Chapter 18
Byrdie
The music is a siren’s call, impossible to resist.
I creep from my bed in the living room, tiptoe across the entryway, and hover in the music room doorway, my ears filled with magic.
The figure at the piano is so shrouded in shadows that it would be impossible to tell who it was if I hadn’t seen this same man, sat right by him even, as he played the piano for me and asked me if I wanted him to teach me how to read music.
We ate dinner together after Lydia left, all of us gathered at the dining table in the kitchen with Nance, eating family style.
I thought Nash might ask if I wanted to take him up on his offer to teach me how to read music, but he didn’t.
Mostly we talked about Lydia’s betrayal, about making sure to change all security codes so she couldn’t get back inside, and no one, even though they had to know I spent the night with Vonn, asked us about it.
The notes flutter and dance over my head, beguiling me. My chest hurts, and my fingers throb when the music fades.
“You can join me,” Nash calls out, head down.
“How did you know I was here?” I reply, not moving from the doorway as I continue hungrily eyeing the beautiful grand piano I ache to play.
“I hoped,” he says quietly, turning to look at me. His expression is impossible to read with only the entryway light behind me for illumination. “I keep hoping it will draw you out of that room and back to the girl you were before someone took you.”
“You said you don’t like to play anymore.”
He lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. “I like it much better when I play with you.”
I thought the music would be the thing to draw me across the room to settle on the leather bench beside him. It wasn’t the music. It was the man.
The leather is slightly warm, and he shuffles over, giving me more space than I need. He did the same before when I was skittish and terrified of men.
It hits me right between the eyes how long it’s been since I noticed the size of the three men in this house.
None of them are small. Nash is lean, with the long ropy muscles of a runner, and over six feet tall.
Vonn is bigger than most. Between scrubbing floors and dusting bookcases, I stopped noticing their size and just saw them.
“The piano was a cage,” he says quietly, eyes on his fingers, which he has resting lightly on the black and white keys.
I take in his profile. His strong jaw. His fuller lower lip. The tiny tilt at the end of his nose.
“I spent my childhood shuttled from my nanny to school, then to after-school activities and back to the nanny to take me up to bed and read me a story before she finished her shift at nine. I would eat in the kitchen with Nance, never with my parents. Every minute of my day was planned out and carefully managed with no input from me.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a childhood.”
He presses down on the piano.
F sharp.
“It was better than what others might have. I had a roof over my head and never went to bed hungry. My life could have been worse, but I won’t pretend it wasn’t lonely.”
When he turns his head toward me, I look away, focusing on the keys instead of him.
It’s an addiction.
Nash once asked me how I learned to play the music I loved without being able to read music.
I hear the pieces that feel real to me, and I repeat them over and over until they sound real to my ears.
But it’s an addiction. Unhealthy and a more compulsive habit than I should let myself give in to, but if I didn’t have music, I wouldn’t have had anything except Mom. And sometimes, I didn’t have Mom at all.
“My dad left my mom when I was still a baby. She loved him a lot.”
I press down on three keys.
D minor.
“Did you miss him?” he asks.
“I never knew him. There were pictures, but Mom got rid of them when she took me to Jeremiah’s compound.
Mom loved Dad, though. She had years and years to fall in love with him—to build her whole identity around him.
When he left her, she had no idea who she was, and she attached herself to the next man she thought wouldn’t leave her and break her heart the way my dad had. ”
Maybe that’s where I get this addiction to music from. Mom. She would do anything for someone to love her unconditionally, and I lost count of how many times I would lie awake all night repeating music in my head.
“I needed to feel something,” I say, my fingers curling on the piano keys.
I feel Nash looking at me. “Tonight?”
I shake my head. “Up on the roof. Standing at the edge. I stopped feeling in the desert. I should have sat down and died, and I couldn’t, but I don’t know that I wanted to live either. That’s why I haven’t wanted to play. What if all my feelings are gone, and it doesn’t feel the same anymore?”
What if a part of me died in the desert after all?
If I lost music, I wouldn’t know who I am.
He moves closer, cradles the nape of my neck, and tilts my head up so we’re eye to eye. He looks down into my face, his heated stare flicking from my eyes to my mouth, communicating exactly what he intends to do.
Kiss me.
I can push him away or tell him I don’t want him to kiss me. But I peer up at him, not moving.
My toes curl, and my eyes flutter shut as he brushes his mouth over mine in a soft caress.
