by Daryl Banner
But you don’t realize how small they really are until there’s two of you sitting at the piano bench, poor air conditioning, and a fizzing can of soda balanced precariously on the sheet music stand.
“It starts with A minor,” Tomas explains, his enormous hands covering the keys and striking the chord. This may be odd to think, but I wish I had hands as big as his, able to cover an octave and a half with just a simple stretch of fingers. “Then right up to its minor third. Hear what it does to the timbre? Add a seventh, then come back down to A minor and … wait, that isn’t right.”
I’ve been patiently sitting next to him as he tries to figure out the song he wants to play me. My hands are on my lap and they haven’t struck a single key since we both came into this room half an hour ago. I came here with this whole plan to continue playing hard-to-get, to look my prettiest, and to wear that outfit Dessie insists makes my eyes pop. I even got contacts, thanks to Dessie and my being her new pet project.
Not that Tomas noticed. “Okay, no, I got it,” he announces. “Starts with A minor, then up a third, then up a whole to the major, and …”
I’m not really listening. I’m staring at the instrument that sits on top of the piano. It’s his instrument. It’s what he plays. It’s what that music he wrote was for—this instrument on the piano.
And it’s not a violin.
It’s not even a cello.
In fact, it’s not a string instrument at all.
It’s a—“Bassoon,” I mumble.
Tomas stops playing and looks at me. “What?”
I flinch. I didn’t realize I’d spoken out loud. “Sorry.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yep. A minor.”
“Right. A minor.”
Music has never bored me until this moment in time. I wonder if it would even have made a difference if I wore a paper bag instead of this ensemble of lime green and white floral designs. I watch as people pass by the window of our piano room on their way to other practice halls, most likely. Or else his music is literally scaring them away.
Maybe he’s nervous and won’t make the first move. You know, like Dmitri was. Maybe I should touch him. Like I did to Dmitri.
I shake my head. Stop thinking about him! He’s not here. Tomas is. And Tomas is so much cuter and taller, and he’s a musician like you.
Cuter. That’s so a lie.
I’m even doubting he’s a musician. Tomas approaches music like a math major approaches a problem: figuring solutions, calculating the relationships of chords, and assessing the song as a complex formula.
“Am I boring you?”
I snap my eyes to him. Tomas’s have softened as he looks down at me like a puppy dog. Yeah, even sitting on a bench, he has to look down at me. We’re not eye-to-eye, even literally.
“A little bit,” I confess.
The smallest flash of hurt crosses his face before he wipes it away like a computer reset to its factory settings. “M-Maybe you want to play something. Didn’t you have something for midterms? Something for your Theory class you had to write?”
I feel oddly confident around Tomas. Something tells me it has nothing to do with my makeover. Something else tells me it does.
“Sure,” I mumble. “I’ll play something.”
He scoots over on the bench. When my fingers touch the smooth keys, it’s like stepping on the doorstep of your house after coming home from school and smelling your mom cooking dinner. Except the only smell in this room is my perfume, his laundry detergent (if I had to guess), and the faint hint of old wood from the piano.
And I play.
When I finish, awareness returns, and I feel his eyes on me. In this instant, my heart jumps, suddenly quite aware of the fact that there is a boy sitting next to me on this bench, and he’s eyeing me. Hungrily. Lustily. Needily.
“Tomas …” murmurs the Sam who is not me, the one who is pretty and confident and worthy of a boy’s attention.
“Y-Yeah?”
I push at the bridge of my glasses before realizing they’re not there. You have contacts now, Sam. You’ll never poke at your nose again. I turn to face Tomas and find his eyes alight with deep, bleeding lust.
Or curiosity. I think I might be forcing a love song to happen when it’s all just in my head.
“You’re staring,” I tell him.
“Oh. I’m not meaning to. It’s just that you’re pretty.”
My heart flutters at his words. “You think I’m pretty?”
“Your m-music,” he amends, then blinks like he just got slapped in the face. “Your music is really pretty. And I like looking at it. Listening to it. Damn it.” He squints at the piano, annoyed with himself.
