Chapter 5 #2
She built the set with precision. She sang about loneliness.
She sang about wanting. She sang a song about a woman who kept her real self locked away, and Thorne's truth-sense opened up without his permission and caught her sincerity.
The warmth bloomed in his chest again, and his grip on the railing turned his knuckles white.
The last song was slow, low, and in a minor key.
Her voice dropped to the bottom of its register and stayed there, and the room went still.
Her eyes swept the house once. She wasn’t performing for anyone in particular, she told herself.
Just looking. For one terrible, perfect second her gaze found his in the dark at the edge of the stage.
She held the note.
He held the railing.
The song ended.
The amphitheater was silent.
Not quiet. Not polite. Silent. Ten thousand beings, not one of them moving, not one of them breathing. The air crystallized into something reverent. No rustle of clothing. No shifting of weight. No sound at all, except the echo of her last note dying in the vaulted space above the stage.
Phoebe stood in the spotlight, and the silence stretched. Her eyes shone and her mouth tightened. She walked offstage.
He met her in the wings.
Her stage makeup was smudged at the outer corners of her eyes. Two wet lines tracked down her cheeks, catching the backstage work lights, and her mouth was compressed into a line that was fighting to stay steady and losing.
"Nobody clapped."
Her voice was unsteady. The performance polish was gone. It cracked on clapped like a plate dropped on tile.
"Was it really that bad?"
She doesn’t know.
She had just given the performance of his lifetime, and she was crying because she'd read the silence as failure. Nobody had told her.
His rule said: not your business. Keep your distance. Just Miss Calloway, and a professional escort to her dressing room, and nothing else.
His hand was already rising.
"Miss Calloway." His voice came out quiet. Quieter than he'd intended. "Nobody clapped because applause would mean your performance was merely competent."
His finger touched her cheek.
The side of his index finger, curved, brushing the wet trail beneath her left eye.
Her skin was hot, flushed from performance.
His finger was ice cold. The contact was less than a second of the lightest pressure, but it went through him like voltage.
Chest. Throat. Lower. The rescue and the stage floor firing at once from one fingertip on a wet cheek.
She was six inches from his mouth. Her lips were parted. Her eyes were huge and dark and fixed on his face.
The frost wanted to bloom. He could feel it building in his fingertips, in the air between them. He locked it down and held it.
"Silence is reserved for the extraordinary." He dropped his hand and let it fall to his side where it belonged. "And you are, without a doubt, extraordinary."
Her breath caught. A small, sharp intake, audible in the quiet of the wings. And then she laughed. It was a stunned half-sound, startled out of her, wet and shaky and bright.
He stared at her. The laugh made no sense. He had delivered a factual assessment of her performance caliber in the context of the culture's response protocols. What, precisely, was funny?
She laughed again. Smaller. Shakier. Her hand came up and pressed against her mouth, and above her fingers her eyes were brilliant and wide.
"Thank you." She wiped her face with her free hand. "For educating me."
He had reached. She hadn't recoiled. She'd laughed.
He did not know what to do with that.
"Your dressing room," he said. Duty. Solid ground. "I'll sweep it before you change."
She nodded and fell into step behind him as he moved down the narrow corridor. Her heels clicked a half-beat behind his boots. Every nerve was tuned to the sound of her heels behind him.
He opened the door and gave the room a standard sweep. Corners, closet, washroom, sight lines from the window. All clear.
He stepped aside to let her enter.
She walked past him and stopped. Her whole body locked.
On the vanity, centered in the mirror's reflection, sat a small flower. Silver paper and a ribbon tied with precision wrapped around it. Beside it sat a folded, handwritten note. Her name was on the outside in neat block lettering.
No one should have been able to place it there. The room had been secured. He had conducted a sweep before the second act of the show had begun. And the door had been locked the entire time.
Frost erupted from his hands as his fingers touched the vanity and raced across the surface. It crystallized over the mirror, crawled up the wrapping, and sealed the note under ice. Every reflective surface in the room frosted over. His control was gone.
Phoebe was standing right beside him.
Close enough to see. Close enough that the frost reached the edge of the vanity nearest her hand and stopped dead at the edge.
The ice crackled softly in the sudden cold.
He stared at the frozen mirror. His reflection stared back, pale eyes blazing silver-white, his stripe patterns vivid against his skin.
Phoebe hadn't moved.
She was looking at the frost on the mirror. At the ice on the gift. At his hands. At him.