17. Millie
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MILLIE
I wake up still in his arms.
For a second, I don't open my eyes. I just stay.
His chest rises and falls under my cheek.
His arm is around my back, heavy and warm.
One of his hands rests on my hip, fingers curled loosely against the fabric of my shirt.
I can feel him breathing—slow, even, a rhythm I could set my own to.
Last night was the first time anyone has ever held me while I slept.
I don't think I'll ever sleep the same alone again.
I shift, just enough to see his face. He's already awake.
"Good morning." His voice is low and rough with sleep, and every part of me leans toward it.
I sign it back. Good morning.
He gives me that sleepy half-smile, eyes still heavy, hair a mess, the morning light doing unfair things to the angles of his face.
I'm close enough to see the faint stubble along his jaw and the crease the pillow left on his cheek.
He looks soft. Unguarded. Like a version of himself he doesn't know anyone gets to see.
Neither of us moves to get up.
"How'd you sleep?" he asks.
I give him a thumbs up. Then I add another thumbs up. Then I raise both thumbs up again. He laughs, quiet and scratchy.
"Four thumbs up. That's the highest rating I've ever received for anything."
I poke him in the chest. He catches my hand and holds it there. His thumb traces a circle on my wrist, and my whole body listens.
We make breakfast together. Or he makes breakfast, and I sit at the counter and steal pieces of bacon off his plate before he can put them on mine. The energy between us has changed overnight. It moves slower now, like the morning is something we get to keep.
He keeps looking at me over his coffee and smiling when I catch him, and I keep looking away and smiling too, and neither of us is talking about last night because we don't need to.
It's just there. Where we used to keep a careful distance, there's nothing left.
He reaches past me for the pan and lets his hand rest at the small of my back a second longer than he needs to.
When he leaves for work, he stops at the door, then squeezes my hand.
"I'll see you tonight, Mills."
I nod. He goes.
The apartment is quiet. I stand in the hallway smiling like an idiot for a full thirty seconds before Tofu meows from the kitchen and snaps me out of it.
Today I go to the orchestra hall.
I haven't been back since before the fall.
I get dressed carefully: a long skirt, a blouse with a collar, flats.
Clothes that belong to a person with somewhere to be.
I look at myself in the mirror, and the woman looking back has color in her face again, her shoulders set instead of curled in.
I look like myself. Not a patient. Not a recovering person on someone's couch. A violinist.
The building is the same. The hallways, the rehearsal rooms, the specific sound the floors make under your feet. I know this place the way I know my own body.
Maestro Rios's office is on the second floor.
I knock, and he calls me in, and I step into the warm clutter of it.
Scores stacked on every surface. A baton collection mounted on the wall behind his desk.
Coffee rings on the wood that have been there for years.
The room smells like old paper and strong espresso.
He looks up from his desk, and his whole expression lifts.
"Millie. Come in, come in. Please, sit."
He's sixty-two and still commands a room without raising his voice.
Silver hair, sharp eyes, the posture of someone who's spent a lifetime standing in front of people.
He asks about my recovery. I type my answers and show him the screen, and he reads each one with the patience of a man who has conducted a hundred-piece orchestra and knows how to wait for an entrance.
I type: I'm ready to come back. I've been practicing again, and I'll be fully well by next opening month.
He nods. "Good. That's very good to hear. We've missed your sound, Millie." He takes his glasses off and sets them on the desk. "The sub has done an adequate job. But adequate isn't what I want in my orchestra."
I sit a little straighter.
Then he leans back in his chair and says something I wasn't expecting.
"I want you to know, Millie, that the committee's decision between you and Vivienne was extremely close.
Closer than you probably realize. Your audition was exceptional.
The panel was nearly split. I've gone back and listened to the recordings more than once.
" He pauses. "You have incredible potential.
I've believed that since the day you first auditioned for us. "
I don't know what to do with that. I just look at him.
"Keep practicing. Keep pushing. Keep doing what you're doing." He looks at me over the rim of glasses that aren't even on his face. Force of habit. "Perhaps next season, First Chair will be yours."
I type: Thank you, Maestro. That means more than you know.
He waves his hand. "Don't thank me. Earn it. I'll see you at rehearsal."
I leave the hall, and the cool air hits my face, and I feel something I haven't felt in months.
Direction. The sense that I'm moving toward something instead of away from it.
The path forward isn't blank anymore. It has a shape and a deadline, and for the first time since the audition results, the loss has a far side I can see. It feels like a detour.
I go home. I open my violin case. The dented latch clicks, and the old scratch on the lower bout catches the light.
I tune her. I stand in the spare room. I lift the bow.
No pain.
For the first time since the fall. I play, and my ribs don't stop me.
My core holds. My breathing is steady and deep, and I can fill my lungs all the way without flinching.
The bow moves, and my body follows, and the sound pours out of me the way it used to.
Full and open and mine. The notes fill the spare room, bouncing off the walls, and Tofu lifts her head from the bed and watches me with her one blue eye like she's seeing me properly for the first time in weeks.
I'm rusty. I can hear it. My intonation drifts on the harder passages, the muscle memory sluggish after weeks of not playing.
My vibrato is thinner than it should be, my left hand still regaining the strength it lost. But I don't stop.
I don't need to. Because underneath the rust, the foundation is solid.
