17. Chapter 17
The cool cotton draped across Odette’s shoulders.
She folded into it as Cassius tugged the sheet beneath her chin.
His fingertips, so deft and light, brushed her forehead as he tucked a loose curl behind her ear, then bent to kiss her temple.
He muttered something, but through the fog of waking and another burst of the hum, she could not quite decipher the words.
They sounded a little like Think on it. Please.
As he groped his way through the grey dawn and into a chair to slip on his shoes, Odette tried to find sleep again, to brush away his departure, but she could not stop herself from watching.
They both would have done that. Dressed in the dark to escape before morning or watched a lover grapple with buttons and hems. Gent that he was, Cassius probably assisted with fastenings and cords, whereas she never wore outfits that required a man’s assistance for such illicit meetings.
She always made sure she could manage everything alone.
How long had she loved him for? It felt like forever.
And in a way, perhaps, that was true. He was one of the few friends who’d known her since before she’d become a sensation.
Through working together, bickering all the while, love of a kind had grown alongside the friendship.
He scared others with his desire for control and demands for perfection, but not her, because she kept to the same standards for excellence.
The constant need for precision sat at her core like a metronome, so of course they’d found a harmonious way of working together as it kept pulling them into sync.
But this? This pounding in her chest, the ache in her stomach, the need in her sex. The longing to be held, to be close, to be filled by him, to simply be beside him and watch time pass—it was both familiar and foreign, innate and strange.
And wonderful.
Incredibly wonderful.
And the worst thing imaginable.
She’d meant for this night to banish her longing, had meant to experience him and leave, fully satiated. But she craved him more than before now, and not just the way he made her scream, how he controlled her pleasure only to let it unleash on her in a tempest…
No, she craved the way he looked at her. How he smiled at her when he almost never smiled at others. His kisses. His touch.
He paused at the door and regarded her with the same steady look, the same easy confidence that she could draw from basements, pits, and his podium. His lips stretched into a lopsided smile, and his mouth formed words she could not make out.
As he left, the door closed soundlessly behind him.
Her heart ached in her chest. Yet, somehow, it felt as if it were leaving with him.
Sunlight stretched out from behind the curtains.
It filled the gaps between the white paint and the wood finishes of her furniture, lit the grain and knots of the floor, and bounced off the plaster cornices above.
It even glinted off the glass that cupped the lamps.
Of all the days for London to shine, why would the sun choose a day when all she wanted was to weep?
For years, she’d seen that look.
For years, he’d given her that smile, even as he refused to laugh.
And today, she finally dared to hold it, to accept what it meant.
Love.
But Vienna? She’d been to the musical heartland to perform more times than she could bother to recall. It was a beautiful city, and clearly where Cassius wanted to be.
But this place was her home. The one place she’d felt like she belonged, her neighbours like the family she had never known.
And what would happen once he grew bored of her body?
When there were younger, prettier, less headstrong women eager for his attention?
When he discovered, as they always did, that she was not a goddess at all.
That she was just a pretty woman who could sing.
He deserved Vienna. He deserved the applause.
He deserved to bow and know it was all for him, for the master of music that he’d become.
He deserved perfect musicians, to work with genius, to conduct orchestras three times the size of any he could hope for in London.
To lead them through the compositions he adored, to play them in the buildings the pieces had been written for.
He would work so hard. Maybe there, he’d finally find the adulation he’d lost in his youth and been chasing for so long.
She lay in her bed, crumpled and useless, until rest began to annoy her.
Then she rose. Washed. Dressed in a simple tea gown so that she didn’t need to call Nora.
Walked through her halls, down the stairs, and made her way to the house next door.
She rapped the knocker. Gena opened the door, and the scent of warm sugar and tea infused the cooler spring air. ‘Miss Delaney?’
‘I know I am early. But can I see Albert?’
Gena wrung her hands. ‘He’s not been well, miss. Even for him, as he’s been.’ Gena stepped back to allow Odette to enter. ‘Mr Worthington comes by after breakfast to help Mason wash and dress him. Right now, he’s still abed. But I suppose you can go up if you don’t mind him like that.’
Odette crept up the narrow staircase to the first floor, where the Abberton family had their rooms. She knew the way without direction and did not need to be announced.
Walking up these stairs had always felt a little like coming home.
Not to her own home, but how she imagined it might feel for a child, once grown, to return to the place where they grew up.
There was so much familiarity inside these walls, so much comfort in the turn of the hallway and the edges where the flocking had been worn down by careless hands skimming corners, or by skirts brushing wallpaper.
She knew the way to his room. Once, some years ago, when Albert had laid abed with a fever, she had taken a turn cooling his forehead so that Iris could sleep.
Another time, they’d all drunk too much while Mason was playing the upright, all of them singing as Jonah danced.
Albert had fallen asleep on the sofa in the parlour, and she’d helped Iris guide him up the stairs, dozy and sluggish, in the early hours of the morning.
A precious night, better than any opening or any gala.
A night all the sweeter because they took it for granted.
An angled shadow from the open door cut into the hallway.
Odette slid inside Albert’s room. When she pulled back the drapes, light spilled over the floor, its soft, yellow rays a harsh contrast to the molten embers glowing in the fireplace.
Albert had often said, in his off-handed way, that his room was colder than the others.
He would make sure Iris had the warmer room. It was just what he did.
Now Albert lay on his side, a thin bracket of grey tucked beneath the covers of his wooden four-poster bed.
He seemed smaller and thinner than the man that Jonah had carried down the stairs mere weeks before.
When Odette climbed onto the bed, he blinked his eyes open.
She lay down beside him, her head on the pillow next to his, and watched his face.
She looked for fear, in case she was scaring him because he’d forgotten her, even as her heart burnt for recognition.
For a spark of memory, of anything. But while his eyes searched and settled, there was no miracle. No acknowledgement. Nothing.
Odette sought his hand. She pulled it into the gap between them, him lying under the blankets and her on top, his hand lax against the covers.
That was familiar. He had been a solid man, once, imposing and aware of his own space, with hands big enough to swallow a smaller palm and a shake that used just the right amount of pressure to put people at ease.
It wasn’t much… but he moved. His grip tightened.
Odette tried to hold back, but she could not prevent the slow trickle of tears.
There was too much inside her, and she could not contain it any longer.
‘My dear friend,’ she said, a little louder than a whisper.
‘I am sorry to disturb you. I don’t know what to do.
’ She relaxed deeper into the pillows as the words she’d forced into silence, that she’d hidden even from herself, tumbled out.
‘Something terrible has happened. I have fallen in love. Not a little, either. I have lost myself. To damn Cassius.’
She gave a small laugh, and it came out distorted, broken and choked.
He did not join in, but she could still imagine that he did.
She imagined his big booming laugh and his bright voice.
His sparkling eyes and the way everyone in a room settled and became more comfortable with themselves because he was there.
She remembered hot coffee and sweet biscuits, mulled wine in the study when he returned with stories from his travels, and that time they’d both been in New York at the same time.
They’d visited every dance hall with young Iris to try and break her melancholy after Hamish had moved away.
She remembered him fighting his way through the crowds to congratulate them after her first sold-out show, the man so warm and genial that he’d put even Cassius at ease.
She remembered all the things he had forgotten and held them in the space between them, hoping she would always, always remember them.
‘What was it you said, my friend? To love is to live? But how can I go? What if the doctor is right?’ This fear wrapped around her tighter than any of the others.
‘How can I be in the city of music and not share in its beauty? I am not the sort of woman to stay on the edges. I would come to hate him. But how can I do nothing and watch him leave?’