Finding Ever After

by Pepper Basham

  “There.”

  Esther skimmed a hastily created score sheet which weighed chess moves –played by both opponents---with hair pins.

  “So for every piece you claim from my side of the board, I have to surrender a pin?”

  “Not so bad, is it?”

  “And what if I win?”

  Nic tilted his head, raked his fingers through his hair. “I would buy you a trinket. But nothing that would make your fiancé suspicious. And, you know I have approximately zero pennies to rub together.”

  “You will go to the Brattle Book Shop and choose something that makes you think of me.”

  That wouldn’t be hard, he thought. Everything made him think of her.

  “And what would we tell Widow Barclay? I will not be able to arrange my hair back in the same style without my lady’s maid.”

  Nic mulled this a moment. Sometimes his ceiling reveries ended in a far-fetched scenario wherein Esther was his bride and he stood in Thomas Weatherton’s place. If anything could deprive a soul of that dream it was the realization that the woman needed a lady’s maid if only to fix her long Rapunzel locks.

  “Can you say that a bat flew into it? Or a spider?” Nic suggested.

  Esther nodded, her cheeks were somewhat flushed for as much as she had played buoyantly off of his suggestion, she knew that his request required impropriety. Intimacy.

  Nic sank slowly under the weight of attraction. He nabbed a rook and the first pin from the side of her head released a waterfall of gold. A castling move and he swept a few more pieces. She was a good player. His equal. But he had never been so determined in his life. Nor so competitive. According to the hastily scribbled rules the higher valued pieces were worth more pins so when he sieged her knight a large swath tumbled over her forehead before she tucked its curtain behind her ear. A commandeered king and nearly the entirety of the long blonde swath at the back was released to fall down over the ornamented buttons fastening her dress.

  Nic blinked. The board was becoming slightly blurred. Fuzzy. He looked back up at her. Her cheeks flushed beguilingly with each exposition of her hair. He had imagined its texture and length but he couldn’t have anticipated the liquid life of it. It spun everything in the drab horrible room into gold just by the way the stark, blinking bulb caught it. She bit her lip and he watched her make a move, long finger hovering over a bishop, hair in a delicious mismatch over her shoulders and into the curve of her waist.

  He deserved the slight tremble in his fingertips and the quick stop of his heart and the cotton filming his tongue. She was utterly beautiful and this had been his idea. He hoped he kept the stark desire from his eyes, had cleared the thickness from his throat when he huskily reminded her that she was in the midst of an illegal move. He wanted to kiss her. Once. Twice. Forever.

  They both turned at a shift in the Barclay corner of the room, Esther holding white-knuckled to a pawn in one hand and a fistful of hair pins in the other. The widow resettled and sighed, blew out a wisp of hair from her slackened bun and carried on in slumber.

  Esther smiled at Nic coyly when their eyes met again over the board and Nic relinquished his entire life and soul to her.

  “Would you like me to hold those for you?” his voice wasn’t sounding the way it was supposed to. Because his voice wasn’t supposed to crack like an ill-tuned scale half a way up the octave.

  Esther shook her head and carefully lay them in the curve of a folded piece of Schubert.

  They continued.

  She surrendered more pieces and freed more hair, he sobered by thinking safe, logical thoughts such as how she got it to stay up on her head in the first place. She pursed her lips and scratched her ear and tackled another pin before she yelped a slight owww.

  “What’s the matter?” Nic set his queen down.

  “It’s stuck.”

  Nic wasn’t surprised. Her hair was like a field of wheat blazoned under a harvest sun. Great. Bad poetry. Just what the confusion in his brain needed. He slowly stood from his overturned milk crate and crossed to her.

  “Let me help. You can’t see from there.”

  She was doing a poor job of reaching over to the back of her head and straining her arm in the process.

  Nic assessed the damage and leaned over. There was so much of it. It was so long and the most illustrious color. He gently parted a sea of hair and determined the opened end. “I don’t want to hurt you.” He whispered, carefully untangling the pin and sliding its oblong top up, carefully separating it from her scalp. “Did I hurt you?”

  “No.” she whispered.

