“You play all of these?”
“Oh, I could, I suppose. I’m capable.” She tilted her head, looking over the instruments with a fond expression. “I’ve played most of them but not all. It’s a collection.”
Distracted by the conversation, Niko ran his hands over the keyboard. He’d always had this itch beneath his skin when he saw an instrument, like he should be able to play and how the music existed in his fingertips if he only knew the right way to put them.
“It’s almost a prerequisite for me to be a collector,” Carys said.
This was something that had been cemented for Niko in the days following the awkward signing match between Carys and her brother. The woman didn’t need prompting to add to a conversation. She was forever throwing information out there without a second thought. It boggled Niko’s mind.
“My parents were anthropologists, but my mother was particularly interested in music. Hence my name.”
Jamie looked confused. “Carys?”
She laughed. “No, not that. My middle name is Lyric,” she said with a slightly sheepish smile. “Benny’s middle name is Rhythm, which is ironic since he has none. Maybe it was always supposed to be a part of me.”
“You work in music?”
“I repair and restore instruments for a living. Antiques are my specialty. If you’ve ever been to a historical house or a museum and they say something about how the piano or whatever still works, that’s because of people like me.”
She looked smug about it, too, and that amused Niko.
“There’s money in that?” Jamie asked.
“Sure. I make a pretty decent living, enough that I don’t really have to worry, especially because I don’t get charged much rent here. I could get my own place pretty easily, but Gran liked the company.” She shrugged.
“Nice. Sounds like good work if you can get it,” Jamie said. He then returned to Niko’s side, helping him measure. “I’d love to have even half the collection you got here. That drum set’s pretty sweet.”
“That’s my brother’s favorite, too. He likes the vibration best. Do you play?”
“Hell yeah.” Jamie bumped Niko’s side. “This guy and I had a…” He looked over, guilty and obviously regretting opening his big mouth.
“Had a what?” Carys asked, not catching the shift in the atmosphere.
Niko bent his head, writing down the measurements they needed, and Jamie cleared his throat, subdued. “A band. We used to have a band.”
“Oh, that’s great. What did you play, Niko?”
Niko’s lip twitched, but he didn’t look up. Jamie answered for him after a few awkward moments. He forced a laugh and slung his arm around Niko’s shoulders. “You can’t play anything worth a damn, can you? He was the singer.”
“Oh.”
Right. Oh. There was so much sorrow and fucking pity in that one sound. He kept his head down and concentrated on his work.
He was expecting platitudes and for her to say she was sorry. He even braced himself for the inevitable stumbling. The first thing people said was at least he hadn’t lost his vision or hearing, which was true enough. If he’d been given a choice between the three, he’d give up his voice willingly, but no one had asked him.
“I don’t have any mic stands here, anyway,” Carys said, startling him out of his tense pose. “So if you could play any instrument here, what would it be?”
Jamie surreptitiously stepped on his toe hard enough to get his attention. He gave Niko a look, his head turned away so Carys couldn’t see, that plainly said, “Answer her.” Since it would be a while before the house was done, Jamie wanted Carys to get comfortable with Niko as soon as possible.
Niko turned and surveyed the collection. His eyes lit on the keyboard first, but he dismissed that as not badass enough. Instead, he walked over to a beautiful electric guitar on the wall.
Carys snorted. “Typical. You guys all want to be rock stars, don’t you? And who could blame you? Anyone would look cool with this.” She arched a brow, challenge in her eyes. “Do you know what it is?”
His look must’ve been disparaging because her grin widened. Already knowing the name of the guitar, he did his best to guess the sign and held two fingers up to his teeth in imitation of a snake.
“This is the sign you’re looking for.” She held up her right hand, index and middle fingers bent in a similar and, now that he thought about it, more effective imitation of a snake. She made a slithering motion with her hand and went for her neck. Then she nodded her head in the direction of the guitar. “ESP Snakebite. She’s a queen.”
