“Where’d you get this ugly thing? Looks like someone put it
through a blender.”
She heaved an aggravated sigh as she came back into the
living room and saw Rob studying the score Nikki had brought her. “Nikki got it
for me. It’s old. Don’t touch it!”
He snapped back the hand that had been reaching for the music
and stared at her like she’d lost her mind.
She scowled. For some reason, the thought of him touching
that beautifully broken score made her extremely irate. She envisioned the
already yellowed pages turning black and withering at the touch of his
unappreciative hand. “Are we going, or what?”
He moved away from the piano and gave her a measured look. He
put his hands on his hips. “Did you want to take a Midol first?”
She opened her mouth to say something really rude, but before
she could voice it, he chuckled and stepped forward.
He took her hands in his and shook her arms lightly. “Babe,
what’s wrong? Why are you so annoyed?”
“I’m just sick of people’s opinions, Rob. First Nikki, and
now you? Why don’t we invite the mailman in and see what he has to say about my
life while we’re at it?” She tried to ignore the fact that he’d called her “babe.”
She hated that he tried to lay claim on her when they were not together.
Rob raised his eyebrows and moved his thumbs back and forth
across her hands. “I obviously didn’t know Nikki had irritated you because I
wasn’t here. I’m sorry if I made it worse.” He smiled, but she noticed it
didn’t really reach his eyes, which made her wonder if it was sincere at all.
“If you don’t want to go hiking, it’s okay. I just thought maybe you’d like to
enjoy this gorgeous day with me.”
Melody sighed, feeling a little bit like a jerk. He really
hadn’t done anything to provoke her; nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. He
was always opinionated. She didn’t know why she’d expect him to be any
different. “No, I’ll go. Sorry. I’m just on edge.”
He trailed his finger along her jawline. “Don’t worry about
it, babe. I’ll help you forget whatever’s bothering you in no time.”
She didn’t say anything about his arrogant remark. Those also
came with the territory when she was with Rob. She secured her hair back into a
ponytail and followed him out the door. As she turned her key in the lock, a
distant part of her mind screamed at her that she was insane, that this wasn’t
who she was. That nothing she had been doing for the last year of her life was
productive or useful in any way. That all she was doing was hiding and running.
She hated that voice’s opinion even more than she hated
Nikki’s and Rob’s. So, she ignored it completely.
Chapter Two
Melody let the door crash closed behind her, not caring that
it made a racket that probably could be heard all the way down the street. Her
feet were screaming at her, she felt like her lungs were going to collapse, her
quads felt like they were made of jelly, and her mood had not improved any.
Apparently, Rob’s idea of a “hike” was actually an Iron Man death march up the
side of a mountain where he took off like an Olympian and left her behind,
wheezing and puffing and almost falling to her death. And to make things even
better, he had heckled her the entire time, calling her slow and out of shape.
The man had actually asked her if she wanted to eat dinner
with him afterward. Even if she hadn’t felt like throwing up from overexertion,
she would have told him to cram it up his you-know-what. He’d continued to
tease her all the way home, thinking, she imagined, that he was funny. She
wanted to kick him where it counted. At times, Rob could be witty and charming.
Those times were redeeming and were why she continued to keep him around. Other
times, he was just a jackass.
After flopping down on her sofa, she yanked off her hiking
boots and flung them across the room in frustration. She was finished with him
for about a week. He could sit over there and figure out why she was annoyed.
If he had a brain in his head at all, he wouldn’t have a hard time with it. But
then again, he was a guy, so who knew? Knowing him, he’d think she’d fallen
madly in love with his primal, alpha behavior. In other words, the fact that
he’d acted like a complete caveman.
She rolled her eyes and stood, heading down the hall. She
pulled her clothing off and threw it haphazardly around her bedroom, grabbed
her pajamas, and made her way into the bathroom. After she had drawn a steaming
hot bath, she stepped into the tub and lay back in it with a sigh of bliss.
As the hot water relaxed her tired, tense muscles, she let
her mind replay the day, specifically her outing with Rob. Sometimes she
wondered why she continued to indulge him. He irritated her seventy-five
percent of the time. Try as she might, she couldn’t see herself falling for
him. He was cocky and flip, and self-centered.
In the back of her mind, she knew the real reason she kept
him around. It wasn’t because she was interested in him. It was because he was
a distraction. It kept her from thinking about anything in her life that
reminded her of the past. Rob was about as far from what her life had been as
she could get.
Before her parents’ accident, the three of them had lived and
breathed music. It had been the three of them for Melody’s entire life. While
she’d had friends and had never been a loner by any means, she had always
preferred the company of her mother and father above everyone else. They all
understood one another. They all spoke the same language, music. There was
nothing now that they were gone. There had been nothing for the last year. No
music. No joy. No nothing. So she filled her days up with mundane things that
didn’t matter, distractions, just to get by.
She had a job, a pitiful one, working as a sales clerk in a
women’s clothing store. She hated it with a passion. It wasn’t her, but that
was why she had taken it. It had nothing to do with music, nothing to do with
the life that had been shattered.
But as she thought about it, she realized she wasn’t really
accomplishing anything by avoiding all that had once reminded her of what she’d
loved. Like Rob had pointed out, she still had pictures everywhere of her
parents and the orchestra they had all been a part of. And she couldn’t escape
the fact that the love of music still lived within her. It wasn’t going to
disappear just because she turned her head the other way and pretended she
didn’t see it.
She’d done everything in her power to alter her life to not
revolve around music and the memories that would cause her pain, but it had
only ended up causing her pain anyway. And it made her sick to her stomach to
think that, by turning her back on what had made her life with her parents
special, she had, inadvertently, turned her back on them.
