by Cassia Leo
After class, no one followed or intimidated her then, either, so she swung by and picked up Alex from the music building. He tucked his long hair in his black baseball hat and donned sunglasses as if he were the one being followed by the Russian mafia, and they went to breakfast at a coffee shop across the street.
At breakfast, the waitress flirted with Alex, laying her hand on his shoulder and bending way, way over, as if Georgie wasn’t sitting right there. Georgie even caught her taking an over-the-shoulder selfie of him. So fucking unprofessional.
Alex was polite, and he didn’t precisely flirt back, though he smiled at the waitress a bit too broadly. When they had finished their egg white omelets, he left the woman a huge tip, the sap.
God, men were so easily manipulated. Flash a little boob and their wallets fall out of their pants.
For the rest of the day, Georgie went to classes when she had to, ditching Alex in a piano practice room or her dorm room. He worked obsessively on the guitar, practicing extraordinarily complex technical scales and changing parts of that Scrambled Eggs song, and then composing others.
Four others.
These new songs had words that he sang under his breath at first, scratching in a notebook, then for her. Over the hours and days that they had together, his voice healed, and it was the first time she had heard him when he wasn’t so hoarse he could barely speak.
He was a bright tenor with an extraordinary range down to a deep baritone.
Sitting on her bed, listening to Alex sing songs of love and heartache in a wide-open, velvety tenor was spell-binding. After one song about a guy longing for his girlfriend, singing, “When I touch you, I can breathe again,” where the word “breathe” sounded like Alex was spreading his arms and turning his face to the sun, Georgie joked that he needed to excuse her to go change her panties.
But she meant it. Her body was beginning to crave him, and they had so little time before he had to fly back on Saturday afternoon.
Over time, Georgie became more certain that she wasn’t being followed and so the Russian bratva must not know where she lived, just her cell phone number. That guy at the nightclub must have been just some guy, not a Russian hit man. She attended class and walked around campus with more confidence, even though she kept at least one of her bug-out bags close at hand at all times.
When she was walking to class her phone buzzed in her purse. Georgie checked the screen before she answered, dreading an unknown number, but the screen said Lizzy.
She thumbed the screen. “Lizzy?”
“Yeah, Georgie?” Her raspy voice was a relief. “I need to ask you a favor. It’s about The Devilhouse.”
The Devilhouse didn’t matter to Georgie. She would be far out of town before Mannix Bonfils managed to do anything about it. “What about it?”
Lizzy, in her raspy little voice said, “I’m taking over. I’m going to be The Domina of The Devilhouse.”
Georgie cracked up.
When she got her breath back, she asked, “What the Hell happened in France between you and Mannix Bonfils?”
“Mannix is dead.”
“Oh.” Georgie swallowed hard. “I’m sorry?”
“I’m not. He tried to kill Theo, and I’m still not sure why he thought that I would go with him if he did. Anyway, Theo was half-owner, a silent partner, so he owns it now, and I’m going to run it.”
“What about college?” Georgie asked.
“I’ll finish this semester and then go part-time. I’m switching my major to business. Remember, you said that you could get me through Diffy-Que!”
Georgie scrubbed her face with her hand. “Yeah, about that, Lizzy—”
“Anyway, we’re having an all-hands meeting at The Devilhouse tomorrow afternoon to discuss how all of Mannix’s changes are gone. There will be some changes at the D-H, but they’re the other way, better for contractors. You can come, right?”
Georgie glanced at the crowd around her, everyone hurrying to class, watching for anyone who might be following her. “I’ve got a lot of stuff going on right now.”
“I really need you to be there.”
If the Russian bratva really hadn’t found her, if they only knew her phone number, then maybe she could get her job back and continue with her planned payback scheme.
Yet, she shouldn’t commit until she knew. “I don’t know.”
“Please, Georgie! I need you. I’ve never done anything like this before.”
This was Lizzy, her friend who had helped her slay her Boston R’s. “Okay. I’ll be there.”
“Thank you! I’ll see you soon!” She hung up, and Georgie tucked the phone back in her purse.
It would be fine.
In those few days, she caught Alex playing his violin only once, when she had been at class for several hours and was just dragging in.
When she opened her dorm room’s front door, he wasn’t in the study room, but the bedroom door was closed. The soprano strains of violin music echoed through the dorm room, and she very gently cracked the bedroom door to hear better and sat on the couch.
Even his actual violin was exceptional, producing an extravagant, lush sound that she had never heard outside of a major concert hall. His bowing was so intricate that some parts sounded like two violins playing in harmony as he drew out the soaring, heart-wrenching notes of Schubert’s “Ave Maria.”
Schubert’s Ave Maria
Georgie hadn’t been to Mass in years, so many years. She missed the music. She covered her face with her hands, not allowing any tears to break free, and sat silently until Alex strummed his guitar again. After a few minutes, she composed herself and slammed the front door, yelling, “Honey! I’m home!”
They stayed at his hotel those nights because his feet did actually hang off of the end of the twin bed in Georgie’s dorm room and because, as she said, reasons.
Something was changing, though.
