32 Playing Violin is Like Entering a Jumpgate
Playing Violin is Like Entering a Jumpgate
T wenty minutes later, Spie opened her door to a visibly nervous Trash Girl.
In comfortable sweatpants and an oversized sweater, she stood awkwardly in the corridor, her arms folded tightly across her chest, her gaze darting left and right.
Her cerulean hair spilled from a messy knot atop her head, and her eyes were smudged with what looked like yesterday’s eyeliner.
Manny would be furious with her for leaving it on again.
Spie thought she looked beautiful.
“I don’t think anyone saw me. Arbora was already sleeping when I left.”
The low timbre of her voice, her harsh accent catching and gnawing on her vowels, sent electricity pulsing through Spie’s chest.
“Relax, Trash Girl.” She held out her hand. “You’re not breaking any rules by being with me. We’re allowed to bring contestants up to our rooms.”
Artemis glanced at the outstretched hand, then brought her gaze up to Spie’s. Another jolt of electricity warmed Spie’s core.
“But what if your brother...” She trailed off, gaze falling sideways. The question was clear.
What if Nicky found out I was with you after midnight?
Spie dropped her proffered hand. “My room is soundproofed for privacy. And anyway, Nicky would like that we’re friends.”
This wasn’t more than that. Spie wouldn’t let it be more than that.
Artemis exhaled audibly. “Right. Of course. Friends.”
Was that disappointment or relief?
Spie stepped aside and, with a tilt of her head, indicated the bed, where her violin case lay open. “Over here.”
They crossed the lavish carpet. Cool salty air and the distant sound of crashing waves stole through the cracked balcony door.
Spie settled sideways on her bed with one leg folded up under her and the other dangling to the floor.
Artemis remained standing, staring at the bed like it held some kind of trap.
After a few seconds, she seemed to deem it safe enough and knelt opposite Spie, both legs tucked up beneath her.
Spie became acutely aware of the way her gaze kept flicking to Spie’s profile before stealing away.
Acutely aware that only a violin separated them, acutely aware of how easy it’d be to slice through the thickening tension and lay Artemis flat on her back—
“So, this is her.” Spie blinked away the image forming in her mind.
Tenderly, she lifted her violin from its case.
“She belonged to my late father. On Old Terra, the violin is a traditional instrument. Expanese orchestras adopted a more-modern design a few centuries ago, but this is an original Old Terran. An antique, though it plays as if it were carved yesterday.”
“She’s beautiful,” Artemis said reverently, gaze raking over what felt like an extension of Spie’s being.
Spie’s lips twitched into a smile. Warm, nervous energy expanded within her chest. “You think so?”
“Oh, absolutely. I’m an engineer at heart; I love to see how things are constructed.” Artemis reached out a hand. “May I?”
Spie nodded and Artemis gently lifted the violin. She turned the instrument over with care, as though she understood not only the violin’s material value but the importance it held to Spie.
“The craftmanship is incredible. The detail—we don’t have anything like this back home.
” Artemis returned the violin to its case.
“Sometimes, when I was young, before our father left and before our mother got sick, she would play the orii?te .” The X-er word rolled from her tongue beautifully.
She looked up and folded her hands in her lap.
“It’s a tubular instrument made of blown glass.
Sounds like...like birdsong, actually.
Ollie and I would sit at her feet and close our eyes and hum.
It’s the happiest I remember my mother being. ”
“Do you play it also? This or—oria—”
“ Orii?te ,” Artemis finished for her. “And no. It’s a delicate instrument and I don’t have the gift for music.
Ollie, though, he learned to play beautifully.
He loved it so much. But we had to sell our orii?te in the year after my father left.
Ollie would’ve been eight? In another life, I think he might’ve been accepted into the Musicians’ Guild and spent his evenings playing at the governor’s mansion.
But in this life, I don’t even know if he remembers how to play.
Or if he even could after the loss of his right hand. ”
“He remembers,” Spie whispered with certainty, staring at her own beloved instrument.
For some insane reason, a flood of sudden emotion swelled in her throat.
She swallowed against it, forcing it back down before she did something as embarrassing as cry.
“When the instrument is a part of you, when the music feels like your true voice—a body doesn’t forget that. ”
When she looked back up, it was to meet Artemis Ialan’s quizzical gaze.
Strands of her hair had come loose from her bun, and her too-big sweater had relaxed sideways, revealing the soft white skin of her right shoulder, the faint impression of her collarbone.
The glow of the moons painted her silver, and Spie had the strangest sense that this had happened before.
That in some parallel universe, they’d sat together and talked of music and brothers and longing.
Spie wondered if, in that reality, she’d been brave or reckless or cruel enough to reach across the violin between them and kiss her.
She wondered if Artemis tasted as heady as she imagined. If she tasted of sadness and defiance and purpose.
“Play for me?” Artemis whispered, but the request was weak. Her gaze had dropped to Spie’s lips, as if she knew the direction of Spie’s thoughts. As if she desired Spie in return.
But Spie wouldn’t let herself reflect on this mutual, unspoken attraction. She couldn’t.
So, she did what Artemis asked. She lifted her precious violin into her arms, retrieved her bow, and stepped off the bed.