He lifts his head. “How did that feel?”
I lick my lips, wishing he would do it again. “I shouldn’t have let you kiss me. Vonn and I—”
“Slept together,” he quietly cuts in. “I know. So does Makhi. We all care about you and want you to be happy. If that’s with one of us, then so be it.”
“And if it’s with all of you?” The sound of my heart beating is loud in the quiet dark.
“Then be happy with all of us.”
I admit what I hadn’t wanted to say before. “I liked it. Your kiss. I liked the way it made me feel.”
All soft and warm and gooey.
“Again?” he whispers, voice husky.
I nod.
His mouth on mine is soft, then hungry. Sweet and so rich, I lean into it, craving more.
He breaks the kiss to frame my face between warm hands, softer than Vonn’s slightly rough, calloused touch. “If I wanted to carry you upstairs and make love to you, what would you say?”
I’m used to hiding from my feelings. I used to view them as a weakness—a tool someone used to bludgeon me because people have hurt me so many times.
At every school, I was the new kid, bullied for my thrift-store clothes, uneven home-cut haircuts from my mom, and no idea of where I fit in the world.
Every time I thought someone was being nice to me and I opened up to them, they used what I told them to hurt me.
I started guarding my heart. Then my mom, the one person I believed would never betray me, betrayed me to Jeremiah. With him, I always hid my feelings, or he would have used them to control me the way he controlled everyone else in the compound. Including my mom.
Until now.
Now, I don’t want to hide from my feelings or hide them from the three men in this house.
Nash gave me a safe place to hide from an obsessed cult leader.
Vonn has never stopped making me feel safe.
Even Makhi, who hurt me when he kicked me out and slammed a door in my face, did it to protect Vonn and Nash. It hurt, but I understand why he did it, even if I’m not sure I can forgive him for it.
No one in this house has ever used my feelings against me. So, I have no doubts about sliding into Nash’s lap and circling my arms around his shoulders to say, “I wouldn’t have a problem with you making love to me at all.”
He lifts me as if I weigh nothing at all.
We’re so focused on kissing that he walks into the doorframe, making me laugh.
“Sorry,” he whispers, rubbing his hand up and down my back as he holds me in his arms. “I didn’t want to drop you.”
“Carrying me out of the room might be a little easier if you’re not kissing me at the same time.”
A grin transforms his face. He’s always been handsome, but in a quiet, intense way. When he grins, I’m breathless.
“That’s true,” he agrees.
Then he goes right back to kissing me as we zigzag through the entryway and up the stairs.
Three steps up, he breaks the kiss, breathing hard. “I really do have to stop kissing you now, or we’ll both fall down the stairs.”
“Aren’t I heavy?”
He smiles. “Not at all.”
“If I tried to carry you, I’d break both our necks falling backward down the stairs.” I tease.
He stops halfway up the stairs and looks at me. “You’re lighter.”
My cheeks burn. “Put me down.”
Chuckling, he keeps a firm hold of me. “I don’t mean you’re heavy. You smile more.”
“I’m trying to lean into the happy moments. I used to run away from my feelings, but I’ve been thinking a lot since Vonn told me that we never have as much time as we think we do.”
He resumes carrying me up the stairs. “He’s right.”
I bite my lip. “And you don’t mind…” I fumble for the right words to explain this new thing we’re doing. “Sharing me? If that’s what this is.”
“We’re friends who all have deep feelings for you. That’s what this is.”
When he says it like that, it doesn’t feel as strange as when I say it in my head. I don’t know anyone who has a relationship like this, but then again, I never stayed in one place long enough to hear anyone's relationship stories.
At the top of the stairs, he stops and looks me in the eye. “And no, none of us mind it as long as you don’t.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t mind it at all.”
“Vonn and Makhi have a way of communicating that sometimes involves fists,” he says on our way down the hallway.
In his room, he leaves the overhead lights off and nudges the door closed before he carries me to his four-poster bed in a burgundy room as elegant as it is beautiful.
“What’s your way of communicating?” I ask.
He sets me down and gets on the bed beside me after kicking off his shoes, so we’re lying side by side.
“I didn’t communicate,” he says, smiling wryly. “Vonn and Makhi pulled me out of myself. I didn’t talk. I stewed in whatever mood I was in. It drove Nance nuts.” His lips twitch into an almost-smile.