I nodded.
“And so part of it is, he’s all strong and silent and can just growl at me any time to take my panties off and follow him into a closet. And that’s great, but…we can’t talk about stuff because the people we’re playing wouldn’t do that.”
I nodded. “And you can’t just stop playing the role and be yourself….”
“…because I’m scared of breaking the whole thing. What if this is all we have? What if I push him away?”
I thought for long enough that I finished the rest of my wine. As Clarissa poured me another, I said, “But you can’t go on like this forever. Is the sex really good enough that you’d risk the long term, just to enjoy the short term?”
She just looked at me guiltily.
“Really? It’s that good?” I asked.
She shook her head sadly. “You have no idea. Seriously, he makes me feel things I didn’t think I could. It’s like being high…I actually have to come down again afterwards. It’s not like normal sex.”
A little stab of jealousy went through me. I knew it was wrong, but…I hadn’t even experienced normal sex yet.
Clarissa’s eyes were distant. “Have you ever just had…I don’t know how to describe it…just an automatic reaction to someone? Like you’d feel that way about them, physically, even if you didn’t like them?”
I blinked. “Yes.”
She barely seemed to hear me. “When I first met him—it was when I took Nat to Darrell’s place for the very first time—I thought he was this big, stupid, arrogant lump and yet…even then, even when we were yelling at each other, there was this…thing going on.”
I nodded, leaning in, my heart thumping. “Yes.”
“Later, I figured out how smart he was, and I really started to like him, but my point is that even when I thought I hated him, this thing was so strong that….” She sighed. “I’m sorry, I’m probably not making any sense at all.”
“You are,” I said faintly. “But with you, it was mutual. How did you know it was mutual?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t. I thought he hated me. I thought we were mortal enemies, and I cursed myself for being weak and wanting him even though I hated him.”
“So how did you…?”
“Well, the second time we met, we were fighting—again—and then he stepped right up to me and said that someone should teach me a lesson, and—” She flushed and looked down at the table.
“What?”
She shook her head.
“What?”
“I can’t believe I said it.”
“What? What did you say?!”
She took a deep breath. “Bear in mind that it was in the heat of the moment. I said: ‘Well, why don’t you, then?’”
The sound of the words hung in the air over the table.
“Oh,” I said.
“It just sort of slipped out. And then he kissed me and I kissed him back and he pushed me down onto the table—stuff went everywhere—and…well. At some point, Nat and Darrell walked past the door and saw, but she didn’t tell me until later. Though, honestly, Godzilla could have ripped the roof off the house and we probably wouldn’t have noticed.”
I nodded, deep in thought. If Connor felt that way about me, would I know? I wasn’t even completely sure how I felt.
“So?” Clarissa asked.
“Hmm?” I was still worlds away, my head back in the practice room.
“So what do you think I should do?”
I thought hard. “What is it you want to talk to him about? Specifically?”
“I don’t know…anything and everything. Our futures. Where it’s going. What he’s going to do after MIT. I’m a planner, Karen—like you. I’m not saying house or babies or anything—not yet. But I like to at least talk about the future. For Neil, even planning a vacation is too big a commitment. Sometimes I wonder if the sex thing is holding back the relationship…or if he’s scared of the relationship and he’s using the sex thing to fend it off.”
I pursed my lips and thought. My gut told me that she wasn’t being unreasonable, that maybe Neil just needed some sense slapping into him…but what did I know? I was a virgin, for God’s sake, the least qualified person possible to advise on a sexually-charged relationship. Just as when Natasha had asked for my advice, I felt that if I told her the wrong thing and it split them up, she’d never forgive me.
“I’m not sure,” I said slowly. “Give it time, maybe?”
“That’s just it…I get the feeling we’re running out of time.” I could see the worry in her eyes. Tell him, I thought. Tell him what you need. Confront him. But I couldn’t say it. I was someone who, at twenty-one, still had all her bills paid by her father. I couldn’t even run my own life—I shouldn’t be trying to run anyone else’s.
It broke my heart to do it, but I leaned across and gave her a hug instead of a solution. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” I told her.
She sighed. “Thanks.” She looked at me for a moment and frowned. “Wait: you said with you.”
“What?”
“You said with you it was mutual. As opposed to with…?”
Help! “No one.”
She relented, but the suspicion never quite left her eyes.
Chapter 14
I spent the next few days trying to work out what I felt. I’d see Connor in lectures, down at the front, and space out watching him, the lecturer’s voice turning into a distant drone. I understood, now, why he never took notes. Before, I’d thought he was lazy because he wasn’t scribbling everything down or rattling it out on a laptop. Now, I saw him sitting there frantically trying to memorize what he was hearing and I winced in sympathy.
I noticed he was there for every lecture, now. He’d turn around and smile at me and I’d smile back, and every time there’d be this weird flip-flop in my stomach...this was just physical, right?
Of course it was. Just physical.
When the lecturer announced the next essay—due in a week’s time—I locked eyes with Connor and gave him a solemn nod. I’d figure out a way to help him with it and, together, we’d turn around his grades. He looked skeptical, but gave me a nod in return.