I’m not used to this feeling of power. It’s usually boys who have it over me, not the other way around.
“So when’d you decide to study music?” he asks, shifting topics abruptly. “Did your parents go to Yale? You look like a Yale girl. Violin or viola or something. Do your parents tour in a string quartet?”
I blink. “If they went to Yale, why would I be going here?”
Tomas opens his mouth, shuts it, opens it again. “I … This … We … Klangburg is a good school. It has an award-winning music program.”
“Oh. I didn’t mean …” I shake my head. “My parents didn’t go to Yale. Far from. And the only one in my family who tours is my dad, and it’s a far cry from … performing in a quartet.” I smirk. “Unless that quartet includes guitarists, drummers, and a keyboard from 1982.”
“1982?”
I experience an inward sigh. He takes me too literally. I noticed this when we met at the front of the Music building an hour ago and I told him teasingly, “Oh, Tomas! I wasn’t expecting to see you here.” And then he responded, “I thought we made plans? That’s why I’m here.”
Humor isn’t his thing. I get it.
“A really old keyboard,” I amend. “I’m … not sure about the year.”
“Oh, okay. I was about to say. That’s pretty old. 1982.”
I smile mildly, then shift my attention back to the piano, the whole reason we chose to meet up—assuming it wasn’t just an excuse. “I can play you more music.”
“I’d like that,” he says too quickly, then stares at my hands as if waiting for them to switch on like a machine.
“Maybe we can even … write a duet someday.”
He faces me again at once. “A duet?”
“Yeah. Your instrument. My instrument. Our instruments.”
Now I’m the one being literal, and yet his eyes are flashing like I’m talking in code. Does he think I’m literally suggesting we have sex? With music metaphors? Sam would never in a million orbits of the sun do that.
New Sam, however … “I’ll … play you some more,” I decide.
“Yes.” He chokes on his own tongue, then repeats, “Y-Yes.”
And so I play some more. Despite the bassoon that sits on the piano, I try to imagine his voice—Tomas’s voice—as the violin I always dreamed of playing alongside. I close my eyes as the music takes me away, hearing the cry and wail of a string that sobs in its melody as it works to support each of my heavy, passion-laden chords. The unity of these two voices sings in my head like a dream. Such harmony …
His shoulder presses against mine as I play. His thigh, too.
I notice.
My fingers fumble on the keys. I open my eyes, but keep them trained on my hands. Somehow, it makes it even harder to play when I’m watching my fingers. I play so much better without an audience, including my own eyes.
But my present audience is only one harmless guy. One harmless, literal-literal guy. And he’s sitting next to me on this tiny bench, which I swear is growing even tinier by the second. And he’s focused on me, wanting me, hungry for me.
Or maybe I’m projecting that. Am I horny? Is that what this feels like? I’m not even sure.
Do I want him to make a move? Is that what I’m waiting for?
I ignore all
these thoughts and just keep playing, assuming the music will somehow figure it all out for me. But I’ve lost track of the song, and now I’m just spilling chords from my hands, improvising.
“I like that,” he says suddenly. “Great chord progression.”
I have no idea at all what I just played or what he’s talking about. “Thanks. It’s my signature thing,” I say anyway.
He inhales sharply to say something, then nothing comes out. His breath is so jagged, I can feel it blasting on my ear. He’s having “thoughts” too. Lots of actually literal, flesh-against-flesh, heart-pounding thoughts. Soon, his breath is all I can hear; even the chords I’m playing come second to the rushes of hot, uneven air from his parted lips.
If I don’t kiss him now, he may go into cardiac arrest.
This is a serious concern of mine.
And then I end the song resolving on A minor—right where all this mess started.
“Thanks for musicing with me,” he says.
Musicing. I smile. Maybe there’s a sense of humor in him after all. With my hands in my lap, I calmly face him. “It was fun. Maybe we can do this again sometime.”
“Tomorrow?” he suggests quickly. “And Monday? I’m pretty much free every night after seven. Or six on Wednesdays. Or weekends. I can listen to your music every day of the week.”
