Chapter 24 #2
She flashed back to Emerson teaching her how to play.
By the time she’d gotten lessons from Emerson, she’d managed to teach herself crude basics from the secondhand – more than likely third- or fourth-hand – keyboard Blythe had managed to finagle for her for Christmas when the music department at the high school had gotten a grant for new keyboards.
She’d written the notes on the keys to memorize them and had then painstakingly learned simple songs by ear.
Emerson taught her like this, though, sitting right next to her on the bench. Mostly because she’d been so soft-spoken Darcy hadn’t been able to hear her when she’d been sitting several feet away.
But, undeniably, sitting next to Juliet didn’t feel anything like sitting next to Emerson.
Juliet held her hands above the keys on her end, turning that intent gaze to Darcy. “I’m not going to be playing nursery rhymes. Can you manage a piano duet?”
She snorted, derisively. “Haven’t you forgotten?
” She flattened one of her hands against her chest. “Why, I can’t even play on my own, because I always have my group propping me up,” she shot back, the words Juliet had once used to belittle her having no sting in them anymore, not now.
“The question, Miss Independent, is: can you?”
God, she loved the way Juliet’s eyes darkened and narrowed before she growled, “Put your talent where your mouth is, and play.”
Darcy did.
Without warning, she decided to see if Juliet could drop in and play with her. See if she could put her talent where her mouth was.
She started simply with “Jingle Bells,” and to the utter thrill that shot through her, Juliet promptly fell in line.
Their arms brushed together as they played, and Darcy had to make sure she stayed focused on her own hands, on the notes she was responsible for on her side of the piano, rather than on Juliet’s hands.
As they were coming to an end, Juliet surprised her, switching into a new song.
Darcy paused, thrown for a loop and needing to focus a little more for a second – “Carol of the Bells.” She dropped in, turning to give Juliet a smugly satisfied stare, but she didn’t know if she accomplished it. All she knew was that she was smiling so widely she felt it in her cheeks.
At the end of that song, she pivoted before Juliet could, into “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Slowing down their tempo, the end of the song reverberating through the air in a much gentler fade.
She still felt exhilarated, but also soft.
Really, really soft, as she kept her fingers pressed on her final note, looking at Juliet. Shoulder-to-shoulder, they were so close, and Juliet was staring up at her intently, as she stated quietly, “I concede. Your talent remains untarnished tonight.”
Juliet’s hands slid from the keys, but she didn’t move away.
Darcy thoughtlessly moved into playing “Silent Night,” wanting to keep this atmosphere. Wanting to pause it, right here. She didn’t look away from Juliet for a moment.
“You, too, can keep your crown,” she murmured back.
“Have you always lived here?” Juliet asked, eyes searching hers. “At the bowling alley?”
She found herself chuckling. Not that the question was funny, in an objective sense, but the concept of it was funny to her. “Uh, no.”
She continued to play, turning away from meeting Juliet’s eyes and feeling like she was staring straight through her, to look down at the keys.
“We lived in a lot of places around town.” She shifted from “Silent Night” into a melody she’d taught herself from an orchestra, after obsessing over symphony holiday songs one year.
Something she played by ear that might not be a technically “correct” version of any song, but it was always a hit when she’d played it here.
At least, for a certain crowd. Others felt it was a little too melancholic.
“Our mom…” She rolled her lips, staring pointedly down at her hands, at the way she moved. “She battled a lot of addictions. But her worst one, the one she could never kick, was men.”
With that, she aimed a humorless smile at Juliet, only to find that Juliet was shifting. For the first time tonight, she faltered in hitting the keys, wincing at the sound of striking the wrong chord.
Had she crossed some sort of unspoken boundary? Juliet had already spent hours and hours with her family today, was this somehow crossing some line?
It made her stomach twist uncomfortably, because – because she didn’t really talk about her mom, usually. What was the point? The only people she would discuss her with were Blythe and Emerson, and they already knew everything about her.
The only way her thoughts and feelings about her mother were ever brought up was in her music. Playing right now as she spoke made her feel more comfortable, even. She didn’t know what, exactly, was hardwired that way inside of her but it was.
“Don’t stop,” Juliet urged, nodding at the piano, where Darcy had paused, her hand resting on the keys.
Juliet didn’t walk away when she stood, but instead maneuvered so that she was straddling the bench, completely facing Darcy.
Scooting even closer, somehow. One of her legs was behind Darcy, pressing against her right behind the bench, and she dropped both of her hands to Darcy’s thigh, warmly pressing against her.
