After exhausting her search Melody left her computer, no more
enlightened as to what she had seen the night before than she had been when she
started.
She made herself some pasta with meat sauce and garlic bread,
having gone to the grocery store after her outing with Nikki, and opened up the
bottle of wine Rob had brought over the night before.
As if the man had freaking radar, he knocked on her door as
soon as she had finished pouring her first glass. Melody knew it was him
without looking. He was relentless.
Melody went to the screen door and did her best to smile at
him, even though she still kind of wanted to claw his face off.
“Hey, Mel,” he greeted. “Whatcha up to tonight?”
“I just finished dinner, actually,” she said.
He pouted in a way she imagined he thought would be cute.
“Aw, that’s too bad. I thought maybe we could grab a bite.”
She shrugged helplessly. “Sorry, it’s already made and dished
up. Can’t let it go to waste now.”
“Well, do you have enough for two?”
She sighed. Talk about presumptuous. The guy had no limits to
his pushiness. “Actually, thanks for the offer to hang out, but I think I’m
going to take tonight and relax. I kind of want to play piano for a bit.”
A strange expression crossed his face. “Oh, well…that’s good,
I guess.” He scratched at the back of his head. “I thought you were done with
that stuff.”
She arched an eyebrow. “I don’t think I was ever
done
with it. I just needed time to get over the memories it brought up.”
“Oh…are you going to go back to playing in the orchestra?”
She frowned. Why did he sound so weird? What did it matter to
him? “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far yet. I’m just taking things one
day at a time and enjoying the fact that I
can
play now. The orchestra
is really the furthest thing from my mind at the moment.”
For some reason, that seemed to make him relieved. “Oh, all
right. Well, have a good night then, Melody. You know where I am if you want
me.”
She ignored the implication behind his words and forced
another smile. “Thanks. Goodnight.” She closed the inner door and rolled her
eyes, then went back to her now lukewarm dinner.
The food was mediocre. She had never been the best cook. The
wine was rather exceptional, however. At least Rob had managed to get that
right. She was about to pour her third drink when she decided to abandon the
glass and go for the bottle. Who cared? She was a big girl. If she wanted to
drink an entire bottle of wine all by her lonesome, it was her own business.
Even her parents wouldn’t have stopped her if they’d been alive. They probably
would have been there drinking right along with her.
She smiled at the thought of them, painful as it was, and
migrated to the living room with her bottle. She stood in the doorway for a few
seconds, staring at her piano. Taking a long drink of wine, she slid onto the
bench, letting her eyes scan over the enigmatic piece of music on the stand.
Her mind was already hazy from drinking. She didn’t drink
often, so it didn’t take much. Her usual anxiety about playing was diminished,
an effect from playing the night before coupled with the alcohol. The man she
had seen still tugged at her heart in a way she could never explain, or
understand. But she wondered if it really mattered. She had been filling her
life with distractions for the past year. Maybe this was just another one. At
this point, who cared? She couldn’t deny that she’d rather distract herself
with mystical men who appeared when she played music than with Rob, who
appeared when he wanted to try and get into her pants.
She took another drink of wine and then set the bottle on the
piano. She poised her fingers over the keys, drew in a soft breath, and began to
play the haunting melody once again.
It didn’t take long for it to enrapture her, to consume her, probably
because the Cabernet she was drinking had lowered the barriers of her skeptical
mind. She saw him again, alone at his own piano, and the volume of his sorrow
was so staggering it almost made her fumble her playing. Each haunting note
ached. Each measure bled loneliness. It echoed the pain within her own heart so
perfectly that the line between his sadness and hers blurred, and she could no
longer tell them apart.
Her eyes drifted closed as the music swept her away with its
dreary beauty and perfect melancholy. The temperature in the room plummeted,
and the hair prickled along her arms, the same as it had done the night before,
only much more profound. She did not open her eyes to look around…she played on,
wanting to make it through the piece. She wanted to know how the story ended,
though she really wasn’t sure what the story was. She just knew there was one.
