6. JULIAN
six
JULIAN
The piano bench was too cold. It shouldn't have been, not after I'd been sitting on it for twenty minutes, but the chill in the bar didn't care about body heat.
It felt like it was coming from the floorboards, a slow, rising frost that seeped through the wood and into my marrow.
I rested my fingers on the keys without pressing down, feeling the fake ivory, plastic made to look expensive, slick under my sweat.
This was the ritual. The pre-set silence before I let the noise back in.
My left hand twitched. It was a muscle memory I hadn't authorized, a subconscious urge to reach for a specific chord.
I knew the shape of it. A minor ninth that felt like a bruised rib.
For three days, this melody had been pacing the cage of my skull, a restless, rhythmic thing that didn't have a name.
I didn't recognize the composer. I didn't recognize the era.
It just felt like a signal bleeding through from a different frequency, a song that had already been playing in the room before I arrived.
I forced my hands back to the center of the keyboard, running through the scales of the first piece on my setlist. I needed control tonight because the air in Hollow Vale felt thinner than usual, like the town was holding its breath.
Rowan had told me about him two nights ago, saying it like he was reporting something that had happened to him rather than something he'd chosen, which was how I knew it mattered.
Our rules had always been simple: don't lie, don't bring it home, don't let it matter more than us.
Rowan wasn't lying. But the way he'd said the name, like he was handling something fragile, that was new.
The bar was starting to fill, the low hum of voices blending into the clink of glassware and the muffled thud of the front door opening and closing. People didn't come here to talk; they came here to be alone together. It was a cemetery for the living, and I was the one who provided the eulogies.
I took a breath, the air tasting of stale beer and that sweet, unidentifiable scent that always hung over main street, and I began.
My fingers moved with a precision I'd spent years perfecting at the conservatory, before the lights became too bright and the expectations became a ceiling I couldn't stop hitting my head against.
Here, in the dim red glow of the bar, I could just be the sound. I watched the dust motes dance in the amber light of the floor lamps, and for a moment, the world was just math and vibration.
Halfway through the second piece, the frequency shifted.
I felt it before I saw him, a change in the room's pressure, like a window had been left open in a storm.
My gaze drifted toward the bar, and that's when I saw the man.
He was sitting alone, hunched over a glass of whiskey like it was the only thing keeping him upright, with dark curly hair that looked like he'd been running his hands through it for hours.
Something cold moved through my chest. I didn't know his face, but I knew the shape Rowan had described, brown eyes that seemed to be looking through me.
I could see the way his throat moved when he swallowed, the way his fingers tightened around the glass until his knuckles went white. He looked like he was witnessing a disaster in slow motion, or maybe he was the disaster himself.
My hands almost faltered. I hit a grace note too hard, the sound jarring against the quiet of the room, but he didn't blink.
I'd seen a lot of broken things in Hollow Vale, but this man looked like he was made of glass that had already shattered and was just waiting for someone to move the pieces.
I finished the set with a flourish I didn't feel, the final chord hanging in the air, vibrating until it was nothing more than a memory.
The silence that followed felt like a held breath. I stood up and walked toward the bar. I should have gone to the back and waited for the second set, but the melody in my head was pulling me toward him.
I sat two stools away. Ten minutes passed before either of us spoke.
"That was beautiful," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
I turned my head. His voice had the same timbre as the melody I'd been hearing for three days. It was like hearing the lyrics to a song I'd only known as a tune.
"Thank you," I said. "Most people just use it as background for their drinks."
"It didn't feel like background," he replied. He finally looked at me, and the depth of the exhaustion in his eyes made my chest ache. "It felt like... an autopsy. Like you were taking things apart that I thought were hidden."
I felt a strange, sharp pull in my gut. I noticed the small scar on the back of his left hand, my gaze then dropping to his fingers. He wasn't wearing a wedding ring, but there was a faint, pale mark on his finger where one used to be.
"I'm Julian," I said, reaching out a hand. I usually avoided contact with the patrons. They were customers; I was the atmosphere. But this felt different. This felt like a collision that had been planned by the town itself.
"Oleander," he whispered, his hand sliding into mine. His skin was cold, but the touch sent a jolt of heat up my arm that made my vision swim for a second. "Oleander Voss."
"A name like a warning," I murmured, the words out of my mouth before I could censor them. I saw him flinch, just a tiny movement of his shoulders, and I immediately regretted it. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean..."
"No," he said, a small, painful laugh escaping his throat. "You're right. It is a warning. I'm just not very good at following them."
We talked in fragments for a while. He told me he was new to town, that he'd moved into an apartment on the east side.
He didn't mention a husband, but he mentioned a loss that had the shape of a person.
He spoke about the fog and the buildings that decayed in spirals, and he spoke about the silence of his flat.
Every word he said felt like a note in that melody, a piece of a puzzle I was terrified to solve.
I had to go back for my second set but I wanted to stay on that stool and listen to him talk until the sun came up, until the shadows in Hollow Vale retreated back into the cracks in the pavement.
But the job was the job. I stood up, and for a second, we just looked at each other, the urge to tell him he shouldn't be alone tonight on the tip of my tongue but I didn’t get there.
"Stay for the next set?" I asked. It wasn't a command. It was a plea.
"I'll stay," he said. He kept his eyes on me as I walked back to the piano.
When I sat back down on the bench, the keys didn't feel cold anymore.
I ignored my setlist and played the melody, letting my fingers go where they'd been wanting to go for three days.
I played it for him as I watched him from across the room, and I saw the moment he seemed to recognize it.
I saw him go still, his whole body turning to stone as the music filled the space between us.
He disappeared soon after, my routine dragging me home after a silent wave to the bartender. Rowan was awake, sitting up in the armchair near our bed with the lamp on, which meant he'd been waiting. He took one look at my face and his expression shifted.
"What happened?" he asked.
"I played it," I said. I sat on the edge of the bed, my hands still trembling. "The melody. The one that's been in my head for days. I didn't choose to play it, Rowan. My hands just went there."
Rowan smiled, standing up and crossing the space to sit beside me. “What changed?”
"He was there," I said. "Oleander. He was sitting at the bar, and the second I started playing that melody, it was like he recognized it and then he left."
Rowan's grip tightened. "What do you mean, recognized it?"
"I mean, he knew it. Not like someone hearing a familiar song. Like someone hearing a voice they thought was dead."