Her stomach exploded in that fizzling, fluttering feeling, looking back down at her hands. She did what Juliet requested – what she really wanted to do – and kept playing.
After a few seconds, after she took a long, deep breath, she continued, “Me and Blythe are named after our mom’s favorite male romantic heroes,” she scoffed. “That should tell you a lot about her, I think. That’s… I mean, you know I didn’t graduate high school.”
Juliet slowly nodded, those dark eyes silently trained on Darcy’s face from only inches away.
“I was never really a good student. Couldn’t do math or science for shit, even when I would really try. I liked English–”
“All of the reading tracks, yeah,” Juliet supplied, her hands squeezing softly at her thigh.
“Yeah,” a fleeting smile tugged at her lips.
“But… I don’t know. I fixate on the things that seem to stick in my mind to, like, a crazy degree.
” Juliet knew that about her given her trouble sleeping.
“And then focusing on all of the other things back then, the things I didn’t understand or didn’t really understand, felt like torture.
I felt so… stupid. My mom made me promise I’d graduate.
That was it. Make sure I get to the finish line. ”
She shook her head, the same emotions from ten years ago sweeping through her. Tangling her up in worthlessness and anger, burning through her veins, and she pressed the keys harder, working it all out.
“When I finished my junior year, though, that’s when she took off. Met her newest guy. Totally dropped off the face of the earth. She’d done that before a ton of times, but only for a few days or a week. That time, she just didn’t come back.”
She did her best to recite the story as it was: a story. Just something that had happened, only the facts. But she could hear the intensity in her own voice and in the way her hands were speeding up as she played, pushing the tempo up around them.
“I just figured…” She rolled her lips, not wanting to look at Juliet. No, she tried her damndest not to be ashamed of herself, because she’d done the best that she could do.
Nonsensically, though, she felt more embarrassed saying this to Juliet now, than she would have six months ago. Six months ago, Juliet’s opinion of her was already garbage.
Now – now, she cared about it. A lot.
Her voice was hoarse when she continued, “I figured, if she didn’t care enough to stick around, what did it matter?
She obviously didn’t really believe in me.
Why should I go through another year of being called trash, another year of feeling like an idiot?
Why should I keep a promise to someone who couldn’t keep the bare minimum promise to stick around until I was eighteen? ”
The muscle in her jaw felt tight. Her voice was tight. Her throat was tight. Her shoulders were tight.
“That’s…” She forced in a deep, calming breath, before she confessed, “That’s why I need this so much.”
She got a little sloppy, hit the wrong key, and stopped, again. The silence in the room felt heavy around them in the sudden absence of the music.
“It’s not just for me, but – Blythe was supposed to go to college, you know? She had the grades and the cheerleading scholarship. But she’d have had to move away from here while I was still under eighteen. So, she didn’t go. She stayed here for me.”
It hadn’t been Darcy’s plan, either. She’d thought that after she graduated, she’d go to Nashville and see what happened. Maybe she and Emerson could go and figure something out. But… Blythe hadn’t left her, so how could she possibly leave Blythe? She couldn’t.
She reached up, rubbing her hands over her face, letting out a tremulous breath. “Anyway. That’s when we moved into the apartment upstairs, got jobs here. Sandra – the owner – she knew what was going on, what situation we were in. She was great.”
And even though it was Pineford, even though it was complicated, she’d lived in the upstairs apartment of the bowling alley longer than she’d lived anywhere. The place she and Blythe had made theirs had been the most stable home she’d ever had.
“The rest… well, you’ve listened to Bowling Alley Ballads.” She injected some levity into her voice, turning to look at Juliet for the first time in minutes. “Here I am.”
Juliet had already reached up, both of her hands cupping Darcy’s jaw. Darcy’s inhale choked off in her throat, as Juliet didn’t say anything, just looked at her. There was a crushing, burning intensity in her gaze, and Darcy felt it ping through her entire body.
Then Juliet surged forward, capturing Darcy’s lips, the passion just as intense as it had been etched into her face.
She didn’t disconnect from their kiss even as she felt Juliet push forward, wedging herself between Darcy and the piano, settling firmly in Darcy’s lap.
Only then did Juliet lean back enough to whisper against her mouth, “That’s exactly right, Darcy: here you are.”
There was something so strongly affirming in her voice, and it coursed through her veins as she wrapped her arms around Juliet’s waist, keeping them pressed together.
Darcy might have written a lot of songs about romance in her life.
But with the way she felt her heart pounding in her chest, the way she felt with Juliet completely wrapped around her and those words circling through her ears, she realized: being with Juliet was the only time she’d ever really felt all of those romantic feelings she wrote about.