Chapter Twelve
Wednesday was the hottest day of the year on record. One hundred percent humidity.
Gwen stood in the moist air next to sweating strangers on the subway, riding in between her interview and her first rehearsal.
The interview had been fun. They had a stylist there to dress her and do her hair and makeup for the cover shoot. It was the first time someone spent time on her appearance like that. The problem was, she now looked like she had dressed up for this rehearsal, taking care with her makeup and hair. Which, she had not, and absolutely had not for someone in particular.
She arrived at the rehearsal space off Eighth, and after a quick glance confirming that Xander Thorne had not yet arrived, she began saying her hellos and tuning her violin. Gwen welcomed the two new violinists, one of them taking her old spot.
At ten a.m. on the dot, a pair of Ray-Bans walked into the room carrying a Stradivarius case. There was a small chorus of congratulations from the cellos and basses that Gwen ignored. She flipped her pages, eyes firmly planted on her music stand.
She heard the chair across from her drag against the floor, and the oomph of a heavy body landing into it. Gwen tried not to concentrate on the knowledge she had about that body. How those thick thighs could hug her hips, how that chest expanded in quick rhythms when his panting breath—
“Welcome back, everyone!”
A cheer greeted Nathan. And Gwen smiled at him, her vision blacking out where a hulking figure was bending to open his cello case.
“We have some exciting changes this year,” Nathan hollered over the noise. “As we know, my wife, Ava, is now on the board of directors, making way for our Gwen Jackson to take up first chair.”
Nathan swept his hand toward her, and the room exploded into sound, cheering and whooping. She blushed, and waved, not daring to look to see if everyone was applauding.
He continued, “And our own Xander Thorne had an incredible summer. His band was on SNL this weekend—”
Loud. Loud, loud. Gwen applauded with everyone, eyes on Nathan.
Mei called out, “Yo, Thorne, what do I have to give you for Michael Che’s number?”
Nathan quieted down the laughter. “I know an email was sent out, but we’ll talk a bit later about the added concert and the performance with the Broadway League. A few structural changes to our regular concerts as well…”
Structural changes. Gwen frowned.
“But let’s jump right into it! Turn your books to the…Green Bay song.”
“Green Day!” The whole group laughed, and Nathan shook his head, muttering.
Just before Nathan cued them, Gwen’s eyes lifted without permission.
Navy T-shirt. Dark eyes. And the lips that had been on her neck just five days earlier.
It wasn’t until that moment that she realized exactly what it would feel like to sit directly across from him for an entire season. Nothing obstructing her view. Just the two of them on either side of the conductor.
His eyes swept over her, and she quickly faced Nathan, refocusing.
Just before they moved on from “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” Nathan asked Gwen if she had any notes.
They both knew that the cellos and basses were playing too loud.
She cleared her throat and said, “Xander, I think we could pull back a bit.”
“Could we?” he mumbled sarcastically.
Her eyes flicked up to him. It was the same tone he used with Ava. She stared him down and slowly raised a brow at him. “Did you need clarification?”
She heard the orchestra hush.
Something sparkled in his eyes, and his lips twitched. “No, ma’am.”
Turning back to her music, she nodded at Nathan that they could continue. Mei caught her gaze from her position in the trombones and mouthed, “Oh my god.”
At their ten-minute break, Gwen jumped up to run to the table in the corner where Nathan and Ava always set out tea and coffee, and occasionally cookies or donuts.
She grabbed an oatmeal raisin cookie just as a shadow crossed over the table. She didn’t need to look to know who it was.
“You could have told me the gig was SNL.” She glared down at the cookie. Apparently, that was all she was angry about today.
When he didn’t respond, she pulled out a ten-dollar bill she had pressed into her pocket for this exact moment, and extended it to him.
“For the tacos.”
There was a pause while she stared at his forearm, which was not reaching for the bill.
“You didn’t eat them,” he said.
Breathing in the rumble of his voice, she said, “It doesn’t matter. They were mine.”
“They were nine dollars.”
She slapped the ten-dollar bill on the snack table. “You tipped a dollar.”
He stopped her before she could head back to her chair.
“Maybe we can get that coffee instead. If you really want to pay me back.”
His brows were high on his forehead, waiting for her answer. She scowled, grabbed a Styrofoam cup from the stack, and turned the coffee carton over, pouring a cup. She thrust it at him. She was just jamming the bill back into her pocket when he stepped into her, blocking her from walking away.
“I shouldn’t have crossed that line,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, I was…” He swallowed, and she watched his throat move. He pushed a hand through his hair, staring down at her. His eyes landed on her lips, and his words drifted away.
