Chapter 26
“Okay, even if we find the microphone equipment up here, what are the odds it will still work? This crap looks half a century old.” Nic squinted at the ends of cords. “I still think we should’ve rented from my guy in Wichita instead of buying that refurbed stuff.”
Felicity had always wondered why there were a dozen antennas on the far side of the old church.
Similar to how her apartment was tucked away at the back of the building where a priest might have once lived, on the restaurant side there had been an old Catholic radio station studio.
Nic said it hadn’t functioned as a radio station for at least a decade when Aunt Jeannie and Dexter Greene bought the building, but that for years the church had used it for storage of old electronics and sound equipment.
Felicity grunted at another failed attempt at unknotting a tangle of cords. “Since you’ve spent the last few months helping me with my business’s balance sheet, I feel a lot of satisfaction in reminding you that renting the equipment he had available for today would’ve made us go over budget.”
He snorted.
She hid her satisfied grin in the cabinet.
“Mr. Greene said there was something that looked a little like a karaoke machine speaker. It’ll work fine for a middle schooler May Day Festival.
” The sound equipment they had been using since the fall had crapped out at the last minute, and the festivities would be starting in a couple of hours.
“We can use it for the field day too.” She paused.
“I mean … if that doesn’t get canceled.”
Nic nodded. The meeting deciding the fate of the courtyard was in less than two weeks.
It had cast an odd pall over everything since they’d found out.
The only slightly bright spot was that for the last two Tuesdays Nic had been working in the restaurant rather than disappearing.
Not that this necessarily meant anything really.
Felicity was in a particularly odd mood today.
It shouldn’t surprise her. May Days always put her in this headspace.
She was less than two weeks from finding out the fate of the shop.
All of the financial restructuring work she had done with Nic and Sam’s help since September had gotten the shop in much better fiscal shape, but everything would be for nothing if the garage was built.
What would she do if Bruce won?
She could try to run the shop for as long as possible. She could watch the plants die from lack of light. She could sell the space. Look for a new one nearby. Move the store. Or she could move back to Maryland.
But it wouldn’t even feel like going home, would it?
Thea and Courtney had moved a bunch of their stuff into their new place last week. It wasn’t completely done, but it was livable. Watching them set up a home together was a bitter reminder that Felicity wasn’t sure what she wanted when everyone else around her seemed set and settled.
A year ago, she had thought the mere act of living was too hard. It hadn’t seemed worth it to try anymore. Now she had spent the entire year fighting for this new life that she had fallen into, and what would she do if she lost that too?
She had been so focused on doing everything she could to win that she had barely spared a thought to plan for if they lost.
Nic seemed off today too.
The anniversary of her aunt’s death was coming up. Maybe that was affecting her mood.
She leaned back on the closet wall and pulled her knees in to her chest. “Do you think with everything we have scheduled … do you think we’ll win?
Do you think we can beat him?” Bruce had stopped by yesterday and hinted about the winds of change in the city council, but Cynthia Dale had told her a few weeks ago to ignore him.
“No idea about the pocket park grant, but against the city council goons? I think so.” He shrugged. His eyes went a little wide. “Look out for that spider.”
Felicity hopped up and screeched, and in her hysterical flailing, she saw a highly entertained look on his face and knew she’d been played.
The very intimidating, scathing look she was busy directing at him distracted her enough that she leaned on a music stand that probably hadn’t been structurally sound since soap operas were radio shows.
It gave out beneath her and went careening over the floor, where it smacked into Nic’s forehead.
“Oh shit. I’m sorry.”
She bent to get a better look, lifting his chin with a single finger. In the weird old lighting of the room, she was struck by a thought from the past. A firing of her brain that was more feeling than memory. A warmth surged through her.
Her hands guided his head to make sure she checked everywhere the dumb thing had hit.
“Am I bleeding?”
“Nope.” She winked. “The hard, thick skull helps.”
“You’re mean.”
“I’m a peach.”
“The sour kind.”
She was still holding his face.
“Felicity…”
“Yeah?” Her breath hitched at his tone
“You should know…” He reached up a hand, his long fingers encircling her wrist bones. “Even if you were sour, I’d still take a bite out of you.” He grabbed her arm and pretended to take a bite out from where the tattooed vines over her skin became blooms.
“Behave, you maniac.” She knelt and pushed his arms to his side.
They were eye to eye. Nearly nose to nose.
“I’ve been trying. I know we talked about this before … but what if I don’t want to behave anymore?” His head tilted tentatively, lips quirked to the side, looking at her through his unfairly long eyelashes.
She pushed him down to the floor, Nic grunting out a laugh as he flopped down with her over him. “What if I don’t want you to behave anymore either.” Her elbows hit the ground, framing his head. She threaded her fingers through his dark blond hair.
His hands were on her lower back, one bunched in her T-shirt, the other touching the smallest strip of bare skin.
Her body was flush with his. All it would take was two inches.
“Felicity?” Her name was a gentle puff of air against her feverish face.