  “There.” He held the pin up proudly. He lowered beside her to her shoulder level and dropped the pin in her open hand. Now, their noses were almost touching and he could feel the soft exhale of her breath on his cheek. Several stray strands of hair caught her chin and her forehead. Nic instinctively made to brush a shade from her cheek, surprised when she covered his hand in the movement. Nic tightened his hold and pulled them to their feet. Esther was unsteady with the quick movement on her fashionable heels and fell into him a little. Her riches of hair under his chin, the thrum of her heartbeat pressing the outer lace of her dress so he could feel it through his cotton shirt. Their eyes met. Esther’s were wide and hopeful, expectant and a little shy. He slowly looked in the direction of the masses of blonde hair down her back and then back to meet her gaze again. She showed consent for his wordless request with the slightest incline of her chin.

  Fingers entangled in her hair and every weightless word strangling his throat and probably showing through his eyes, he smoothed her hair from her forehead, studied the canvas of her face from cheek to chin and lowered his mouth to hers.

  Esther always thought it would be wonderful to have had so many kisses you could classify them. A kiss on a whim and one for a parting, a kiss for good morning or a random meeting in the park. A kiss that meant forever, a seal of devoted eternity. A kiss that exposed a shudder of vulnerability as someone pledged themselves to you wordlessly and gifted you all that speech could never wrap with a perfect bow. So it was, thus, a quandary, when she felt all of these at once the moment her mouth met his.

  She trembled a little navigating the first uncertain seconds of the soft friction of his lips, but then she fell deeply. He was so close, his strong hands holding her fast, the smell and feel and hold of him so wonderfully new. How could one feel like they were drowning and levitating at the same time?

  She pressed her palms to his chest and followed his lead while changing the tempo just a little on her own, teasing what she could feel as a temporary stretching smile before the inconvenient need for air separated them.

  It was, of course, rather ridiculous to fall in love so quickly. But it was almost as if she had always known him and her head was just catching up with what her heart knew all along: there was a Nic Ricci and he would someday step into her path and paint her world resplendent.

  She took a few, trembly breaths and searched his glistening eyes. There was a little bit of confusion hovering in the pencil light frown lines between his eyebrows and he blinked a few times unsteadily. But she translated the contours of his face’s clear canvas. He was as stunned as she was. His head was just catching up, too.

  Hands still fanned on his chest, she regulated her breathing while her heart galloped like a white steed in pursuit of an evil dragon.

  “You know Nic Ricci,” she said before the words could fall away and never return. “I think I am very much in love with you.”

  She stopped. The curtain peeled back and suddenly the sparkle and starlight around her dissolved into a dusty rehearsal space. They had days left together. Only days. Not the years and sighs and tears and smiles she wanted. She slowly disentangled, she lowered her shaking fingers to her sides.

  Nic fell back slightly, focused on a dead plant suspended from the right corner of the room and raked his fingers through his black hair.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Esther
added when it was clear he would not return the words. Or, indeed, anything at all.

  “I should apologize.” Nic’s voice sounded as if it were reciting something. “You are a betrothed woman and I took advantage of you. I sincerely apologize, Miss Hunnisett.” He took another step, determined to slice more air between them. “It was not the behavior of a gentleman…”

  “If you think that … that …that was just you…” Esther was hurt and thus riled. “Were you there, Nic? Not five seconds ago where I was very clearly a part of that… that duet. You did nothing ungentlemanly. In fact, I wanted you to do it! I am not a lady. I am …”

  “Stop.” Nic raised his hand. “I’ll not have you say anything against yourself. You are very much a lady. A beautiful, maddening, bewitching and intelligent lady.” Nic shook his head. “I am responsible.”

  “I had just as much to do…”

  “Esther, I can’t. I can’t tell you I love you. I can’t listen to you tell me you love me because I can’t have you. And it hurts me too much.”

  He fumbled with his hair again before drawing his hand over his eyes.

  “I need to be with you.” Esther grabbed his forearm. “ I can’t go on with this life. I was fully prepared and reconciled. I knew I didn’t have a choice. But I didn’t know there was you.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I have nothing to offer you, Esther. I have no way of saving your father’s estate.”