He’s talking about music, Sam. Get your mind out of the soot-filled gutter. “I’ll give you my number and … you can call me sometime,” I suggest. “Do you have a pencil?”
“J-Just type it into my phone.”
“Okay.”
He hands me his iPhone. It’s sleek and silver with a saxophone sticker pasted on it. “Saxophone?”
“It’s from my Aunt Minnie who didn’t know what I play.”
“Oh. Okay. I have two gay uncles,” I volunteer randomly.
“Are they a couple?”
“No. Brothers. My dad’s brothers, to be precise. Both gay.” I decide to turn flirty and play dumb. “How do I … add a number into this?”
“Oh. You have a Droid or something? You add it like this,” he says, leaning over me and touching the screen.
His fingers graze mine. He has rough fingers, calloused at the tips. I wonder if he plays guitar. That could marry very well with my piano—a lot more than a bassoon, that’s for sure.
“Thanks,” I murmur when he’s done and my number’s inputted.
He smiles, which he accomplishes by pulling either corner of his lips as far out as he can. It’s a flat, crooked line of lip, his smile.
I rise from the bench and still feel like I’m looking up at him. “I’ll see you another time then, Tomas.”
There’s a flicker of impatience in his eyes when he says, “Definitely. I had fun. Thanks. Another time.”
All the words pour out of him clumsily like a dismantled ball of rubber bands. My heart breaks a little. Should I be inviting him back to my dorm? Is that too forward? Would anything even happen if I don’t instigate it? Why do I feel like if I invite him back, we’ll just end up watching reruns of X-Files on my roommate’s TV and listening to him bore me to death with Area 51 conspiracy theories or how Beethoven was actually an alien sent here from Neptune?
I’m going to have to make the first move. I know it. And maybe he knows it, too.
So I lean into him for a kiss.
My lips miss his face and my chin goes over his shoulder, one of my arms swinging around to turn this clumsy maneuver into a half-hug.
“See you later,” I mumble before letting go and heading out the door.
Kill me now.
Chapter 12
Dmitri
Brant is sunken into the couch in a cloud of anger, clutching his blue and orange afghan. I’ve never seen him like this.
“You sure you don’t wanna go?” I ask him at the kitchen counter.
“Nah.” He picks at his nails, squeezes the afghan, and stares at his phone, which balances on his knee in front of him.
Ever since he and Clayton had their big blow-up over something happening (or not happening?) with Chloe and Dessie and something else, they’ve been all weird and cold toward one another. Apparently there’s weirdness between Clayton and Dessie too, which is all the more exacerbated by both my roommates being at odds with each other. I’m caught in the middle like a tree in a storm.
What the hell am I supposed to do about all of this? I have issues of my own. Eric and I hung out many more times after that Tex-Mex-and-hang-out-in-the-dorms night where nothing happened but a few flirty glances, some suggestive words, and a teasing graze of fingers along my thigh. But he’s never once made a move. There was a moment when I thought he wanted to kiss me, but then he suddenly started talking about Dessie, which then turned into interrogating me about Clayton, and suddenly he had lines to study or something.
Everything is weird. Everything is so unnecessarily weird and cold and off with everyone.
“Dude, you should talk to Clayton,” I say. “Come to his opening night. He needs our support, especially with Dessie being—”
“You can support him.” Brant taps a few times on his phone.
“Brant …”
“I think I’m comin’ down with something anyway,” he mumbles, then chuckles at something on his phone and starts tapping away.
I guess he’s found some new girl. I have no idea what he did to Chloe or what transpired between them, but it was clearly enough to cause a rift between him and his best friend, and somehow Dessie got caught in the middle. Hell, maybe she’s the one I should be talking to.
“Suit yourself,” I tell him, grabbing my phone off the counter and heading for the door.
“Hey, Dmitri.”
I stop and turn, gripping the doorknob. “Yeah?”
“If you do talk to my boy, don’t tell him I’m sitting here moping. Say I’m out bangin’ chicks or something. Don’t give him a single damn impression that I’m—”
“Got it.”