Niko drew his hand over the smooth surface, allowing himself the one touch before he went back to the window. Jamie had him fixed with an expression he couldn’t read, but before he could shrug his shoulder in question, Carys spoke again
“So what was your band’s name?”
The look on Jamie’s face turned to wry amusement. “We covered rock songs. Our name was Carbon Copy.”
“As in one rock band is like another is like another?” Carys laughed.
“Hey, that’s what they get for letting the metal head name the band,” Jamie said, pointing at himself. “I don’t like listening to the music, but I liked playing.”
The noise of footfalls in the hall drew their attention. Niko glanced over his shoulder to see Bennett come in. He turned back to the window but not before he saw the other man’s expression turn to a scowl.
“Hey, Benny.” There was a pause, and then Carys spoke again. “These are the guys I, uh, hired to help fix up Granny’s house. They’re going to be around a while. There’s a lot to do.”
At first, Niko didn’t understand why she was talking out loud. Obviously they’d had no problem talking with hands alone the week before. A quick look showed that Carys was indeed both signing and speaking. Then he realized she was being polite. It might’ve been awkward if she and Bennett had a conversation all their own with the other two still in the room.
Jamie took a minute to finish what they were doing, and then he turned around.”Hi,” he said, raising a hand to his forehead with a slight wave in what Niko recognized as the sign for hello. “Um, let’s see. J-a-m-i-e.” He spelled his name in surprisingly confident signs. “Me.” He pointed to himself and flashed his most charming grin.
Bennett looked bemused, but Carys’s face lit up with pleasure. “Do you know how to sign?”
“Oh, uh, not really. No.” He looked back and forth between Carys and Bennett, taking in the way she was signing his words to her brother. Then he turned deliberately so Bennett could see him as he spoke. “When Niko had his…” He shrugged, rubbing his neck. “Well, I wanted to learn for him, because I thought someone had to be there to translate.”
Niko stared at his best friend, who was studiously not looking at him. Jamie had never told him he started to learn sign language for him. He didn’t know what to think about it, either.
“Anyway,” Jamie said. “I haven’t gotten very far, but I know all the important things. Drums.” He pointed and signed. “I’m hungry.” He made that sign, grinning when Carys laughed. He waggled his eyebrows as he signed the next silently, his eyes on Bennett. To Niko’s surprise, Bennett’s eyes went wide and his cheeks flushed red.
Carys huffed. “Don’t tell Benny he’s handsome. His ego’s big enough.”
“Can’t fight the truth,” Jamie said, winking at Bennett who then ducked his head.
The other man recovered quickly and signed, looking at Niko as he did. Niko looked over his shoulder out of instinct as though Bennett were looking at someone else. Of course, there was nothing but an empty window behind him.
“What’s your problem?” Carys asked, translating for her brother. “Don’t want to introduce yourself?” She turned to Bennett to answer without giving Niko time to process. “He’s mute,” she said. “And he doesn’t sign.”
“Is there something wrong with your hands?” she translated, and then she looked at Niko apologetically. “Excuse him. The�
��” She cut off as Bennett began signing again. “Don’t tell me. You’re one of those who thinks you’re too good for it? You don’t want to look like a freak like me. Bennett.”
Bennett glanced at his sister but then back at Niko and signed again. “Tell me if I’m wrong,” Carys said.
She sighed, looking to Niko. “Look, he doesn’t mean anything by it. In Deaf culture, this kind of bluntness isn’t considered rude.”
“It’s fine,” Jamie said, stepping in. He looked at Niko. “It’s fine.” There was warning in his tone, and only then did Niko realize his hands were clenched at his sides in fists. “N-i-k-o,” he signed and pointed at Niko. “He just hasn’t gotten around to it. That’s all. it was half a year ago now? He went in for a routine surgery—some nodules on his vocal chords—and the good-for-nothing surgeon made a mistake.”