In class, Georgie’s attention wandered sometimes. When her professors were expounding on hegemons and statistical modeling of elections, she found herself remembering lilting strains of violins and dissecting intricate guitar melodies, but she shook her head and put herself back together.
When Alex played for her, everything else in her life fled. For three glorious days, Georgie lived with music around her all the time, even when she should have been concentrating on her classes.
The timid musician lifted her head, drawn out by the music.
Thursday night, he stroked her body until she was floating. A dim flicker of Georgie’s mind noted that this was like being hypnotized, this languorous suspension of her mind even though her body wasn’t lifted by the ropes. Alex held her in his arms, murmuring music to her, delving into her body until they were both breathless and clutching each other, until she was safe on the other side.
Friday passed in a desperate haze of music and heated flesh with Georgie running her fingers over the ridges of the tattoos on Alex’s back.
Saturday morning came far too soon.
SATURDAY MORNING
Georgie
Saturday morning, after Georgie and Alex spent the wee, dark hours in a practice room fine-tuning a song that he would surely stuff in a bag somewhere, they dropped by Georgie’s dorm room to grab some notes that she wanted to take with her when she fled. In her study room, the curtains were drawn tightly against the sun outside.
“I don’t want to leave,” Alex said, his hands lingering on her waist and hips. His dark eyes looked more forlorn than when he had arrived.
“Your plane doesn’t leave for a couple hours. I just need to meet some friends at the Student Union to exchange class notes,” Georgie said. “You can come with me, if you want.”
“Oh, God,” he laughed. “No, I cannot walk through a Student Union to help you get your notes.”
“Why not?”
Alex ran his fingers through his hair, tangling it around his fingers. “Lingering trauma from Juilliard. Just the thought of political science still give
s me chills.”
“Yeah? You take a lot of poli-sci classes at Juilliard?” she asked, knowing full well that the whole point of attending a music conservatory was the laser-narrow focus on music. No math classes. No Biology for Non-Majors. No poli-sci. Just musical theory and craft and instrument classes. “Anyway, if you don’t want to wait, you can take my car to the airport. Just tell me where you parked it and I’ll have Lizzy—” but Lizzy was staying at Theo’s house, taking care of him while he healed and just showing up for class, “—or someone else drive me to the airport to pick it up.”
He shook his head, his long hair swaying. “I’m not going to take your car. I would call a car service to pick me up. I just don’t want to go yet.”
“You can just hang out in my dorm room. Just don’t crank the music too loud. My suitemate Hester next door has a thing about loud music. Something about the Devil and being dragged down to Hell on radio waves.”
Alex laughed out loud this time, a full-throated singer’s laugh, and then he stopped. “That’s kind of catchy. ‘Dragged down to Hell on radio waves.’”
“Writing words for Mozart’s chamber music?”
He caught her around the waist, pulling her to him. Georgie let her fingers trail down his ribs, feeling the thick ropes of muscle under his black tee shirt. The thin fabric would probably tear easily if she sank her teeth into it and yanked.
“Not for Mozart, no. When I’m with you, everything sounds like a song.” His eyes lifted to the ceiling again. His delighted chuckle vibrated through his chest. “Where is my damn notebook?”
“You’re always scribbling.”
“Not always.” His strong hand dropped lower on her hip. He dipped his head, and his lips grazed her neck. “Skip the notes.”
“I can’t,” she said. The notes were for Lizzy, who was trying her darnedest to catch up, and Lizzy was counting on her.
“Stay.”
“Oh, Alex, I want to, but I can’t. Just wait for me here so I can kiss you good-bye.”
And it would be good-bye.
He said, “I’ll wait. Hurry back.”
“One more thing.” She pulled a wad of thread-covered elastic hair ties from her backpack pocket. “Use these when you tie back your hair. Rubber bands break the strands. They’re not good for it.”
He took the bands, smiling, even if it was a little sheepishly.
Georgie untangled herself from his arms, but he kissed her all the way out the door, and their mouths parted just as the door closed between them.
Her lips felt swollen all the way to the Student Union and while she grabbed a couple scones for Alex or for her drive across the mountains tonight. She trotted through the throng at the SU, crowded even though it was Saturday, to find her friends.
Mina and Kalli were sitting at a cafe table drinking super-size lattes, so Georgie joined them for a few minutes.
Georgie was still running her thumb over her lower lip when she realized that Mina and Kalli, after they had handed over Lizzy’s notes, were repressing giggles and covertly comparing her to something on a tablet.
She lowered one eyebrow at them. They were silly girls, more interested in getting an M.R.S. than getting into law or grad school, but they took good notes and had been generous with helping out Lizzy when she had been absent for a couple weeks, even transcribing professors’ lectures from a recorder for her. “Yes, ladies?”
“You’re famous,” Kalli said, tossing her lustrous black hair back over her shoulder.
Panic slammed Georgie. Those news clippings were almost a decade old and had a different name on them. “No. I’m not. That’s someone else.”
“Nuh-uh. Look.” Mina turned her tablet toward Georgie.
