by Megan Chance
He stilled. His fingers froze at my waist, his kiss went slack though he did not move his lips from my throat. I felt the strain of his listening, and the remembered pleasure of how he'd always done that, how he'd always listened to me with his whole body, blended with the pleasure I felt at it now, so I didn't allow myself to resist; I was so tired of resisting. I let the duet take me, and like today in the storage room, my voice reached for the notes the way a body stretches upon waking, slowly and with joy, like honey after salt, unbearably sweet and smooth and liquid, familiar and at the same time like nothing one had ever tasted before. And then my part was done, and I went silent, waiting for his answer, which came, his hand tightening against me, his song quiet and for me alone, and then the back and forth and our lines together, harmonized, and it was over, the last notes joining the sunlight to make it seem brighter and hotter, and he was looking at me with a kind of wonder in his eyes, so strange. It was such a reverent expression it made me laugh, and then he was smiling and laughing with me, wrapping his arms around me, pulling me down onto his chest so I felt the vibration of his laughter.
We laughed for a long time.
He said, "How beautiful you are when you smile. How I've missed it."
I felt my smile fade. I pressed my finger against his lips. "Ah, such flattery. You'll turn my head."
He caught my hand, holding it away. "I want to tell you something."
I shook my head, afraid, leaning down to kiss him, whispering, "I want you again already."
He laughed again, softly. "Still running away."
I twisted loose, running my palm over his too-prominent ribs, downward.
He caught my hand again as I trailed it across his hip, stopping me just as the tips of my fingers reached him. "Listen to me, sweetheart."
"Don't tell me. Please. I don't want to know."
He ignored me. "I know you intended to leave me that night. I know you meant to ask DeRosier to take you away."
"You ... knew?"
"You're not very good at hiding what you feel. I'd known it for weeks. I meant to let you go. I stayed away long after the performance was over to give you time. When I got back to the hotel it was nearly four. And then, when I saw him there and ... all the blood--I went a little mad. I tore the damn room apart looking for you. By the time I realized you were gone, I was covered with blood myself."
I covered my eyes as if I could blind myself to the image his words roused, then let my fingers drop when he continued.
"When they took me away, I said nothing about you. They thought I'd done it and I let them think it."
"I saw the newspaper reports," I whispered. "I always wondered ... why."
He looked at me as if he didn't understand the question, as if it made no sense to him. "Because I love you."
I stared at him. "You took the blame because you loved me?"
"Of course," he said impatiently. "Why else?"
Why else? I had thought a hundred other things. He'd been caught; they didn't believe him when he told them the truth; something. But not love. Love had never occurred to me. How little I'd believed it when he said the words. They were easy to say, after all, meaningless. He had used me and manipulated me. But what he'd done for me.... Once again, I had the disquieting sense that he was not quite who I'd thought he was.
He sighed. "I want you to understand. Sing Sing is ... there's no talk allowed there. Only the guards are allowed to speak. It's silent, but it's not quiet, and it's heavy--there were times when I felt as if I were suffocating beneath the weight of it. All these ... hushed sounds. It's inhuman, somehow. I thought of you. I thought ... somewhere she's singing, she's happy. I imagined it until I thought it was real. There you were, on a stage somewhere, smiling, singing.... It was what kept me sane."
I buried my face in his chest, and somehow that was worse, the power those words had in their rumble against my cheek, and I lifted my head again. I looked toward the window, where the sun was too blinding to see.
"Then Willa wrote. I asked her for news of you. I wanted to know where you were singing, what the reviews were like"--he laughed shortly--"even what you were wearing. And she wrote back and said there was nothing. That you had disappeared. That you weren't singing anywhere she knew, and that ... that broke my heart, Bina. And made me angry. I'd made this sacrifice, and you had thrown it back in my face. You made it worthless. Four years of my life, thrown away. That's what I mean when I say you owe me. That's why I came after you. Because you weren't singing, and I wanted to know why."
I rolled away from him, onto my side, turning my back to him, and this time he let me go. I was sorry for everything, for his sacrifice, for the fear that racked me now that I knew the truth of it.
"What happened that night, Sabine?"
"You know what happened. I killed him."
He whispered, "Tell me."
He put his arm around my waist, pulling me back against him. His breathing was low and deep against my shoulder. I rolled again to face him. I kissed him, softly first, and then pressing, seducing, using my tongue and my lips to quiet him.
He took my face in his hands. "Tell me."
I shook my head. I trailed my hand down his chest, to his navel, lower. I stroked him. "I don't want to remember. I want you to make me forget."
"You can't ignore it forever," he said, but he kissed me, and in relief I gripped him, bringing him closer. Yet I did not recognize his kiss; there was something there that was unfamiliar, an intensity that woke an equal desire in me, and he made love to me as if he meant to take me into himself, to consume me, as if he could make of us a single person, as if he could make me whole.