And she wanted to figure it out.
Dampness touched her skin and she heard the distant crash of
ocean waves as she neared the end of the piece, the piece she had played
three-fourths of by feeling alone and not by reading the music. Slowly, she
opened her eyes while her fingers danced across the last few measures.
She sucked her breath in sharply, and her hands stilled. As
before, half of her living room looked the way it had in her vision, only this
time, it was so much more. The music continued, played by the solitary, dark
figure over by where the door should have been. Her hardwood floors and white,
modern walls gradually turned into gray stone, and her electric lighting
fizzled out into soft candlelight.
There was a surreal, dreamlike quality to the vision and she
blinked hard, then glanced at her bottle of wine, wondering if maybe she
shouldn’t have drank so much after all. She picked it up and stared at it, then
raised the bottle to her lips and took another, rather lengthy drink. She
half-expected the images to be gone once she lowered the bottle, but they
weren’t. The misty vision remained and she found her gaze drawn back to the man
at the far end of the room, playing the music with no name that portrayed so
perfectly the emptiness in her soul.
Entranced, she stood and took a few tentative steps forward,
still holding her bottle of wine. Maybe she was drunk. Maybe she had fallen
asleep at the piano and was actually dreaming. Either way, it didn’t matter.
She had to see his face. And she couldn’t stand his painful isolation one more
second. It was hurting her.
The sound of the notes became more resonant the closer she
got, and the dampness she felt in the air intensified, as did the sound of the
ocean waves. The room grew darker, and the highlights cast by the candlelight
became brighter and more pronounced.
She stood behind him, watching the firelight play across his
dark hair, watching his long, skilled fingers pull perfection from the keys.
The haziness surrounding the vision began to dissipate, and the muted lines
became clearer. Every note he played reverberated through her soul.
Slowly, she reached her hand out, moved by the beauty of the
music and the fantasy she had fallen prey to. Her outstretched fingers parted
moist darkness until they caressed the length of his shining hair. The silken
realness of it startled her, for she had honestly figured the entire dream
would vanish upon her attempt to interact with it, and he did something she
hadn’t expected.
His hands crashed down onto the keys with a cacophonous sound,
and he whipped around to look at her.
She jumped back with a little shout, stumbled over her own
feet, and fell down hard on her backside, dropping the bottle of wine. It
tipped over on its way down and dumped its contents all over the front of her.
She gasped, and the shock of the liquid hitting her skin brought her rushing
back to reality.
“Oh my goodness, are you hurt?”
Her gaze snapped to the owner of the voice—the tall,
devastatingly handsome man looming over her—and she screamed. She scrambled
into a standing position and turned, intent on running from this
dream-gone-wrong and going straight to bed.
She screamed again. Her room was gone. Her house was gone.
There was nothing familiar to her anywhere in sight. All she saw were stone
walls, firelight, and when she whirled back around, the most beautiful man her
eyes had ever had the privilege of looking at.
Her heart bludgeoned her rib cage with the force of its
pounding, and her wine-fuzzy brain spun nauseatingly inside of her skull. She
turned in a frantic circle, whimpering with bewildered terror. Upon seeing that
nothing was going back to the way it should have been, no matter how hard she
tried to search for her living room within the shadows of the dimly lit room,
she decided it was a good time to scream again.
Chapter Four
“Oh man, oh man, oh man, I’ve really done it, haven’t I?”
Melody muttered to herself after she’d finished screaming. She tangled her
fingers in her hair and squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ve really gone crazy. I’m
hallucinating. This is bad. This is really, really bad.”
“Madam?” The beautiful man stepped toward her with his hand
outstretched.
Melody gave a shout and jumped back, stabbing her finger at
him. “You stay away, hallucination!” She spun around again, searching for a way
back to reality. “This isn’t happening,” she continued to mumble. “Come on,
Mel. Wake up, wake up, wake up!” She smacked herself in the forehead repeatedly
with her palm. When that didn’t work, she closed her eyes and started to click
her heels together. “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
“Madam, please.”