Artemis’s gaze tracked her as she moved to the center of the room, the heat of it as hot and deadly as the beam from an LZ blaster.
Spie tried to ignore the way that gaze awoke a different heat in her chest as she balanced her chin on her violin’s chinrest and tucked the instrument into the crook of her neck.
She straightened her posture, closed her eyes, and raised her bow.
The first note came out strangled. She adjusted, breathed, and tried again.
The note rang out a strong open A. It reverberated in her chest, her stomach, her feet.
She inhaled, letting her body fall into the rhythm of a thousand mornings spent alone, with nothing but her violin and the music it wrought.
The song that fell out of her was one she’d composed herself, a melody of urgent longing and hot shame.
She’d titled it “Anywhere but Here, Anyone but Me,” had composed it the morning after her mother called Spie to her office and told her she’d embarrassed the Expani name one too many times.
Playing violin was like entering a jumpgate: for a suspended moment, everything disappeared. Her body, the room, the manor, even Artemis watching. All reduced to particles of pure sound, floating beyond the limits of the human form. Spie yearned to escape forever to that place.
But too soon, the song came to an end. Her bow slowed, her fingers stopped. Her breaths came heavily and sweat marked her temples. And as the final note rang out, a mournful G minor, she opened her eyes.
Artemis stared, attention rapt. When Spie lowered her violin and bow, the X-er said, breathlessly, “That was...” She swallowed. Breathed out. “Sad.” Her gaze traveled over the topography of Spie’s face, but Spie sensed it went deeper, saw deeper. “And beautiful.”
Heat flared in Spie’s core. An airy rush of sensation quickened her pulse. There was an iron in her chest, heavy and dense but burning, growing hotter by the second, turning molten and dripping down into her gut. Spreading lower.
Her legs moved of their own accord, transporting her back to the bed, where she laid her violin back in its case and resumed her place opposite the woman she’d just invited into her inner world.
“Thank you,” Spie whispered. “For listening.”
In the ensuing silence, she stared at Artemis and Artemis stared back.
The burning sensation inside her built until it threatened to overflow.
She couldn’t contain it inside herself, knew that if she didn’t do something with it, she’d incinerate from the inside out.
Distantly, some rational part of her brain knew she was being selfish, knew she needed to stop herself from making a huge mistake, wondered if she was repeating with Artemis who she’d been with Arbora, but she could no more stop herself than she could thwart the expansion of her mother’s empire.
“Artemis.” The X-er’s name fell from Spie’s lips like a plea.
She reached out a hand, passing it above the violin, breaching that safe, dividing line, and placed her palm atop Artemis’s folded knee.
This was a bad idea. This had been a bad idea from the start.
From the moment she’d cornered Artemis Ialan in her tiny, cramped, kitchen and twined a strand of her unruly hair around one finger.
Artemis stared at Spie’s hand, frozen. Spie’s skin burned so hot, she was certain she’d sear a hole into the cotton of Artemis’s sweats.
“I shouldn’t like you.” Artemis’s throat bobbed. “I shouldn’t feel this way.”
“Feel what way?” Spie whispered, scooting closer, gently pushing her violin and its case out of her path. Her knee pressed into Artemis’s.
Artemis looked up. This close, Spie could make out the green flecks in the warm brown of her irises.
Her pupils were dilated. Spie inhaled, and her lungs froze.
She wondered at the magic that was a woman who could make her body forget how to breathe.
The most natural, instinctual reflex, ingrained in the deepest subcortical structures of the brain, and one tortured glance from Artemis Ialan stripped Spie entirely of the ability.
Was this what it’d felt like for Nicky, the first time he kissed her?
The thought was like a barrel of ice being turned over in Spie’s chest. She flinched backward, the moment shattering, dousing Spie with cold reality. She yanked her hand back from Artemis’s knee and forced herself to take a few pained breaths.
“Never mind. Forget I, forget we—” Spie turned her gaze to the balcony doors, to the not-so-distant sea.
Where the tide did the bidding of the moons, forever a slave to something greater than itself.
Damn it, why did she feel like she was going to cry again?
She was usually so good at keeping her emotions in check, shoving them back behind a steel wall in her mind.
Far enough away that no one would ever witness them.
But something about this woman demolished her internal wall like it was a flimsy.
“Spie?” A tentative hand on her shoulder. The press of Artemis’s knee more firmly against her own.
Spie squeezed her eyes shut against the urgent swell of tears.
What is wrong with me? Her emotions were all over the place.
If she wanted to sleep with someone, she slept with them.
(With consent, of course, but also, wasn’t that the whole problem?
Her wants always eclipsed someone else’s.
Wasn’t that the reason Arbora remembered their relationship as toxic when Spie didn’t?) What she didn’t do—had never done—was pull out her violin and play a song that contained more than notes: contained pieces of herself, her world, her pain.
Never let anyone in.
“You should leave.”
The pressure of Artemis’s hand left her shoulder.
It was like having a knife yanked from her gut.
Her mattress compressed and then returned to normal as the other woman shifted her weight and stood.
Spie yearned to take the words back, to beg her to stay, but she couldn’t force them out between her closed lips.