“That I’m some pussy just sittin’ here being a bitch,” Brant finishes anyway. “Don’t tell him I’m stewing over those words he yelled at me. Or that I’m, like, having some sort of existential crisis here about what the fuck my purpose in life is.”
“Existential? That’s a big word,” I tease him. “Was it on your word-of-the-day calendar today?”
“Yesterday,” Brant teases back, cracking a smile.
I wasn’t here when the blow-up happened, so I don’t know exactly what was said. But I don’t pry; whatever ugly words were shared are between Brant and Clayton. “Take care of yourself, buddy.”
“You too.”
Twelve minutes later, I’m standing in the lobby of the School of Theatre tapping my thin paper ticket on my thigh impatiently. There’s quite a crowd here for opening night, which I suppose should have been expected, but it’s still pretty overwhelming. Everyone’s all abuzz and a particularly thick mob has formed around a few individuals, which I can’t make sense of. I assume it’s some sort of homecoming, maybe a bunch of Klangburg Theatre alumni gracing the department with their attending the opening night of the first show of the semester. I even spotted a news van outside.
Finding the lobby to be too suffocating, I push my way into the actual auditorium and find my seat in row N. The entire rest of the row holds its occupants already—some of them seated, some of them standing and chatting with people in other rows—so I squeeze my way down the aisle and put my ass in my seat, then bury my nose in the program the usher pushed into my hands on the way in. I sigh and bite my lip, reading the names.
My eyes catch his name: Eric Chaplin O’Connor, playing Simon Stimson. I make myself smile, despite the misgiving that’s built in my chest ever since I met him.
It’s a heart-sinking doubt. It’s the feeling of being played with. It’s the feeling like I’m just a cat’s toy for him to bat around and never bite. The feeling of being led on. Did he lead me on? Or did I lead him on?
I can still see the pinch of his lips the
last time we saw each other, the way he squinted at me like he was trying to figure me out. Maybe that’s what his narrative has been this whole time, and I’m just blind to see it. Maybe I was just his little quest, and now that he knows I’m bisexual and totally a possibility for him to mess around with, he’s lost all interest. Maybe he only liked me when he thought I was his friend’s boyfriend’s forbidden fruit.
I sigh and let the program drop to my lap, then glance around at my neighbors. I know no one, but everyone here seems to know each other. There’s not a face nearby that isn’t talking excitedly or shouting at one another across the auditorium (which is rather big, by the way).
I twist my neck and catch a couple near the aisle a couple rows behind me. A tall guy and a cute, sexy girl with short hair. She’s turned away, but I know a cutie when I see one. He’s not bad himself, honestly, but looks like he’d be about as exciting in bed as a book report on the dictionary.
Just as the girl turns back around, I look away, not wanting to be caught staring. It just so happens to be when the lights dim and all the noise of the room cuts down to whispers and crinkling of paper programs in laps as the curtains pull apart and the play begins.
Despite how I feel, when Eric enters the stage playing the role of the town choir director (and resident drunk), I smile. It’s so exciting to see him in his element, especially when all I know of him is the way he is outside of rehearsal, full of sassy comments, dark snark, and tilting eyebrows that show just how much he’s judging everyone near him.
How much has he judged me?
Half of what he talks about is how horny guys make him and how deprived he feels of gay attention in the Theatre department—or as he calls it: gay-tension. “Seriously,” he told me once over two cans of Diet Coke with season 2 of Grey’s Anatomy playing on his roommate’s TV, “you’d think there would be more homos in the School of Theatre, but I feel like I’m the only fucking one. And unless you’re way into anal—spoiler alert: I’m not—then you’re a freak who isn’t worth anyone’s gay-tension. Screw them. Ugh.”
I told him I didn’t care what anyone was into or not into; I was attracted to people’s minds. He glossed over what I said and continued to complain. I wanted to shake him and tell him I was right there in front of him. I nearly interrupted what he was saying with a kiss, but I just couldn’t make myself act.