Wildalone (50 page)

It was past midnight when a large group stormed in and the cacophony became unbearable. I locked myself in the bathroom, staring at the mirror under the fluorescent lights, letting time pass. When I came out, a tall shadow blocked my way and cornered me in the empty hallway.

“Look—at—
that
!” The voice dragged each word through a grin that made me shiver. “The girl who thinks she's too good, just because she managed to spin the head of Rhys Estlin.”

“Leave me alone, Evan.”

“We've all been wondering about you. Getting Rhys to swear off women? You must be very impressive in the sack.”

He waited until I struggled to move past him, then trapped me against the wall.

“Don't play hard to get with me. I see what's going on—he did grow tired of you, after all, and now he's recycled you to his brother. I might as well be next, don't you think?”

His beer-soaked breath was all over my face. I tried to push him away but his body was crushing me.

“Get off me, Evan, or I'll scream for help.”

“Scream for help? Girls like you don't do that.”

I should have done exactly that, but I still hoped he would let go without humiliating me in front of everyone. Suddenly his teeth sank into my ear, shooting a sharp pain through it.

“I can make you scream in private, if you let me. I've been dying to try you out. Look how hard you've made me already—” He forced my hand down and rubbed it over his zipper, through the jeans. “Come on, promise me that I can try you out once the other Estlin gets tired of you too. I'll be so good to you. You have no idea how good to you I can be, if you keep making me hard like this—”

The rest happened in a flash. He was hurled away from me, a fist smashed into his face and people rushed from all sides, pulling Jake back while a security guard lifted Evan from the floor and escorted him out.

“What did he do to you? Did he hurt you? I hope for his sake that he didn't!” Jake was holding my face and looking into my eyes frantically, as if afraid I might lie to him. “I'm such an idiot, I should have never let you out of my sight! Tell me he didn't hurt you, because otherwise—”

“He didn't, I'm fine.”

The crowd had multiplied. Everyone stood and stared.

“Come, I'll get you a drink. Or would you rather lie down?”

“I'm fine, Jake, really. Let's not make a big deal out of it.”

He took me to an adjacent room where we could be alone. “You won't have to worry about Evan again.”

Something about his tone made me nervous. “What do you mean?”

“He'll be gone from Princeton before school reopens.”

“You're joking, right?”

“Far from it. Evan has pulled this shit before; there are files and he knows it. So he'll probably leave on his own, before it goes to disciplinary committee. Otherwise he'll get expelled. Rhys and I will make sure he does.”

“Expelled for what? For daring to come near the Estlin trophy girl?”

“He would have done things to you that you can't even imagine.”

“Things to me? Just listen to yourself! He's a kid who crossed the line because he drank too much. And you are ready to ruin his entire future over it?”

“I don't care about his future.”

“Jake, what's wrong with you? You sound exactly like your brother!”

“I sound nothing like him. If Rhys had seen what I saw, Evan would be smashed to pieces by now. Getting expelled is a treat in comparison, trust me.”

“But you realize it's as much Rhys's fault as it was Evan's, right?”

His voice turned steel-cold. “My brother has nothing to do with it.”

“Of course he does. Evan considers Rhys a role model, so tonight he tried to do to me only what he's seen your brother do to other girls, even during the so-called Thea phase. And why wouldn't he? I've been with Rhys for months; clearly I must enjoy this kind of thing.”

The response took a few seconds. “None of this is up for discussion, Thea. Evan will have to find another campus for his moronic fits.”

“And if he refuses?”

“It's not a take-it-or-leave-it deal.”

“No, it's the usual Estlin deal. You'll make him name his own price.”

“I will . . . what?!” The anger exploded—in his face, his voice, his hands that tightened into fists instantly. “Rhys told you?”

I avoided his eyes, the madness in them.

“What exactly did he say?”

“Jake, I don't think we should—”

“Oh yes, we should. How much did my dear brother dish out?” My silence only fueled his rage, confirming what he had already guessed. “Rhys can be quite the storyteller. Did he give you all the details? How she went after him, and begged him in the car, and told him she had wanted only him from the beginning?”

“Please don't.”

“Why not? It's a sexy story. Exactly the kind of story Rhys needs before he sweeps a girl off her feet and onto the piano. Was that when he told you? Or earlier, when the two of you were choosing Nora for me?”

Everything in him was bursting—with fury, with pain, the long accumulated pain of having to step aside. To disappear. To erase himself from everyone's life, including his own.

“Is this how he won you from me, Thea? By telling you that I was once a fool because I let a woman walk all over me?”

“He never tried to win me from you.”

“No. He just took you, as soon as he decided he wanted you. Didn't even let you make up your own mind.”

“My mind was made up already.”

“I don't think so. That night in your room, when we stopped . . . it would have been your first time, wouldn't it?”

I couldn't hear my own “yes.” But he did.

“And when I saw you pushing him away on the piano, was it because of me?”

Another “yes,” fainter than the first one.

It was all he needed. His arms closed around me, for the first time without guilt, and he breathed me in—deep, as if until now his lungs had been robbed of air.

“Jake, it's too late . . .”

“I don't care.”

“But I do. I am with Rhys and we can't—”

“None of this matters now.” He took my hand. “I can't believe I waited this long. Come with me.”

Come . . . where?

As he led me out of Ivy, I tried to decide what to tell him in the car. That it was too late for the two of us. And that I really meant it. That the only place I needed to go was back to the house. Fast. Because his gift had to be put away until I could figure out how to explain to Rhys why his brother had been trying to buy a Chopin original for me back in September, long before he was supposed to know me. Before Rhys and I had even met.