CHAPTER 23
I meant to go to the boardinghouse, to be alone, but Johnny had other ideas, and so I spent the night with him. I let him touch me and I thought of Gideon, and when Johnny was asleep I lay there and knew I must end things. Now. Tomorrow. I would send Gideon away, I would tell him about the news paper reporters Prosch had said were looking for him, looking for me, and ask him to lead them away from here. And then I would quit the choir until things were settled at the Palace. I had no choice, after all. The risk of discovery had grown too great.
I meant to do it too. The next morning, I told Johnny I had some errands to run: chloral to pick up for Duncan, a pile of gowns to take to the seamstress, and he did not question me but waved me away and went back to the accounts. I hurried to meet Gideon at the church with my hood over my head and drawn tight, checking over my shoulder for anyone following, nearly running in my haste to save myself.
He was already there. The storage room door was open; I heard the music as I opened the door to the basement and came down the stairs. He was playing "By the Margins of Fair Zurich's Water" as if he loved it. I shut the door behind me and shoved my hood back with the same motion. He glanced up at me and smiled, but he didn't stop, and I went to the piano and looked down at his hands racing across the keys, those lovely hands, and when he finished with a flourish, I found myself saying, "How strange that I don't know ... how is it you learned to play?"
He gave me a bemused look. "You're asking this now? After all this time?"
"I ... never wondered before now."
He sighed. "My mother. She taught lessons to make extra money. There was a piano in the sitting room of our boardinghouse. She made me practice every day."
He said it wistfully, and I saw it was a good memory for him. I would have said I knew Gideon Price better than anyone on earth, but now I thought of all the things I didn't know about him, all the things I'd never questioned. The kind of child he'd been, for example, or what it had been like for him to grow up without a father. The sudden yearning to know who he was apart from myself took me aback.
The time for that has passed. This is dangerous. Just tell him to go. I opened my mouth to say it. But then he said, "Shall we begin?" and launched into Susanna's "Deh vieni" and instead I sang, flirting with him as he flirted with me, and when the song ended, he said quie
tly, "I used to dream of that look on your face. When you sing, you're even more ... radiant," in a sweetly sincere way that surprised and confused me, and I thought of Charlotte saying much the same thing and then ... I could not send him away, and I could not give this up, no matter the danger. Not yet.
WITH FEBRUARY CAME the rain again, and I went to the church nearly every day, and then went with Gideon to his hotel after. I was miserable with guilt and fear, but I could not seem to stop. I had a hundred lies to tell Johnny, to tell Charlotte. The tales were varied and inventive, and I marveled at how easily they sprang to my lips and saw the strain of my deceit in my face whenever I looked into the mirror. I expected any day to be discovered. I knew I must make Gideon go, and soon, but each morning, I thought, one more day. I'll tell him tomorrow.
I tended Johnny the way I'd once tended Leonard Jerome, but I didn't stay with him as often as I had for fear he would see the lies in my face. I told Charlotte I was with Johnny even when I wasn't. But neither did I like to spend time in my boardinghouse room, because there was the journal Gideon had returned to me, and I was resisting it too. When I was there, I ran my fingers over the top of my dresser and thought of it and was afraid of what was in it, what it would tell me about myself, the things I did not want to know.
And if I was miserable with the deceptions, well ... there was the music to make me forget. As always, it was the only thing that mattered.
"THAT'S ENOUGH FOR today," Gideon told me one day after we'd been coming to Trinity for three weeks. I watched him put the music in the folio and tie it shut, and I followed him to the door. He extinguished the lamp and put his hand at my waist to guide me, and just then there was a commotion on the stairs, the clatter of something against the walls, and two workmen came into the basement, carrying a pew.
The men were frequently down here; Gideon and I backed up to the wall to give them room to pass, and then one of them looked up, and I saw it wasn't a workman at all, but Robert Marsdon.
"Miss Olson!" he said, looking both pleased to see me and puzzled. His glance went from me to Gideon, then to the proprietary hand Gideon still had at my waist. The confusion on his face grew more pronounced. "Mr.... Price, wasn't it?"
"You've a good memory," Gideon said quietly.
Marsdon and the workman set the pew against the wall, and Robert dusted off his hands and told the other man that he would be back up in a moment. As the workman went up the stairs, Robert said, "What are you doing down here?"
I stepped deliberately away from Gideon and gestured helplessly to the storage room. "The piano--"
"Ah," he said, obviously no less confused.
"Mr. Price plays the piano, and I ... we--"
"--were practicing," Gideon said. As if he hadn't noticed how intentionally I'd stepped away, he put his hand again at my waist.
Marsdon noticed. He said, "Practicing? Something for the choir?"