That afternoon, I met up with Connor in one of the dusty passages right at the back of the music department. I indicated an ancient, outsize wooden door. “Behold.”
He looked up at it. “What’s behind there? The Fenbrook monster?”
“Storeroom. They had to get pianos in and out, back in the day.” I unlocked the door and put the key in my pocket, then slowly pushed the huge slab of wood inward.
Inside, pitch blackness. Towering shelves holding files of sheet music and countless instruments. Including, if the department secretary was to be believed, a couple of acoustic guitars we could use to practice on. Hopefully between us we’d be able to come up with some ideas that let the cello and electric guitar meet in the middle.
“There has to be a light switch somewhere,” said Connor, and he started feeling around the walls. There was, but when he clicked it, it did nothing.
“I don’t think anyone’s been in here in a decade,” I told him. I pushed the huge door the rest of the way open to let as much light as possible in from the corridor. It was harder than it should have been and, when I looked up, I saw why. There was one of those old fashioned chain-and-weight door closers at the top, trying to pull it closed. Dangling from it was a large cobweb. I shuddered—the whole place was dark, dusty and crawling with God-knows-what. “I’ll hold the door. You go and look.”
He plunged into the darkness. The room was long and narrow and the light from the door only reached about six feet in. He disappeared, and then reappeared lit only by the light from his phone. Ten feet. Twenty. The light shrank and shrank and I could feel myself getting nervous, even though I was the one standing by the door. “Connor?”
“Still here. Black as fuck in here, though. Ah! Guit—No, wait. That’s a lute. God, there’s all sorts of crap in here.” He was completely out of
sight now, the light of his phone hidden by his body. “Ah! Got it. Guitars.” I heard rummaging and scraping. “There’s a crate, but it’s stuck. Give me a hand.”
I looked uncertainly at the door. “The door will close.”
“Wedge it.”
I dug around and found a book of sheet music, but it didn’t seem right to stuff Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata under the door. I dug around some more and found an old scales practice book and figured that would be okay.
Connor’s voice echoed from the other end of the room. “Today?”
“Don’t rush me!” I wedged the book under the door as hard as I could and triple-checked that it couldn’t possibly come loose. Satisfied, I turned towards Connor. “Shine the light! I can’t see anything.”
He held the phone out towards me and I walked towards the glow, the light from the doorway fading with every step. I couldn’t see where I was putting my feet, and the air was dry and horribly still, like a tomb. I kept thinking of that cobweb by the door, and wondering how many more were hanging right above my head, or in front of my face….
Finally, I was next to him, our faces lit by the ghostly white light of the screen. Something in my expression must have given away how nervous I was, because he gave me an encouraging smile. “There. That wasn’t so bad, was—”
A long, ugly sound, the sound of paper being rent apart by brute force. I didn’t understand—I actually turned to see who was ripping a book in half. It was only when I saw the door swinging closed that I realized what had happened. The wedge had worked just fine until the thirty year-old volume had simply split in half from the strain. Now the huge door was closing itself, the chain rattling loudly as the iron weight dragged it closed.
Connor reacted faster than I could, sprinting past me to the door. He reached it just as it closed. He’d taken the phone with him, leaving me in pitch blackness, and I tried to contain my panic. It’s not locked. I have the key. He’ll open it again in a second. Any second….
“Um….”
“What?” I asked quickly.
I saw the light—just a faint glow at the far end of the room, moving up and down. “You know how the door opened inward?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s no handle on our side.”
Cold, twisting fear, rising up inside. “What?”
“I’m serious. There was one once, but it’s been taken off. Just screw holes. There’s nothing to pull on.”
I looked around me. I knew that the room was fifty feet or more long. I knew that, narrow as it was, there was still a good six feet of space in front of me. I knew that the ceiling was high overhead. But in the utter blackness, none of these things felt true anymore. I felt as if I was in a coffin with the walls creeping towards me, pressing tighter and tighter.
“Shine the light down here.” My voice was ragged with fear.
“What?” He was distracted, still searching for some way to open the door.
“Shine the light!” Almost a sob.
Immediately, he shone the light towards me and a dim, ghostly glow washed over me. The walls were pushed back, breathable air opening up in front of me. I started blundering towards him, hands stretched out in front of me.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I couldn’t see him, but I could hear the worry in his voice. I couldn’t answer, though. All that mattered was getting to the light of his phone, getting closer to the hairline crack of light around the door. I was almost panting with fear, the speed at which it had come on only adding to the panic, my throat closing up. Every step brought the threat of a cobweb brushing my face, every shelf my fingers touched felt loaded with creeping, scuttling life—
And then I reached him, and my hands instinctively grabbed at his arms and pulled him close. I panted against his chest.
“Karen? Karen?! Are you okay?”
And somehow, my face pressed against the soft cloth of his t-shirt, I was. He was clean and solid and real and, if I closed my eyes, I could forget how dark it was and imagine we were out in the sunlight somewhere. I took a deep breath and then another, feeling my fear ebb away. “…yes,” I said slowly. I started to feel stupid. “Sorry. I just panicked.”