We passed by the car. He kept walking.

“Where are you taking me? We should go back before Rhys comes home.”

“We will, don't worry.”

Down another block, just around the corner, was a building whose deserted lobby had a billboard of photos:
WELCOME TO PRINCETON
'
S DEPARTMENT OF ENGINEERING
.

“Jake, what are we doing here?”

Without a word, he headed down corridors where ceiling lamps emitted their intense, harrowing light along linoleum floors, as if marking the way to a hospital bed.

Then I saw them. Pianos. Dozens of them, in all shades of black and brown, clustered under the endless brick walls of an atrium whose glass roof must have let the sky in during the day but now closed over us, sealed with night.

“What is all this?”

He smiled, without letting go of my hand. “A temporary rest stop. We're donating these to high schools and small concert halls. They'll get routed from here.”

The simple words, the casual tone as always—as if he had shown me the most ordinary thing.

“So this is just storage space?”

“For a week. We asked and the school said yes.”

“Who is ‘we'?”

“Rhys and I.”

He took me past the nearest uprights. A black Yamaha. A mahogany Steinway. A Knabe in rich soft cherry. Then suddenly in the middle, set apart from the others—a white grand piano. Cream white that made you wish for doors wide open out onto a summer field, for insistent sunbeams, for the opium of tiny flowers, and for the touch of lips—unpredictable, like the first notes of music chosen for you by someone else.

He sat down and began playing: softly, as if it was nothing, and without taking his eyes off me, having gone over the étude probably hundreds of times. I had heard so much about his talent, about his magic over the piano—but none of it had done him justice. He owned the keys completely. Every nuance. Every shade of sound that could possibly be drawn from them. The unforgiving fragility of his touch made the music ache for his fingers, seduced into rhythms that were never intended for it, shattered by him ruthlessly then healed back into phrases of absolute beauty. The étude itself was unrecognizable. It poured out of him with the violent sweep of an ocean afflicted by
storm—raging, hurling its furious waves of sound—until he decided to hush it back in, console it, lull it with the peace of a few final notes and then end it quietly, distilling into a single last chord the vast darkness of its despair.

When he rose from the bench, I knew what was going to happen and that I couldn't stop him, or myself, even if I tried. In some distant corner of my mind, it felt wrong. But I was hypnotized by his music, by the sadness in his eyes while he played, by his lips that had taken mine once and were now finding them again, erasing everything else, absolutely everything—

“Is this how you take care of my girl?!”

The enraged voice shot its thunder through the building and something hit the piano, smashing it to pieces. The entire atrium shuddered.

“How long have you been after her? Since you ordered your little gift?”

I watched in horror as Rhys grabbed Jake by the shoulders and hurled him against one of the pianos. Jake's body hit the wood and the impact left him bent over, before Rhys grabbed him again.

“Answer me! How long? And did you think I wouldn't figure out where you'd take her? Rushing to get these fucking pianos in here, so you can screw around with her behind my back?”

He hurled Jake once more, against a different piano. I screamed and tried to get to them, but he shouted at me to stay away.

“Why the hell did you do this, Jake? I trusted you with my life!” He snatched Jake one last time and pulled him up, yelling in his face with deafening fury: “You're my brother! Why?!”

Jake didn't fight, knowing he had no chance against a rage that wasn't human. Only his quiet voice made it through: “She was mine before you even met her. I gave her up for you.”

Rhys turned around, finding me instantly with terrified eyes whose disbelief demanded an answer but gave me only a second for it. Then they looked past me, and before I could say anything, he was gone.

I
N THE HOURS
that followed, Jake and I didn't speak. He shut the door to his room while I went into the one across from it—the room that had come so close to becoming my own. Then everything sank in silence, a silence deeper than any I had ever known. And in that silence, each of us began to wait for Rhys.

He didn't come home—not the rest of the night, not the next day. Jake never emerged either, and when the starkly red Christmas sun bled its apathy and vanished through the lifeless trees outside, I threw on my coat and went for a walk.

He was going to show up, eventually. He had to. “Funny how Princeton always keeps me on a tight leash: first my brother, now you,” he had said as a joke, once. But it was neither his brother's hand nor mine that held the end of that leash. Something fated and undefeatable had imprisoned him on this campus, so even if he chose never to return to his house, I knew where to find him. Promptly on the next full moon, in one month minus a day.

The rest was less clear in my mind. What should I say to him? Would
he even listen? I was ready to explain, apologize, convince, beg, grovel. Yet sometimes in life, if you weren't careful, things could become irreparably broken. Like those Andalucían gypsies—whose blood, I was starting to suspect, filled his own veins with talent and madness and everything else that had doomed Isabel—he probably found it hard to forgive.

A man like that might fall for you, worship you, lay his life and his future at your feet. But once you trigger his jealousy, all bets are off . . .

I shivered. With the sun gone, the temperature was dropping fast. And now there was also wind: the houses on both sides of the road had ended. This far down Mercer, away from the cozy glow of Christmas lights, a vast open land known as the Princeton Battlefield stretched under scattered pines and hueless sky.

A good moment to turn around and go back
, it occurred to me. But across the field I noticed the detached façade of a Greek temple. Or what was supposed to look like one: four Ionic columns, shooting their elegant verticals up, each topped with a volute as if a ram had been sacrificed at the base and the horns placed high onto the shaft, in praise of the gods.