"You've heard her voice," Gideon said impatiently. "Do you really think--"
"Yes, a special hymn," I said. I shoved my elbow surreptiously into Gideon's chest, willing him to be quiet. "Mr. Anderson knows all about it, but no one else does. I'd appreciate it if you would keep it secret."
Marsdon frowned. "I see. Is it to be for the service then?"
"Apparently we're planning a surprise for Miss Rainey," Gideon said.
I sighed in relief. "Yes, a surprise. You won't tell her, will you, Dr. Marsdon?"
"Of course not," Marsdon said, though he still looked puzzled. "If that's what you wish."
"Thank you," I said, giving him my broadest smile.
He gestured to the stairs, obviously flustered. "W-well then. The others are waiting for me. We needed to move some of the pews.... Good-bye."
He hurried up the stairs, and when he was gone Gideon pressed his fingers into my waist and said, "You are a witch."
It was a light comment, but I heard something in his tone, some disapproval that went beyond his teasing, and I was ill at ease. I didn't like that Robert Marsdon had found us. Although I believed he would keep the secret, I was uncertain just how close he and Charlotte had become--and that bothered me too, that I didn't know.
"Let's go," Gideon said, urging me up the stairs. But as we went back to the hotel and fell into bed, I was aware of that vague disapproval between us that I'd felt in the basement, and nothing I could do to him made it go away.
HE LEANED AGAINST the wall near the window, wearing only his trousers, smoking as he watched me dress. The rain was a cold and steady gray curtain beyond the glass that made me shudder when I thought of going out in it. I wanted to be drowsy, still in bed, curled against him.
As if he'd read my mind, he said, "Why don't you stay?"
"I can't. They're expecting me back."
"You'll be leaving there soon. What does it matter?"
I concentrated on buttoning my bodice.
"How long are we keeping this secret, Sabine?"
I swept up my hair, reaching for the pins in a little pile on the dresser.
He said, so quietly his voice was nearly lost in the sound of the rain, "Do you love him?"
I glanced warily at him in the mirror. His expression was clouded by smoke. "Love who?"
"Johnny Langford."
When I didn't answer, he said, "You'll be ready in another month. Six weeks at the outside. I can have you onstage in New York by June."
I closed my eyes. The hush surrounded me; the rain could almost have been an audience, those few moments just after the curtain opened as they waited breathlessly for the start.
"We'll have to time it right--the newspapers will want their story. We'll pick a reporter; perhaps Simon Trask from the Times. He's always been taken with you. You can tell him how difficult your life has been these last few years. Build the public's sympathy and curiosity. If we do it correctly, there will be ticket lines stretching around the block."
"Gideon--"
"We ought to be able to name our percentage. There isn't a theater in Manhattan that won't want you. We'll have to discuss what our story will be, of course."
"You mean a lie," I said.
"Unless you want to confess to killing him." He ground out his cigarette on the windowsill. "Since I've already served the time, I wouldn't suggest it. We want you performing, not in prison." He glanced up at me. "It would be easier if I knew what really happened."
"I don't like to think about it."
"What did he do, Bina? Why did you kill him? Why won't you tell me?"
I shook my head blindly. He sighed. I heard him cross the room. Then his hands were warm on my arms, pulling me back into his chest.
"Here I am, here we are, as we always were. Practicing and then making love in secret while you go off with some other man. You're doing exactly what you want, Sabine, just as you always did, while I'm living in the shadows, making certain you never have to pay the consequences for anything. What are you telling people about where you come every day? Your friend Charlotte--does she know anything about this? About me?"
"No, but--"
"What about Langford?"
"No. No, I--" My words were trapped in my throat.
"Let me tell you what I want, Sabine," he said very slowly. "Or perhaps it's better if I tell you what I don't want. I don't want this"--he gestured about the room--"no more hiding, no secrets."
"You were the one who insisted on that before, not me."
"Things are different now. I've grown tired of pretending that I'm not your lover. I don't want to share you. It's time for you to grow up and choose: a life with me, or to stay here with him."
"How can I believe you?" I demanded. "The first time there was a Leonard Jerome waiting in the wings--"
"There will be no more Leonard Jeromes, not for my part. If you decide to play that game, you can do it without me."
I did not expect this. I found myself foundering, trying to find the Gideon I knew in this man who looked at me so intensely, who demanded so fiercely.
He said, "I don't want anyone mistaking what we are to each other. If you truly do love me, then I want you to make the choice. I want you to marry me."
I stared at him in stunned amazement.
"Marry me," he said again, as if it were only now dawning on him how serious he was, "or we leave each other."
And the temptation was there, as terrible as had been the one to sing again, to take to the stage. To marry him, to claim him as my own, to never live in secrets ... The Sabine who loved him wanted it so badly. But the Marguerite who had run from him--she knew what marriage would mean. To be chained to him, bound to his will, forced not just by circumstance but also by law to do as he wished, when I was already so prone to do so. How would I save myself then?