Melody’s eyes snapped open to see him coming toward her
again. She opened her mouth to scream again and had every intention of bolting,
but he snatched hold of her wrist before she had a chance to do anything. His
warm fingers encircled her arm and pulled her forward slightly while he trailed
the fingers of his free hand down the inside of her forearm.
Melody’s mind filled with the soothing sound of wind chimes
and soft, tinkling bells. Tingles raced the length of her arm and calmed the
frantic racing of her heart, replacing it with the lovely music of nature. She
could hear the wind in the reeds while it stirred the chimes and it made her
think of summer. Some clarity chased out the all-consuming panic that had been
building within her; she let out a shaky breath.
She turned her gaze up into the man’s eyes, which were the
most amazing shade of blue, not unlike the summer sky she would picture to go
along with what she heard. She glanced down to where he still trailed his
fingers in lazy circles over her wrist, then looked up at him again. “H-How did
you do that?” she whispered.
The smallest of smiles lifted one corner of his perfect mouth
and warmth filled his gaze. “A gift,” he replied simply. “Now, please, how in
the world did you get here?”
She raised her finger and pointed at him. “No way! I will ask
the questions!”
He raised his eyebrows. “All right.”
“You are a hallucination, aren’t you? My grief has finally
done me in, and someone is going to find me in my living room, talking to
someone who isn’t there. Right? Admit it!” She was practically shouting at him
in her attempt to gain some sort of control over this bizarre situation.
He blinked in bewildered silence for a moment before he drew
in a soft breath. “What kind of hallucination would I be if I told you I was a
hallucination?”
She stared at him for a second, then frowned. “Good point.”
She noticed he had let go of her wrist, and some of her spastic anxiety was
trying to return. She felt it boiling up her throat and burning her eyes with
tears she would have given anything to shed. She shook her head. “What is this?
Who are you? Where the hell am I? How did I get here?” She fired the questions
at him frantically while looking around her in an attempt to gauge her strange
surroundings.
He reached for her hand, splaying her fingers so he could
trace the lines in her palm. That wonderful, whispering calm returned, carrying
with it the sounds of rushing water and rustling leaves.
“First question, this is strange. I don’t know anything
beyond that. Second question, my name is Liron. Liron Tabor.”
Her brows drew together in a quizzical frown. “T-Tabor?” she
murmured.
Elizabeth Channing, formerly Elizabeth Tabor.
He nodded, and never raised the tone of his voice from calm,
gentle, and velvet soft. “Third question, you are in my home. As to how you got
here….” He shook his head and looked genuinely puzzled. “I have absolutely no
idea. I did not know it was possible for humans to come here. And I certainly
never expected one to sneak up behind me while I was playing the piano.”
She blinked. “Human? You mean, you’re
not
human?” She
swallowed hard. “What are you?”
“A muse.” His reply was simple, like she should have known
what that meant.
“Muse?” she breathed.
He nodded and his gaze took in her features for a moment
before his expression turned confused. “Do you have any idea at all how you
ended up here?”
“I-I-My friend bought me this piece of music at a yard sale.
I played it. It was beautiful. And when I played, I saw you. You were playing
the same piece.” His expression went from befuddled to kind of ill-looking.
“Um…my living room…it changed. I could see you, playing. I could feel…pain,
sadness.” She frowned as all the color seemed to drain from his face.
“This music…who was its composer?” he whispered so quietly
she barely heard.
“Elizabeth Channing,” she murmured.
“Channing.”
He averted his gaze to the floor and a wave of sorrow came
off of him so strong she felt nauseous. His fingers had tightened around her
wrist to the point of pain, and she tried to shake her hand to get his
attention. “Um…ow.”
He snapped his focus back to her and immediately loosened his
hold on her. “Oh!” he exclaimed softly. He feathered his thumb back and forth
over her wrist and shook his head. “Forgive me for that.” He slowly raised her
wrist and placed his lips gently over her pulse.