A rush of fear replaced the stewing heat from seconds before. She rolled off him. “Fuck. I … I’m scared if I do this, I’ll screw it up. I need this…”
She measured his reaction out of the corner of her eye. For some reason, he smiled. Those green eyes doing that subtle darting that made Felicity feel like her face was a sacred text deserving of in-depth study.
“Felicity…”
Music began playing. A cello.
“What is … who…? Oh…”
He put a finger to his lips and gestured for her to follow him. They crawled along a short, dark corridor, staying out of sight, beneath a large pane of glass above them. Once they found a place in the shadows, Nic pulled her to standing.
Courtney sat inside the old recording booth, surrounded by antique-looking speakers and microphones.
Her eyes were closed. Felicity was mesmerized, not only by what she was hearing but by the visible emotion coming from the artist creating it.
Courtney lived through each achingly beautiful pull of her bow, letting long, unresolved notes linger before moving on to the next.
Felicity had never thought about the patience it must take to play a song like this and let it grow and build so slowly into something exquisitely complex.
She held up her arm, showing him where the tiny hairs had lifted.
Nic nodded with a small smile before holding up his own arm, which matched hers. “Every time.”
“I used to see Courtney here all the time visiting Samantha, and I never knew about Courtney’s career.
Like, I knew she was a musician, but I didn’t know who she was.
She’s so different when she plays and I’ve always been the kind of person that doesn’t recognize faces in a different context, but holy shit, when Sam and Thea told me last fall…
” Felicity made a mind blown motion with her hand.
His mouth twitched. “Yeah, I can see that it would be quite a shock.”
“She’s … wow. I’ve heard her stuff on the radio, but hearing her play live …
wow.” Felicity had known Courtney was a musician since she met her, but it wasn’t until last fall that Thea and Sam had told Felicity about how big a deal Courtney’s music career was.
It had been a long time at that point since Felicity had regularly listened to music.
She wasn’t sure she would be able to feel the way she used to when she found a new song.
But now … Courtney gave herself over to the music. It seemed as effortless as breathing.
Courtney was a physically small person. She was often reserved in a way Felicity never had been. But watching her play made her presence almost overpowering. It was hypnotic. Tears blurred Felicity’s vision before she could understand why.
As Courtney reached a particularly stunning section of the song, Felicity pressed a hand to her heart. She crossed her legs beneath her and sat.
Nic’s eyebrows knitted together. “What’s wrong?”
“How long does she play up here?”
“Hours when she needs to think about something.”
“Can we listen for a while? Would she mind?”
“No. She wouldn’t.” He sat beside her. He wrapped her hand in both of his.
Her head found his shoulder. “Do you ever hear a new song and love it so much you listen over and over again because you want to embed it in your ears?”
“Not sure I would’ve described it quite like that, but yes. Absolutely.”
“I used to feel like that all the time. But I haven’t felt that about a song in a really long while.
” They had given her lidocaine in the hospital to numb the places she needed to be stitched back together.
Regaining sensation had led to so much pain.
Maybe her brain had been protecting her from feeling things because for most of her life she had always been the sort of person to feel too much. To be too much. Talk too much.
No matter what Mr. Greene had said, it wasn’t enough to overwrite the too much narrative in Felicity’s head about who she was.
She was quick to anger. Quick to cry. Quick to grab hold of a grudge and decide to carry it to the grave. She had grown into liking that part of herself, even though it caused trouble sometimes.
But after over three years with the volume and saturation of life turned down, these moments when it was abruptly turned up again overwhelmed her.
Nic squeezed her hand.
“Back after … what happened … I wasn’t getting dopamine from anything. Not my books. Not music. I didn’t feel anymore. I felt nothing. And once I felt nothing, I fell into that trap of wondering if it would be worse to feel everything again, or if the numb nothingness was better.”
He frowned.
“At one point, I even saw an ENT because I thought something was wrong after I broke my nose since I didn’t really like eating anymore. Nothing was laced with dopamine anymore. Everything was gray.”
He took her hand.
“I needed to make myself smaller. Then the fact I was crumbling would matter less. I stopped seeing people. I stayed home.”
She trailed off into silence.
They sat like that for an hour, just feeling the music, the comfortable quiet between them unbroken by more conversation.
Eventually a buzz broke through as a call came in on Nic’s phone.
He turned to her. “I have to go check in about a produce delivery. But … can you … would you want to come over to my place for dinner tomorrow?”
Their eyes locked.
Even the beautiful melody faded from Felicity’s awareness as she lost herself in his beautifully tentative but expectant expression.
“Felicity?”
“Sure. I’d like that.”
He kissed her forehead, his thumb doing a soft stroke over her cheek that gave her more chills than the last song’s key change. He disappeared down the back stairs.
Felicity stayed, hidden in the shadows, listening to Courtney unleash her feelings on bow and string in that attic studio. Felicity’s heart rhythm wouldn’t stop its tarantella beats every time she remembered that soon she would be going to dinner at Nic’s.