Self loathing washed over Melody in waves while Nikki’s words
from earlier repeated in her mind. She had been right about one thing. Her
parents
wouldn’t
have liked her current course of action. It would have
saddened them to see Melody give up everything she had loved, everything she
had worked for, just because she was hurting, just because she was afraid.
She heaved a sigh as she got out of the tub, pulled the plug,
and dried off. She slipped into a light pink tank top and gray pajama bottoms
and headed into the kitchen. She put on the teakettle, thinking a cup of tea
sounded relaxing, and relaxation was the driving force of the evening,
considering how rigorous the day had been.
As she wandered back into the living room, her gaze fell upon
the score of music she’d set on her piano. She stared at it for a second,
chewed on her bottom lip in contemplation, and then went over to give it a
closer look. She picked it up and flipped through it gently, careful not to
damage the well-worn pages. Glancing over the notes, she tried to imagine what
it would sound like, but came up short. Nothing her mind could conjure would
come anywhere near what it would actually sound like when played.
She set the music back on the piano and stared at it a few
minutes more, curiosity gnawing at her. She was racked with indecision, not wanting,
and yet, wanting to play it all at the same time.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to force
some calm to return. Okay, no one was there. She didn’t need to worry about
what anyone was going to say, and no one was going to make a big deal and throw
a party and gush over how much progress she was making. And she wouldn’t be
playing
Adagio in G Minor
, which was really what she had a problem with
more than anything.
She’d play for a second, just to see what the score sounded
like, and if she started to feel like her chest was going to constrict and she
was going to have some kind of anxiety attack, she would stop. Simple as that.
Making up her mind, Melody tentatively slid onto the piano
seat and poised her fingers over the keys. She let them rest there for a
moment, testing the waters, so to speak. A twinging pain went through her heart
and left a dull ache in its wake, but it was tolerable. Sucking in a breath,
she looked at the first measure of music and began to play.
It was a mournful song, slow and dark, Gothic almost. She had
planned to stop after the first few measures, but once she started, two things
happened. Wondrous ecstasy coursed throughout her entire body as the music
filled her soul once again, and her fingers moved over the keys with grace and
ease, like she had never stopped playing. For one beautiful second, she felt
like she’d come home. That reason alone was enough to keep her there, but
something else happened. Something strange and all consuming.
While the sorrowful notes echoed through her empty house, her
mind conjured up the image of a man sitting at a piano, alone in a candlelit
room. She was looking at him from behind as he hunched over the keys, lost
within the same notes she was currently playing. Long, shining,
chestnut-colored hair spilled down his back and around broad shoulders that
seemed burdened, as if they carried weight. That particular thing struck her
because she noted that his shoulders looked the way hers felt. Heavy, tired,
sad….
She focused on the image in her mind, more than happy to
devote her attention to whatever her imagination conjured instead of the grief
of missing her parents. The music filled her, swirled around her, along with
the unbearable loneliness that emanated from the man at the piano. It was
almost as tangible as hers, and her heart connected to him, whoever he was. An
embodiment of her own pain and sadness, she imagined.
A chill ran the course of her body as the temperature in the
room seemed to drop, which she thought was strange considering it was the
middle of summer. She ignored it as she continued to play, driven by the
gorgeous music and the enigmatic image in her mind. She found she wanted to
know more about the person in her subconscious, the man brought to life by this
aged score. It seemed he had a story to tell, and the only way to know it was
to continue playing.
So she did. She gave herself over to the notes and chords,
lost herself within the vision in her mind until it seemed almost real. The
temperature in the room continued to cool and the hair on her arms bristled.
She felt a strange, tugging sensation around her heart, as if it wanted her to
reach out to the man at the piano, touch him, soothe him, let him know he was
not as alone as he felt, and maybe assure herself that she wasn’t either.
As the music coursed through her and around her, she played
with abandon. It was only when she shivered that she realized her eyes were
closed, had been closed for quite awhile. With a start, her fingers fumbled on
the keys, causing the pristine notes she had been playing to falter. How could
she be playing the music in front of her without looking at it? Had she just
improvised the last few minutes? She stilled her fingers, but the melody of the
music continued in her mind, echoing as if through a long tunnel. If she didn’t
know better, she would have thought it wasn’t in her mind at all, but close by,
and real.
Dampness touched her bare arms, and she swore she could smell
the ocean, which made absolutely no sense considering she lived in Colorado,
and nowhere near the sea. She looked toward her front door, wondering if she’d
left it open and some kind of strange storm had rolled in.
She gasped and jumped so hard she almost fell straight off
her piano bench. She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed them with the heels of
her palms. When she opened them again, everything was as it should have been,
and the temperature in the room went back to normal. She stared at her empty living
room, trying to figure out what she had seen. For a second, the half of the
room she wasn’t in had looked like some kind of stone structure, like a room in
a castle. It had felt cold and foggy, dimly lit with flickering candles, and in
the corner where the door should have been sat the man her imagination had
conjured while playing the music. Only, she’d stopped playing, and he had
continued.
“What in the world?” she whispered. Her heart pounded and her
mouth felt dry. She glanced at the score of music and eyeballed it. She had
never been an exceptionally creative person…not visually anyway, in the way of
dreaming up strange visions. Even if she had daydreamed now and again, they had
never been so vivid that they had taken up residence in the room she was in.
Maybe she’d finally lost her mind. Or maybe she was so
exhausted from Rob’s hike of death that her brain was playing tricks on her.
That had to be it.
But even as she convinced herself that was the only logical
explanation, her heart still ached at the sorrow she had felt while gazing upon
that man. She glanced at the keys, part of her longing to play again, to see if
she could glimpse him a second time. Part of her was afraid to. What if she
really was losing her mind? Had grief and isolation finally caused her to
crack? If so, it probably wasn’t healthy to continue entertaining the fantasy.