“It’s okay.” His voice was more tender than I’d ever heard it—except maybe outside the bar, weeks ago, when he’d agreed to help. Pitying the poor scared girl. I could feel my face grow hot, and was almost glad it was so dark.
“Were you kidding, about the door?” I ran my hand over the wood.
“Kidding? No, of course not! There’s no handle.” Like an idiot, I still felt the need to check for myself, but he was right—there wasn’t.
“Okay, let’s not panic. We just need to call someone to come push the door from the other side,” he said.
I waited. “Okay—so call someone.”
“I’m just deciding who to call. Someone reliable…someone who’ll come and get us right now….” He was trying to be casual about it, but I could see him scrolling through name after name on his contacts list. “Thing is,” he said, “most of my friends are people I meet from bands and stuff. They don’t go to Fenbrook and the ones who do…they don’t show up every day. Or even most days.”
The party animal, the guy who spent his life hanging out with friends…didn’t have even one he could absolutely rely on.
“Call Jasmine,” I told him. My phone was in my bag outside the door, so I gave him the number. She answered on the third ring.
I’d seen too many movies where the trapped person starts off with something like “Now listen carefully, I’m—” and then gets cut off. “I’mshutinthemusicstoreroom,” I said, all in one breath.
“What?” asked Jasmine.
“Come rescue me. Please. Second floor, right at the back. Big door. Pitch black in here. Spiders. Help.”
“I don’t recognize this number,” said Jasmine. “Whose phone is this?”
“Connor’s. He’s in here with me.”
There was a pause.
“What are you doing in a storeroom with Connor with the lights off?” asked Jasmine.
“Just come and rescue me! Please!” I hung up. “She’s on her way,” I told Connor.
And then there was silence. And as I relaxed a little more, the silence grew to be…comfortable.
Even intimate.
The phone’s screen was lighting up a little of the room in front of me, but Connor was standing just off to the side and I couldn’t see him. That meant I couldn’t tell exactly how close he was to me…and that started to play all sorts of tricks on my mind.
We’re in a dark room together, a little voice said. If he feels the same way as you….
Stop it, I told myself fiercely. “Say something,” I said out loud.
“What?”
“Anything. Just so I know where you are.”
There was a pause. “Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“Helping me.”
“I haven’t helped you yet. And you helped me.”
That silence again.
“Say something else,” I said. “Tell me about the tattoo…tell me about Ruth.” As soon as I’d said it, I regretted it. Why did I want to know about her?
“We met in New York, but she’s from Ireland. One of those funny things, you know? Come thousands of miles and meet someone from back home.”
“Uncanny,” I said, feeling sick.
“Lasted six months. Then we split, and she headed back to Ireland.”
“Why’d you split?” It was out before I could stop it.
There was a long pause. “We had a falling out.” And there was a bitterness in his voice I’d never heard before.
Quick, change the subject. “That’s one tattoo. Tell me about the other one.”
“That means I was in prison.”
The darkness went from being warm and comfortable to a freezing, yawning void in an instant. “I’m sorry,” I said quickly.
“It was a fair cop,” he s
aid mildly. “I deserved to be there.”
I didn’t ask the obvious question, so he went ahead and answered it for me. “Three months, because I was young and the prisons were full. GBH.” He sighed. “That doesn’t mean anything over here, does it?”
If it did, I had no idea what it meant. “No.”
“Grievous. Bodily. Harm.” He sighed, and I heard him tilt his head back to rest against the wall. When he spoke, it sounded like he was dredging the words up from deep within. “I was the stupid kid everybody made fun of. One guy in particular. And I got used to that. After a while you just accept it, and you accept getting the shit kicked out of you, too. But this one fella, that wasn’t enough for him. He caught me with my guitar one day and he smashed it.”
I stayed silent, listening.
“It was a piece of crap, if I’m honest. Could never tune it dead right. But it was the one thing, you know? The one thing I could do, the one thing in my life that wasn’t shitty. And I watched him lift it over his head and bang it down on the curb, until it was in pieces, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford another one. And…I sort of blanked out. Next thing I knew, I was standing over him and he had a bust jaw and a broken rib.”
“Oh.” It was a lousy thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything else.
“I was lucky—he healed pretty fast, no lasting damage. I was young, so they wiped my record not long after.”
The story was reverberating through my head, the images so different to the Connor I knew. I couldn’t imagine him hurting anyone.
You were right about him, a little voice inside me sang happily. Back at the start, when you avoided him, when you thought he was trouble.
But he wasn’t like that. He’d helped me. He was kind. Or was I just hopelessly naïve? I stood there in the darkness and let it all seep into my brain…the prison record, the parties and the booze….
And I didn’t care. I only cared about who he was now. I was getting to like that Connor; I was getting to like him a lot.
“Do you think we can do it—the recital?” I asked.
“Honest answer?”
In Harmony Page 14