  “So you won’t rescue me? You’ll just let me go?” Esther straightened her shoulders.

  “To what purpose? To get a bloody lip and a black eye before that fiend redirected his anger at you and took you anyways?” He looked so desolate. Esther wanted to smooth the creases from his eyes, the frown at his mouth. “I’m a piano tuner. A math teacher. A terrible rehearsal pianist. With no money. And there’s my father. Even if I wanted to take you from here. Right now… I couldn’t. I’m tangled up in so much here, Esther.”

  It was then Widow Barclay noisily roused. She yawned and stretched and barraged through the silence with her presence.

  “My! My!” the widow proclaimed with a look at her watch. “Would you look at the time. We will be late for…”

  “Esther!”

  They all three turned at a rough voice from the doorway. Thomas appeared just as Nic was taking as quick a step back without looking as if in immediate retreat.

  While Thomas batted at dust particles with his hand, Esther looked with horror to the half-finished chess game. How long had Thomas been in the doorway? Had Widow Barclay noticed him and woken up? Esther’s heart thrummed. She looked to Nic for support but he was bent over his sheet music.

  “Thomas… I thought I would be seeing you later at my father’s house. For dinner.”

  “I had business at Commercial Wharf.” Thomas took in the shoddy surroundings, plodding over the floor boards and almost toppling over a particularly uneven one.

  “Cockroaches.” Esther said as Thomas moved to sturdier ground and tugged at his jacket.

  “And who is this then?” Thomas surveyed Nic.

  Nic separated the space between them with his long-legged stride and extended his hand. If Esther hadn’t been so on edge, she would relish how Nic dominated Thomas with his height. Thomas surveyed Nic’s hand but didn’t take it.

  “I expected to see you behind that instrument.” Thomas gestured to the piano.

  Esther winced at his tone. “We were merely discussing the tempo of the piece.” She blinked in Widow Barclay’s direction. The widow was collecting her knitting needles and smoothing her nap-rumpled clothing. “Weren’t we, Widow Barclay?”

  “Hmm? Oh yes. They were discussing the tempo.”

  Thomas’s eyes locked on Nic in challenge. What had he seen?

  Clearly off-set, her fiancé turned to Esther, fiercely and possessively grabbing her arm and tugging her into his side. “I bet you sounded quite lovely, my dear.” Thomas pressed his lips to her neck. Flushing with embarrassment, she simply nodded, jostling a few unpinned strands of hair over her red-splotched cheeks. “What happened to your hair?”

  “Spider,” said Esther. “It startled me and dug some of the pins in with my movement to get rid of him. I made a sure mess of it.” she tried a smile.

  “Interesting.”

  “Y-your grip is a little tight, Thomas.”

  Rather than relinquish his hold, he wrung her arm more tightly. Esther involuntarily gasped. She had been too humiliated to look in Nic’s direction but when he spoke, his dark unfamiliar tone drew her eyes up.

  “I believe, Mr. Weatherton, that you are hurting the young lady.”

  “Young lady?” Thomas sniffed. “This is my future wife.” She may as well have been a milk jug such was his possessive tone. He gripped tighter and harder, almost lifting Esther with the painful movement. “I can see in your eyes that you would like to use this opportunity for chivalry. But let me remind you that out of the two of us, it is you who have put her in a precarious situation. Her hair is unpinned like the hussy that she is. Ah! Yes! There… you lunge at me.” Thomas smirked. Nic’s fist was raised to propel into Thomas’s jaw. “But you see, young man, if you hit me, I will merely hit her.” Thomas cut Esther with his eyes. “Hurting you would do me nothing except bruise my knuckles. And you would be far more injured and humiliated like the small rodent that you are if I were to assault her instead.”

  Esther swallowed and blinked the fuzziness from her eyes. She tried to focus on Nic and find reassurance in the shadow crossing his face and the twitch jerking his jaw as he measured fast-fleeting self-control. But it was no use. Tears stung her eyes as Thomas spun her and nearly shoved her out the door.

  It wasn’t until she was deposited in the back of Thomas’ chauffeured black car she realized that Widow Barclay wasn’t with them.