She stepped back. Before she…
“Thank you. For the…tacos.”
She returned to her chair, and didn’t look at him for the rest of the rehearsal, resigned not to give him another thought.
Fingertips tracing her arms.
Lips behind her ear.
Hot breath against her hair.
A solid chest behind her.
And an untitled song humming through her blood.
Gwen opened her eyes, her stomach twisting and curling. She pushed her sweating hair off her face, breathing deep as her thighs burned.
Fuck.
Fuck fuck.
She turned to check how much time before her alarm went off, and her thighs pressed together, sizzling through her tingling skin.
Before she could judge herself, she slipped her hand into her pajamas, giving herself two minutes to remember the dream— the memory. And just before she came, she imagined his long, callused fingers turning her face to his, his tongue slipping into her mouth as his fingers rubbed at her.
Gwen stared at the ceiling, breath coming back to her. Then she dragged herself from bed and ran a cold shower.
Gwen thought getting off was supposed to relax a person. But every stranger who bumped her, every train door that closed on her shoulder, every summer raindrop that plummeted onto her person sent her into a craze. By the time she sat in her rehearsal chair, took a deep, Zen breath, and focused on her sheet music, she thought she had herself back in control.
But then 10:01 rolled past, bleeding into 10:05 and 10:10, and still the chair opposite her remained empty. When Xander Thorne finally did push open the door at 10:13, Ray-Bans firmly locked into place, Gwen shook her head and pressed her lips together, turning her eyes back on the page the orchestra was in the middle of.
She listened to several instruments blow and bow out of tune as a chair dragged back, a cello case snapped open, a leather jacket peeled off thick arms, and a pair of sunglasses dropped into the cello case.
At the end of the piece, Nathan cut them off, and said, “Welcome, Mr. Thorne,” in genuine sincerity.
Gwen narrowed her eyes at Nathan. So hesitant with him. Like a dynamic had shifted between them once the Pops lost the grant and they had to crawl back to Xander Thorne.
To his credit, Xander didn’t smirk or take a little bow like he used to. He said nothing. Just continued setting up, dropping the rock stop onto the floor.
“Did you find the place okay?” The dull words slipped out of Gwen’s addled brain and past her lips, a chastising quip.
Silence. He looked up at her for the first time, eyes shadowed and hair limp with the rain. She heard a few titters behind her. Diane was probably huffing.
It wasn’t her place to admonish another orchestra member. It was Nathan’s. But he refused to discipline him. She glared at Xander as Nathan instructed them to turn back to the top, hiding a smile. Xander stared back at her, eyes dark and drilling into her as she lifted her violin.
“You’re getting a reputation,” a deep, familiar voice said.
Gwen’s fingers shook at the voice behind her, ripping at the honey packet she was working open to squeeze into her tea at the snack table.
“Oh, good,” she quipped. “That makes two of us.” She kept her gaze on the cup in front of her, working quickly despite the sticky honey on her fingers.
“Oh, yeah? What’s my reputation?”
She pressed her lips together. “Hostile. Arrogant. And late.”
“You care deeply about timeliness.”
He said it like a fact, not a question, but still she needed to respond. “If someone says they’ll be somewhere, they should be there. It’s not fair to make people wait.”
She paused in the middle of reaching for a napkin to wipe her sticky fingers when he stepped closer to her. She felt his chest just inches from her arm, and she struggled to keep her eyes down.
“I can be on time when it’s important to me. Let me prove it to you. Meet me for—”
“So, the Manhattan Pops isn’t important to you?” she snapped, looking up at him and noticing his warm gaze and parted lips in the middle of a sentence. In the middle of an offer. She had a sudden thought that Alex Fitzgerald would never be caught dead late to a rehearsal. “Saturday Night Live isn’t important to you?”
He swallowed. “No. I had something far more important going on that day, if you remember.”
She blamed the heat. Blamed the stupid fucking look in his eye and the warmth spreading in her chest, blooming deep in her stomach.
And definitely blamed that dream when she chose to suck the honey off her fingers, deeply aware of his gaze on her lips. When she pulled her second finger into her mouth, eyes on him, he drew in a slow breath and leaned a hand on the table.
She returned to her chair. And ignored his eyes and the way he kept missing entrances.
He was never late again. Instead, he was consistently five minutes early.
She could feel his gaze during pieces, during breaks, while Nathan was talking, while they packed up. She started going to the bathroom on breaks to just have ten minutes to herself without him in her line of sight.
The week of the September concert, he was waiting for her outside the rehearsal building, more than twenty minutes early. She saw him when she turned the corner and had to walk toward him. It felt a bit like heading to the gallows holding an iced latte and a violin.