It's been waiting for me this whole time.
It feels like coming back to life. I didn't realize how far I'd gone from myself until I started coming back.
I lose myself in it. Scales first, then études to warm up the fine motor groups.
Then the Barber Adagio, the piece I tried weeks ago and couldn't finish.
The one he heard from the hallway. I finish it now.
I play it through to the end, and the last note hangs in the room, and my eyes are wet but I don't stop.
I play it again. Better the second time. Cleaner. More mine.
I start on a Bach partita. The D minor. The technical demands are vicious, every shift and double-stop and string crossing requiring total focus, and my brain narrows down to just this.
Fingers, strings, bow, breath. Nothing else exists.
Not the apartment. Not the pregnancy. Not Joseph.
Just the music and the conversation I'm having with it.
I finish the passage. I lower my bow. I turn.
He's standing in the doorway.
He's still in his coat, his bag on the floor where he dropped it. He's watching me like he's forgotten how to do anything else, the same way he watched me the night I walked out of the spare room in that dress.
I lower the violin. The room is very still.
He steps inside. He doesn't say anything. He crosses the room in two strides, and his hand finds my waist. His other hand cups the side of my face, and he kisses me.
This isn't the kitchen kiss or a goodnight kiss. This one is slow and deep, and it carries everything he didn't say from the doorway. Hungry, but in no rush at all.
I kiss him back. My free hand grips the front of his coat and pulls him closer. He makes a sound against my mouth, low and involuntary, and I feel it vibrate through me.
"You're incredible," he whispers.
I kiss him again.
We make our way to his bedroom. Our bedroom. The door closes behind us, and the light is low, just the last of the evening sun coming through the curtains, turning everything gold.
He takes off his coat. His hands find the hem of my blouse, and he pauses, fingers brushing the skin just above my waistband. Asking. I nod.
He lifts it slowly. His fingers trail up my sides as he goes, feather-light, tracing the lines of my ribs like he's checking. Like even now, even in this moment, part of him is making sure I'm healed. I catch his hands and hold them still. Nod. I'm okay. I want this.
His breath shakes. Just slightly. I feel it against my neck where his mouth has found the spot below my ear. His lips are warm. His stubble grazes my skin, and I shiver, and my fingers dig into his shoulders.
We're slower this time. The first time, our one-night stand, was urgent and reckless and fueled by the kind of want that doesn't ask questions.
This is different. That was need, impulse.
A stranger's hands in the dark. This time I want him.
Not just his body. I want the way he looks at me like I'm the only thing in the room.
The way he makes me feel whole without ever asking me to be more.
This is deeper than skin. Deeper than want.
And every touch tells me he feels it too.
He lays me down. His body covers mine, warm and lean, and he holds his weight on his arms so he doesn't press on my stomach. Careful. Thoughtful.
"Is this okay?" he murmurs against my collarbone.
I pull him closer. My hands in his hair. My answer.
His mouth moves down my neck. My shoulder. The hollow of my throat. He takes his time. I feel the heat of his skin against mine, the press of his hips, his hands sliding under my back and lifting me closer. My fingers trace down his spine, and he shudders.
"Millie." My name in his mouth, low and rough, pressed against my skin like a secret. "You have no idea what you do to me."
I pull his face up to mine. I kiss him. Hard. I pour everything into it, every word I can't say, every sound I can't make. I kiss him with my whole body, because my body has always been the only voice I fully trust. It's how I play. It's how I love.
He fills me. I gasp. Just air, just breath through my teeth, but he hears it. Every almost-sound that escapes me, he answers, like they're the loudest thing in the room.
He moves. I move with him. My fingers dig into his back, and my legs wrap around him, and I feel him everywhere at once. His forehead drops against mine. I can feel his breath, ragged and warm, mixing with mine.
"You're so beautiful," he says, the words broken up between breaths like they're falling out of him against his will. "You're so amazing. God, you feel amazing."
My arms wrap around him. I pull him as close as possible.
I don't need to tell him what I feel. He already knows.
He reads me the way he always has, through my hands, my breath, my body pressed against his.
I grip his back. Our rhythm locks together, two halves of a duet finding the same measure at last.
He kisses me again, slowly, then rests his lips against my forehead.
Afterward, we lie tangled in the sheets. His arm is around me, my head on his chest. My hand rests on his stomach, rising and falling with his breath.
He's tracing shapes on my shoulder with his fingertip. Slow. Absent. Like he's got nowhere to be and nothing to do except be exactly here.
"So," he says. "I came home to you playing Bach. Just want to point out that most people come home to a TV on or their roommate doing dishes. I come home to a private Bach concert. In my spare room. I just want to acknowledge that my life is unreasonably good right now."
I smile into his chest. I reach for my phone on the nightstand and type: You interrupted the Bach, by the way. I was mid-partita.
"I'll apologize to Bach personally. I'm sure he'll understand."
He's been dead for three hundred years.
"Then he's got bigger problems than me interrupting you."
I laugh. Silent, shaking against him. He tightens his arm around me and presses his lips to the top of my head.
I close my eyes and let the sound of his breathing settle under my ear, slow and steady, carrying me down. This is what home feels like. Warm, and wanted, and finally still. A sound I want to fall asleep to for a very long time.
And for the first time in my life, I don't want morning to come.