  Nic’s head spun. He wanted to drive his fist into the brute’s smug face. He rubbed his forearm as if he had felt every nerve and tendon squeezed as Esther’s had been with Weatherton’s tightening grip. But he was powerless. He wouldn’t lift an inch of a finger if it meant the brute’s temper would worsen. He wasn’t leaving with Esther. Weatherton was. She was to marry him. Esther… He had never seen her scared and agitated before. He only saw her face when she smiled, eyes closed, falling into a piece of music. He only registered the gleam in her eyes when she perfected an unexpected winning movement with a stealthy competition in one of their chess matches.

  Nic felt dizzy. How could his sensations survive so much in the course of an afternoon? His fingers still tingled from the silk-feel of her hair looped in his hand. His heart still thrummed with the first test and friction of their kiss. His mouth still buzzed with the taste and sensation and every thought reconciled the slight and then oh-so-quick shift between his attraction to Esther and his fervent love.

  Nic closed his eyes, drew a jagged breath.

  “Mr. Ricci?”

  It took him several seconds to register the voice. “Widow Barclay! You’re still here!”

  “I believe I was forgotten.” She held tightly to her knitting bag with one hand a bouquet of hairpins with the other. She must have picked them up when Nic wasn’t looking.

  “Widow Barclay, I…” Nic didn’t know how to finish the sentence. He pushed the damp hair from his perspiring forehead.

  “Yes, Mr. Ricci?”

  Widow Barclay looked perturbed and a little shaken but very much rooted to her spot. And far calmer than he felt.

  “I feel that it might not be my place but…”

  “What is your place, Mr. Ricci?” her voice was as innocent as her wide doe eyes.

  “I am a rehearsal pianist.”

  “And a good one.”

  “Time will tell.” Nic shoved his shaking hands in his pockets.

  “I believe that you and Miss Hunnisett will create a beautiful and memorable occasion.”

  “Well, its dependent on her actual accompanist.” Nic didn’t mean for the harsh annoyance to undercut his tone but he w
ondered how her chaperone could stand and watch Esther assaulted as she had been, her eyes filling with tears, the pain over her features. Nic reeled. Perhaps Widow Barclay was merely accustomed to it.

  “Mr. Ricci, I believe that you should speak freely.”

  “Widow Barclay, I was…am…very disturbed by the way that Mr. Weatherton treated Miss Hunnisett just now. As if he was intentionally harming her.”

  “Oh he was. Very intentionally.”

  Nic pinched the bridge of his nose. “It is not my business but I worry for her welfare if Miss Hunnisett were to marry Mr. Weatherton.”

  Widow Barclay adjusted her pince-nez to focus on him more intently. “And that would bother you?”

  “Of course it would bother me!” He lowered his register. “I do not like to see a lovely, refined and talented woman… or any woman for that matter… subjected to such brutal and unkind treatment.”

  “So I am to assume that you would not apply similar tactics in your treatment of a woman”

  “No!” Nic didn’t blink, swallow or move. “No. I would certainly never harm a woman. On the dear memory of my mother. No.” And harm Esther? He flexed the fingers digging into the cavern of his pocket. He would rather cut off his hand than hurt Esther.

  “I believe you.”

  Nic wondered how she could be so nonchalant. About him. About Esther. About being stuck in the North End, abandoned by her chauffeur.

  “I confess I don’t have a vehicle of my own to see you home.” He unclenched his hand and jangled the loose coins under his fist before extracting them and holding them out to her. “Might I provide you fare for the trolley?”

  She reached up and patted his cheek. “A rehearsal pianist.”

  “Well, actually I am a piano tuner. A math teacher, to be exact. I just tune pianos to help my father and…”

  For a moment the fairy-twinkle of the widow’s usually distracted eyes focused directly into his own and set him off guard. Nic watched her leave before packing up the rest of his music.

  But he didn’t go home. If he did, he would just confess everything to his father. That the girl he had fallen in love with had fallen easily into his arms and teased his lips and stretched his heart to a breaking point. That the same girl… no … woman had borne the rough treatment of a beast of a man who treated her as if she weren’t the same woman who hung stars in the sky and told the moon to brighten and shine.