“Yes?” she said, when she was close.
He stared at her, like he’d lost his train of thought, and she watched him lick his lips. “Can I see you? After rehearsal? Any day. Or morning.” A hand shoved through his hair. “See, I can be on time.” He sent her a shaky smile, quickly pressing his lips together.
She blinked away the image of his smile. “Why?”
“I have some new music. I want to hear you play it.”
Something tugged in her chest. Something worth more to her than the way his eyes dropped to her mouth whenever she entered the room.
Clearing her throat, she said, “More untitled sheet music for you to ‘teach’ me?” She lifted a brow and moved around him to pull open the door.
“It doesn’t have to be anything other than the music,” he said, following her inside.
“I’m sure there are tons of other ‘anything but ordinary’ musicians you can work with, Xander,” she said flatly. She marched in, grateful no one was in the lobby. “I need to concentrate on the concert. I won’t have time—”
“On Saturday night, then, after the concert.”
Just the idea of meeting him at night, after a cocktail party, had her spinning. “I’ll be…with friends, and—”
“Are you seeing someone?” His eyes dragged over her face. “I never…I didn’t ask before.”
Gwen thought of Chelsea’s Instagram, filled with selfies of her and him. “Look, I don’t know what you want from me, but—”
“Anything.” Black eyes looked down on her, and he took a shaking breath. “Everything.”
She felt the heat spinning in her again, blossoming from his lips and his breath, and twisting through her chest and low in her belly.
“Tell me I can see you again,” he whispered, leaning into her. “For music or anything else.”
Her heartbeat thrummed. His breath against her forehead shivered her skin, and her eyes fluttered closed when his fingers reached for her jaw.
The door wrenched open, and they sprang apart as several violins walked in. And Gwen realized how ridiculous it was— how much respect she could lose as first chair if she were seen flirting with Xander, just for him to break her into a million pieces when he was done with her.
Giving a small wave to her coworkers, she whispered to him, “No, I can’t. That’s not a good idea.”
She heard him take a deep breath, watching his shoulders drop from the corner of her eye. She slipped past him, heading into the rehearsal room, and looked back to see him standing with his eyes pressed shut, one hand tugging at the roots of his hair.
She tried to focus on setting up, ignoring how he didn’t come in for another fifteen minutes. Just as Nathan began rehearsal, she heard the door open. She listened as heavy boots paced to the chair across from her. The chair creaked and groaned under his weight.
“So, as I mentioned before,” Nathan said, drawing her eyes from where they were firmly planted on her sheet music, “there will be a few changes to the normal lineup. A way to spice things up. We’re very proud this year to feature Xander in a new way. He’s been doing some composing, and has agreed to play a new piece at our concert.”
Gwen’s eyes snapped to Xander. He was bent down, picking his cello up out of the case. The tips of his ears were red. She felt her own cheeks darken as Nathan’s words made more sense to her.
“Xander, would you like to share it with us?” Nathan said.
He leaned back in his chair, cello bow in hand, and rubbed his eye with the other hand. “Not really, no.”
Nathan’s expression fell, taking it personally. Then from behind her, Diane piped up, “Oh, I’d love to hear it!”
A chorus started, echoing Diane’s sentiments, until Xander rolled his shoulders back, placed his bow on the Stradivarius, and pulled the first arpeggios of the song Gwen had played in his apartment.
She watched his left hand move through the fingering, sliding over the notes and humming through the melody that still haunted her in the mornings. She looked to his face, and found him frowning down at the floor. Not even half of the passion he normally played with.
He followed the tempo she’d set a few weeks ago, even taking her breaths and rallentandos, the way she’d breathed into the new sections as she prepared for the differing rhythms.
The fingerpicking. And he skipped the same notes she had. Even though he was the one to write them down. Even though his ideas were better. Even though she had played it like an amateur.
And when the crescendo came, the aggravated ending that eventually evened out into peace—when his lips pressed together, his cheeks pink and his eyes closed—when his tongue swiped across his bottom lip at the very same place in the song that he’d lapped at her skin—that was when she realized…
He still had the recording. Her recording.
The bow lifted off the strings. The orchestra clapped for him. He gave a false smile to the ground in thanks.
“Wonderful, Xander,” Nathan said. “Absolutely stunning. Do you have a title for it yet?”
He rubbed his brow, and shook his head, eyes pressing closed. “I had one. It’s wrong.”
Gwen swallowed and looked back at her music, turning pages as Nathan announced the next song.
Xander refused to look at her for the rest of rehearsal, not even for tempo. Gwen couldn’t decide which had been more distracting: his gaze on her face, her body, her instrument every moment for the past two weeks…or the absence of it now.