“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 makeup. 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, laying 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 bel
ieve 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.”
She sat heavily on the other twin bed that was stripped down to the bare mattress and slumped, her head in her hands. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
He watched her, slouched there in a hopeless slump. Tears lined her warm brown eyes with shining crescent moons.
He asked, “What’s really going on?”
She covered her face. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I thought you wouldn’t appreciate that I don’t work in classical forms.”
“Your songs are beautiful. They make me cry. It doesn’t matter what drumbeat you set them to or what kind of instruments play them, but you scribbling all those songs all week makes a hell of a lot more sense now.” A tear flipped over her eyelid. She rubbed it away hard.
Alexandre took her hand and pulled her over to sit beside him on her bed. He wrapped one arm around her, and she hesitated before she leaned over to rest against his chest.
He said, “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, but people were looking for me. Are looking for me. And with my face on the internet, they’ll find me. And that’s very, very bad.”
Odd. “Ex-boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Are you in the—what do you call it?—where government witnesses are hidden?”
“Witness Protection Program. I wish, but no. And I’m not playing twenty questions about this.”
“Are you sure they’re looking for you?”
“Absolutely.” Her choked voice was almost a sob.
“Surely there aren’t any pictures of you on the internet with me. I’ve been very careful to stay incognito.”
She swiped her phone screen twice and showed him a picture of the two of them eating breakfast.
“That’s unfortunate.” He took a closer look at her grimacing expression in the picture. “Was something wrong with your omelet?”
“The waitress was fluffing her knockers at you.”
“I didn’t notice.” Alexandre had noticed. They were huge, but he had kept his attention riveted on her stormcloud gray eyes.
“I call bullshit,” Georgie said.
“All right, but women often do things like that around me. If I leer at them, I’m an oversexed rock star creeper. If I ignore them, I’m an asshole.”
“I can’t believe I slept with you. God only knows where your dick has been.”
Alexandre cracked up, laughter jolting out of himself. “Finally, someone says something sensible. First, I always use condoms. Religiously. My only religion. Second, before Paris, I hadn’t gotten laid in nine months.”
“I call utter bullshit,” she said. “You must have hot-and-cold running groupies in every hotel at every stop.”
A disgusted shiver started at the base of his spine and crawled to the back of his neck. “I don’t touch them. Maybe I’ll show you why someday.”
Georgie wiped her face with her hands and pulled away from his arms. “You know, it really doesn’t matter. They found me a while ago, anyway. I had started getting complacent, thinking first that they didn’t know anything about me, then that they must have only found my phone number, but they probably knew everything by then. They just haven’t moved on me yet. Let’s get your stuff together and I’ll drive you to the airport. I’ve got places to go.”
He gently tugged her back into the circle of his arms, and she slumped against him. “I have a few hours, still.”
Georgie’s hands slipped up around his neck, and her soft breath fluttered over his neck.
Was she trying to start something? He desperately hoped so. Before last week, it really had been nine months for him. Maybe ten. Just touching the soft skin of her arms was enough to make the testosterone in his body surge.
Yet he asked, “Are you safe here?”
“No, but I’m going to take care of it.”
“How are you going to take care of it?”
“Leave,” she said.
Alexandre felt that word like a bat to the back of his head. “But you have your classes. And law school.”
“I’m going to have to ditch all that anyway.”
“Because of the pictures with me.” He felt horror twist his face. If he had fucked everything up for her—
“No. They called me on my cell a couple days ago. I started making plans to run then. It’s not you. The pictures didn’t even make it worse. They’re too recent. They just emphasized the fact that I need to leave again.”
Every time she said something new, a red flag waved in his head. “Again?”
“Long story. You don’t want to hear it.”
He turned her to face him. “Are you in actual danger?”
She sighed. “Maybe.” Her hands clenched on her knees. “Yeah.”
“I can’t leave here if you’re in danger, Georgie.”
“Oh yes, you can. You need to get right back on that plane and fly away so that I can go underground.”
Panic trickled through him, even as he reminded himself that he didn’t believe in muses. “I can’t believe that you’re going to give up law school.”
“I won’t give it up. Law school is the plan. I’ll go someplace else. Maybe Alabama. They won’t look for me in Alabama, although I thought that about here, too. Change my name legally again. Get my transcripts, and finish my undergrad there. I’ll lose this semester, but I’ll be okay. I just have to work my plan.”
Her vehemence on that last sentence sounded like it masked desperation. Alexandre had felt those sharp indigo tones in his own mouth. “What can I do to help?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Just get on your plane and don’t look back. It’s been lovely fucking you, Alex. Have a nice life.”
He didn’t believe in muses, but he believed that when he stepped out of the town car and back on the tour bus, he would be Xan Valentine again. “I don’t want to leave you.”
Georgie twisted in his arms, standing up on her knees, and kissed him. Her lips slanted across his, and he opened his mouth when she did, feeling her soft tongue on his.
Alexandre couldn’t speak anymore. If these were his last few moments with her before she made herself disappear, he didn’t want those precious moments to be spent on an argument.
Five
Georgie
Five.
Everyone has a number, whether they have kept track or not.
Georgie’s number was three.
Georgie slept with a guy a maximum of three times, and then she untangled herself from any budding relationship before it got serious or was even acknowledged.
There were two guys out there that she had slept with three times before she had extricated herself. One of them had looked a little hurt, but they were cordial to each other for a couple weeks, then they were friends. She had lots of
onesies and two-fers, of course. She wasn’t a fucking nun.
But, five.
The first time with Alexandre had been in Paris, after the performance at Flicka’s reception.
The second time had been the kinkfest in The Devilhouse.
The third and fourth times had been in his hotel room, tangled in the sheets of his bed.
And now.
Five.
Her arms shook a little, but Georgie slid her hands up and into his long hair, feeling the softer, honey-colored strands on the nape of his neck and the ridges crossing his back that felt like the deep calluses on his fingers.
She was going to disappear in a few hours anyway. He knew it. She wasn’t lying to him.
But five.
Alex’s strong arms were already around her, stroking her back and cupping the back of her head under her braid. He moved nearer to her on the mattress, lifting her, settling her against him, and arranging her legs around his waist.
Georgie could already feel his hardness through his jeans, and he dragged her ass across his thighs until his bulge pressed her clit. The thick, double-stitched seam in the denim of her pants nestled inside her spread-open folds and rubbed.
She refused to think that there was anything magic about five.
Alex rolled her back on the bed, his body still wedged between her legs. Her braid flopped to the side, and he snagged the elastic at the end, pulling it off. He used his fingers to comb the plaits out of her hair and wrapped long hanks around his hands.
“Just this once,” he whispered against her throat.
She nodded and stretched her neck to feel his warm breath on her skin. The mild scent of his cologne—green fields, wide-open spaces, and rich fruit and spices—lifted off his skin, and she breathed in his natural masculine scent underneath.
Yes, it would be just this once.
But it would be five.
Alex held her hair, turning her as he wanted, moving her head to mouth her collarbone and dragging her up against him, her back pressed to his torso, to explore her body with his strong, confident hands. He wasn’t rough with it, but her long hair knotted around his hand was a giving away of control that shook Georgie inside, but Alex held her in his arms, slowly stroking into her as he held her head down on her bed, making the springs creak gently under them, his face just above hers, his hair falling around them like a curtain, looking into her eyes with an openness that frightened her more than the mafia killers hunting her.
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