Niko pushed by everyone, shoulder-checking Jamie as he passed, and headed outside. He needed some air. Not being able to talk for himself made him want to punch things, and wasn’t that how he’d ended up here in the first place? He wanted to go back to where he’d been just a week before: minding his own business in his own place.
Fuck Jamie and Del and everyone else who couldn’t leave him in peace. He’d only gone out with Jamie that first night because they wouldn’t stop bugging him. That had turned out really well, hadn’t it? And fuck that Bennett guy, too. So Niko didn’t like signing. Who the hell cared? He would rather do without the stares, thank you very much. As if it wasn’t bad enough that he couldn’t speak for himself, this asshole had to put words in his mouth.
He threw his hat on the floor, stomped on it, and then turned heel to go back before Jamie could come after him. He didn’t want his friend to think he was beating up another house.
When he came back, Carys and Bennett were nowhere to be seen. Jamie was at the window, and he beckoned him over. “Come on, man. Let’s get this pane settled.”
About an hour later, Carys popped her head back in, offering lunch and lemonade. Niko refused—though, with great effort, he offered her a polite smile when he shook his head—and Jamie seemed torn. After a few seconds of hemming and hawing, he left Niko to do some of the grunt work alone.
He had all of fifteen minutes of peace before Carys came in. She set a glass of lemonade on the floor by his feet and handed him a plate with a sandwich and chips on it. “Jamie said you like roast beef and mortadella.”
The look in her eyes as he stared at her dared him to refuse her generosity. His lip twitched, and he conceded with some amusement. He took the plate with his left hand and made the sign for “thank you” with this right. He was hungry after all, and it would be rude to refuse a point blank offer like that. He settled down cross-legged and was only mildly surprised when she sat across from him.
“So this was your room, huh?”
Niko glanced up as he chewed. Obviously, Jamie and his big mouth had been busy. He nodded and wished he could tell her that, all things considered, he liked the changes. The Snakebite alone would’ve been an improvement on the mess this room had been when it belonged to him.
“I’ve never met the old owners of one of our houses before,” she said, looking around the room. “We’ve moved a few times. Circumstances, you know?” There was a tightness to her eyes he wondered about, but he wouldn’t have asked if he could have.
Not that it mattered. Carys came right out with it. “Our mother died when Benny was a baby and I was four. We moved around a bit before Dad got it together.”
Niko looked up, taken off guard by her point blank admission. He hesitated only a second before he spelled out “sorry.”.
“Sorry,” Carys said. She showed him her hand, curled into the sign for ‘S,’ and made a clockwise circle at her chest.
Sighing a bit, he repeated the motion.
“You have to make the face, too.” She pointed at her mouth, drawing it down into a puppy-dog expression of sorrow. “With sign, it’s not sincere if your face doesn’t match what you’re saying.”
His lip twitched, but he imitated her and repeated the sign.
Carys smiled at him. “Thank you. It was a long time ago.” She cleared her throat, looking around the room again before her eyes settled on him. “Don’t laugh at me, but when I was a kid, whenever we moved, I used to explore our new place for secrets. In books, if some kid moved into a house, there was always something secret. In The Baby-Sitter’s Club books, one of the characters had a secret passageway left over from the Underground Railroad.”
She seemed to realize she was rambling and shook her head. “So does this house have any secrets I should know about?”
Niko had an expression that Jamie called his condescending chew. He would look at someone with a stare full of judgment as he chewed his food slowly, and it never failed to make the person he was looking at squirm.
Sure enough, Carys’s face flushed. She opened her mouth, probably to take it all back, but Niko winked at her to let her know he was kidding. He put his plate on the floor and got to his feet.
It took him a minute to remember which floorboard it was and another minute to clear the space of instruments.
“You’re kidding,” Carys said, coming to stand beside him. “You have a loose floorboard? That’s the most cliché one. Tell me you left something fantastic in there. Or creepy. Did you collect animal bones when you were a kid?”
