute before allowing her an answer. “You looked severe.” She draws back, but he laughs, shortly, and squeezes her hand before she can withdraw too far. “Focused,” he corrects himself. “You looked. . . consumed with your music. It was beautiful. Like your cello was just an extension of your body, and not a separate thing entirely. Your cello was the only thing in the world.”
January stares at him, searching his face for teasing, but his smile is too open to be insincere, and color creeps up her neck the longer he holds her gaze. She tries to play off the burn and the ache that accompanies it in her chest. “I guess that’s kind of cute,” she says, with a nonchalance she does not feel. He laughs.
“And your voice.”
“My voice?”
“Yeah, you kept apologizing to the janitor. He made you laugh. You told him you just liked to imagine there was an audience.”
“And what does my voice sound like?”
He pauses and looks away, and a small smile crosses his lips, like he’s keeping a secret he’s on the verge of telling her. “Passacaglia.”
“Bless you.”
He snorts, rolls his eyes back to January, and nudges her foot with his knee. “No, stupid. Passacaglia. Handel. Suite number seven.”
She wishes she listened to classical as widely as he did; she wishes she knew what he meant by this, and she makes a mental note to go home and look it up later. She smiles, widely, now. “Well,” she says. “I’m glad it’s that and not Miss Piggy.”
“Eh,” he says, and shrugs. “You have your moments.”
“Hey!”
“I’m only teasing. Although you do snore. It’s very cute.”
January groans, but nonetheless cannot remove the smile on her lips. In the low light from the string of fairy lights framing her window, everything in the room is warm. Everything is bathed in soft yellow. On him, it’s like the light glows from within him. He is the origin of everything that makes her feel safe. She squeezes his hand once, and he squeezes back.
“And me?” he asks. “Did you ever notice me before?”
She wants to lie. She wishes she had. But she didn’t. The first time she ever saw him was that morning of the accident. When Lourdes bubbled over with excitement, Deja and Justus balanced each other, and Soleil and Taylor still had heartbeats.
The car reconstructs itself around her.
Loch coaxes a few more notes from the keys with his free hand. They scatter the remnants of the memory.
“No,” she admits. “It was that day.”
He nods, as if he expected this. “How did I look?”
Her first impression of him floods back to her. Too tall for his own comfort, too elegant for their goofy group piling haphazardly into an old van, electrified with excitement. Eyes glowing. The most beautiful eyes she’s ever seen.
“Like a fool,” she responds, shoving his shoulder playfully. “You were already half-laughing. Probably at something absurd Soleil said, I’m sure, you’d laugh for anything.” His eyes drop and a soft pink warms his cheeks, but she draws his attention back to her by resting her head on his shoulder. “It’s one of my favorite things about you,” she says, softly.
She feels him swallow more than she hears it.
“Loch,” she says. “Don’t tell me you’re nervous.”
“Why would I be nervous? The prettiest woman I know is holding my hand, her hair smells good, and she told me she likes my laugh. I have no reason to be nervous, besides saying or doing anything that will fuck all that up and make her pull away.”
She doesn’t know how he does it; makes her smile so much it hurts. She didn’t know joy could hurt like this.
It is such a welcome form of pain.
“I wish I met you sooner,” she says, in a near-whisper. It is something she has thought for weeks, now. Since he’s been staying with her, the world seems more bearable. It’s warmer. Softer.
Perhaps the feeling she has in this room has nothing to do with the fairy lights dispelling the darkness.
Perhaps it has always been him.
“Loch,” she says, and it feels different on her tongue. His name is something sacred to her now. She pulls back to tell him so, tilts her head to look up at him.
But he kisses her before she can find the words, and the world stumbles to a halt.
His lips move softly against hers, and he leans into her body, erasing the gaps and spaces she so resented earlier. They’re gone, punished for daring to exist, and his body fits against hers the way the moon fits into the velvet pattern of the star-studded sky. He belongs here. She belongs here, melting into him.
She runs out of air too quicky, and pulls away only for him to brace his forehead against hers and exhale shakily.
“Loch,” she says again, and this time it is not just his name. It is a prayer and a sigh of thanks and a plea.
“Do you want me to…?” he asks, and her mind catches up to his question only when he slips his hand from hers and dares to slide it beneath her shirt, his fingertips urging goosebumps to the surface of her skin where they trace delicate patterns along her abdomen, just above the waistband of her sweatpants slung low on her hips.
It wasn’t a thought she had entertained, mostly because all ability to think coherently evaporated the moment his lips met hers. But she doesn’t just want him; she suddenly feels as though she will combust if he does not take her to bed this instant.
“Please,” she says, more gasp than word, and that smile—it stuns her again, a burst of light so blinding it almost hurts. He laughs a small, disbelieving laugh, and she laughs, too, and he catches the sound in his mouth.
This kiss is different. Not chaste. Not soft. Not shy.
It is filled with hunger. Desperate, greedy want, and tantalizing heat that stokes flames in parts of her she didn’t realize existed before this moment. His name, abruptly, is not the only holy thing she has ever known. His body beneath her is a testament to every god that has ever lived. Miracles? She never thought them real. But he’s here. He is breathing, alive at the same time as her, in the same place. She is entangled in his embrace, falling into his lap and his dizzying kisses, and this is nothing short of miraculous. Whatever is out there—god or gods or the universe—gave her him, and that, yes, of all things is proof of divinity.
He kisses her and it chases away all the pain.
Somehow, they make their way from the bench in front of the keyboard to the couch, collapsing into the cushions. He hovers over her on top of them only briefly, his hips pressing into hers in a way that makes her cry out in frustration, but he only kisses her again, swallowing her air and her ability to speak or do anything but gasp, and then his hand undoes the drawstrings of her sweats, and he fumbles them down her legs, fingertips brushing the skin of her thighs as he does so, and this creates new waves of heat in her.
Her underwear joins her sweats in a puddle on the floor.
His fingertips trace patterns of fire up her thighs.
The way he slips his fingers into her—torturously slow, as much teasing as savoring-- is decidedly unholy.
“God,” she gasps into his mouth, and he slides from atop her to kneel on the floor between her legs.
His mouth on her lips could have converted her.
Everywhere else, and she is all but lost.