The screen showed Georgie giving the flirty breakfast waitress the stink-eye, while Alex obliviously smiled at her. The caption at the bottom read, “Xan’s Valentine: Walk-Of-Shame Breakfast.”
The name was so close to “Alexandre de Valentinois” that Georgie actually read it as such the first time through, but then she read the headline a second time and the story, picking up terms like “rock star” and “missing on tour” and “anonymous jealous bitch.”
No shit.
She turned back to Mina and Kalli. “I would never go out to breakfast without make-up. She looks hideous.”
Both of them raised their eyebrows and examined the photo.
Mina said, “Wow. She really looks like you.”
“All us brunettes look alike to you blondes.”
Kalli fluffed her black hair. “She’s right, Mina. You can’t tell us apart.”
And they didn’t say anything more about it, but Georgie pretended to read the notes and drank her over-sweetened latte, prattling with the girls about who was dating whom, while she stewed for a few moments until it was polite to leave, ready to kick Alex’s ass when she got back to the dorm.
Stupid rock star fucking around with her like she was a goddamn groupie.
OUTED
Alexandre de Valentinois
Alexandre was lying on his back in Georgie’s tiny dorm bed with his guitar resting on his chest and his stockinged feet hanging off the end. Small white speakers, probably Bose, were tucked in the seams where the walls met the ceiling, and Alexandre had plugged his phone into the stereo system. Rather valuable pastel prints hung on the dorm walls below the speakers in lieu of the usual thumbtacked posters. Either Georgie or her roommate had rare taste in art.
His own voice sang to him through the speakers, “Because while I live, Because while I breathe—” His own melody floated through the air to him in tones of blue and teal, swelling to sunset shades at the key change for the last chorus.
Alexandre sang along while he picked out the song on his guitar, barely warming up his voice and letting air stream through his vocal cords, a dreamy smile on his face. His throat felt healthy. Music had immersed him and Georgie for three days in a warm pool of color and sound.
Five songs in total, and pages of fragments filled his notebook. He had never had such an intensely creative period. Every time he was stuck for a musical phrase, Georgie played a variation on the piano that broke his mental logjam. When he couldn’t find a rhyme, she kept him from chasing the abjectly obvious and lobbed options at him, at least one of which was usually the perfect color. She played his songs in the styles of Mozart and Bach and Rachmaninoff and discovered new harmonic possibilities that changed his vision of them to something new and startling.
Despite his total lack of belief in such egregious superstition, Alexandre had found a muse.
Granted, it might have been the college setting and piano practice rooms that evoked resonances of Juilliard, which was the last time that songs had flowed from his mind and body instead of being chiseled out of diamond-hard, bitter ice. It might have been that when Georgie was in his arms, the world around him melted away, and the air thinned until he could drink deep draughts instead of battling to suck oxygen through his clenched teeth.
But it might be her.
She called him Alex, his true name.
She saw him as he was now, stripped of all his history.
She didn’t see him as pathetic, broken little Alexandre Grimaldi, the prodigy who had snapped under the strain, nor as his other, darker self that had been born that night.
Alexandre picked out the song on the guitar over his heart.
He hadn’t found lyrics for the melody that he called “Scrambled Eggs” yet, but the song seemed inextricably bound to Georgie.
Not that he believed in such things as songs being bound to someone.
Or muses.
Summer vacation was only a few weeks away. He would ask her to come on tour with him. She would, of course, because she didn’t have a classical career to leave behind. What college junior wouldn’t leap at the chance to tour America and Europe for a summer with a rock band?
A jagged slam rattled the prints nailed to the walls.
He swung his legs off the bed and stood, lay
ing his guitar on the bed behind him. “Georgie?” he called.
The door from the study room flew open, and Alexandre caught a glimpse of the blackened sole of Georgie’s high-heeled boot where she had kicked it open.
Her furious face chilled him.
Georgie shoved her phone at him. The screen filled with a close-up of his own face and bare torso posed for the Rolling Stone cover shot a few months before.
She yelled, “Are you fucking serious?” The rage in her voice spiked orange light around her.
He held up his hands. “I can explain.”
“You’re a fucking rock musician? You’re a singer in a band? And I’m all over the internet because you’re a fucking rock star? I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me who you are.”
“Do you listen to Killer Valentine?” he asked.
“Of course not. I mean, I haven’t,” she backpedaled.
“Would you have known who ‘Xan Valentine’ was?” Darkness shivered at the edges of his vision when he invoked the name.
“No.” Her derisive tone explained exactly what she thought of popular music.
“Then it doesn’t matter, does it?”
“It matters that I’ve been walking around with a major rock star and didn’t know it, and people have been taking my picture and slapping it up all over the internet.”
“I’m Alexandre when I’m with you. I’m not Xan Valentine. Xan is a jackass. I don’t think you’d like him very much.”
“You’re Xan Valentine,” she grated out between clenched teeth.
“He’s a persona, a stage name—” Alexandre tried to explain, even as darkness wormed inside him.
“No one else is Xan Valentine. You are!”
He sat on the bed and ran his hand through his hair. After stroking Georgie’s silken brown hair for three days, his own hair felt like straw in his fingers. “I thought this conversation would go differently.”