He glanced up at her and waggled his eyebrows before he went back to working his fingers around the edge of the board, trying to remember how it eased up.
It wasn’t a loose or broken floorboard. The space had been put there on purpose. For what, Niko had never known, but it was the reason he’d chosen this room in the first place. His little-boy instincts had found the space right away, and he’d never told a soul except Jamie.
He considered too late that he probably shouldn’t be showing Carys what he’d left in the small space. It wasn’t exactly workplace appropriate, and she was still a stranger. Who knew how sensitive she was to these kinds of things?
The look of eager anticipation on Carys’s face made up his mind for him. He bet it would be worth her reaction. Besides, in all likelihood, one of the other owners of the house had found this space and emptied it out. After all, it had been fifteen years.
He finally got the board loose and stood up, sweeping his hand grandly over it with a little bow. It was difficult to control his smirk as he stepped back and she reached into the hole.
“Ew!” She gave a little squeak and tossed the contents of the hidey-hole away from her. The porno magazines, stiff and dusty from disuse, landed on the wood floor with a thwack. He’d been right. The look on her face and the way she jumped back as though the magazines were covered in spiders were well worth the risk.
“Oh, shut up.” Her face was beet red, but she was smiling. She’d seemed like the type of person who could take a joke. “I should’ve known. I took you for the type who knows his way around the internet. Magazines. Pah. So old fashioned.”
His lips curled up on one corner, and he tilted his head, arching an eyebrow at her.
She stared right back at him. “You,” she pointed at him, “are dirty.” She raised her hand just below her chin and waggled it. Then she put her index finger to her head. “Dirty-minded.”
Niko shrugged unapologetically and used his foot to sweep the magazines back into their hiding spot. He replaced the board and moved the cello he’d displaced over it again.
He looked up to find Carys staring at him, indecision written on her face. “It’s just a thought, but… I wondered if I could teach you how to play one of these instruments. Any of them.” She gestured around the room.
Niko blinked, certain he’d heard wrong.
“I kind of got the sense music was important to you. A real loss,” she said in a rush. “I know it’s not the instrument you’re used to, but you could have music again. If you wanted, that is.”
Niko’s mouth worked, but of course, no sound came out. Not that h
e knew what to say regardless.
“Just think about it, okay? Offer stands,” Carys said. Her cheeks still flaming, she stood and gathered up his empty plate. She hurried away, leaving him staring after her.
The windows were done. Now that the most necessary repair had been made, they moved on to the most obvious aesthetic damage.
The railing Niko had tried to rip loose wasn’t the only part of the small front porch that was dilapidated and ready to fall apart, so it made more sense to replace and update the whole thing. Carys had agreed but only if she could start paying them for their work.
“The work you did on the windows alone added more than enough value to the house to make up for your temper tantrum,” she’d said. “You deserve to be paid for your time, but you can give me a discount, if you want.”
With those words, Niko could consider himself among the employed again. It was a nice supplement to his disability checks, and if Carys intended to update the whole house as she was considering, it would keep him busy for a while.
All things considered, Carys and Jamie made his new work environment pleasant. Carys and her lack of a filter were growing on him. At least she was interesting. He left her house that evening in a chipper mood.
His smile fell when he went to pull into his parking space only to find it occupied by his father’s truck. Niko’s lip twitched in annoyance. Things like this had been a point of contention between him and his father growing up. Vincente believed a child’s respect for his parent should be a given, while Niko thought it would’ve been nice if his father would let him offer his parking space rather than simply take it.
Niko clenched his fingers around the steering wheel and swallowed down the irritation that knotted in his throat. He backed up and drove around the corner to the guest parking. He was almost to his apartment when he realized he was gnashing his teeth so hard that his jaw had begun to ache.
“Where’s the beer?”
He shouldn’t have been surprised when Del greeted him at the door already in mid–conversation. He glared, and she made a face. “You didn’t get my text, did you?”
Spaces Between Notes Page 4