Chapter 6
Six
Ari
The sky was pouring buckets of rain when I left the theatre, forming puddles around my feet.
The street was one long sheet of water, glowing like black glass that glimmered faintly from the single streetlamp across the road.
I was huddled in an arched stone alcove, waiting to see if V would come outside, but also I was stuck until it stopped raining.
I had initially planned to find one of the staff, demanding they take me to him, but the venue had kicked everyone out the second the concert ended due to flooding from the storm.
Then I had hoped to see him amongst the other musicians when they left.
I had no intention of going back to my hotel without finding him tonight, but my hope had faltered when the rain grew so thick, I couldn't even see the faces of the people leaving the theatre.
My thin black dress was plastered to my skin from the blowing rain, and my hair kept dripping into my eyes.
I’d memorized the directions of how to get here, but seeing V in the flesh after dreaming about this moment for so long had turned my mind into a jumbled mess.
I wasn’t sure I remembered how to get back.
The theatre’s door had been on my right when I arrived, but the subsequent twists and turns once I rounded the corner had blurred together, and I felt stuck between a rock and a hard place.
I wished I had worn anything other than my black heels, but they were the ones V had first seen me in, so it felt fitting.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, wishing I’d brought something a little more water-friendly, but my right heel slipped on the edge of a cobblestone and I fell backwards.
I reached for the walls, but all I did was smear water over the stones as the world turned upside down.
I braced myself to land in the small river that had once been the road as I kept falling, but a hand closed itself around my elbow, effortlessly pulling me back to my feet again.
The scent of black pepper and old leather filled my nose, and my heart stuttered in my chest at the sudden invasion.
The rain was so thick, I hadn’t realized anyone was close enough to help me.
“Sorry—” I began, but a man’s deep voice stopped me in my tracks.
“You know, you should be more careful,” an old-fashioned British accent said, and my nerves skittered as I wiped strands of wet hair from my face.
When my eyes found my savior's face, rain and time itself must have stopped because I no longer saw anything other than the man standing in front of me. His hair was dripping wet, but it was unmistakably red, and I recognized the face I had spent years looking for. His black suit clung to him like ink, and water dripped from his temple to his jawline, sliding slowly down the column of his throat before disappearing into his collar, but the thing that held my gaze were his lips. They were even fuller up close than I’d expected them to be.
He had the faintest shadow of dark circles under his eyes, like he wasn’t getting enough sleep, and it took everything within me not to reach up towards him and brush the wet hair off his face.
It was him. My violist.
My mind churned violently, struggling to make sense of reality.
He was British? I hadn't expected that. Was I dreaming? Had I fallen and hit my head? I couldn’t remember how he had appeared so suddenly, or process how the stars could have aligned so perfectly as to place him within my vicinity at the exact moment I had slipped.
But here he was, right when I needed him most.
“Y-you,” I stammered, unable to say anything else.
His head tilted slightly—the movement so small most people would have missed it, but I was absorbing every millisecond of him like my life depended on it.
“Me,” he said with a voice that was deeper than I’d expected him to have, and a small smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth that made fireworks go off in my stomach.
His response knocked any remaining air from my lungs, and his eyes glinted as something sharp and ancient flickered through them.
Lightning crashed, lighting up the sky for a brief moment in time, and his eyes reflected the light like electricity had struck somewhere inside him, too.
My eyes grew wider with each second that passed as his presence finally registered in my mind.
Poets would have claimed he had been carved out of the storm itself, but he was real. He was here. This was really happening.
All I could do was stand there with my mouth open slightly, my breath coming in choppy bursts I would have been embarrassed by if I was paying better attention, but I couldn’t pull myself together.
This only proved that I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted anyone else in my entire life, and any momentary pangs of regret I’d felt for leaving Jake behind disappeared completely.
Instead, all I could hear was the reckless, feral voice inside my head, telling me that V was everything I ever needed.
Lightning cracked overhead again, illuminating the street in a bright, white-blue light, and I caught a glance of his deep brown eyes boring holes into my soul.
His gaze marked me—claimed me—and I sucked in a sharp breath as he raised his hand to my face, brushing wet strands of hair from my cheek.
His fingers were featherlight as he tucked the strand behind my ear, and I melted at his touch, feeling fireworks bursting into ruinous tension at all the places his fingertips met my skin.
I was already panting when his eyes raked over my face. He looked at me with the intensity of the way a predator watches its prey that should have terrified me, but instead, it made my knees buckle. He was better than any version I’d managed to dream up inside my mind, and my very soul was on fire.
I wanted to burn.
“You—” I repeated, my voice cracking. I swallowed and tried again. “You play viola.”
A beat of silence stretched between us as I waited for him to respond, but he didn’t answer. He didn't have to. There was something in the way he looked at me that told me everything I needed to know—something like recognition, or hunger, or disdain, or all three things tangled together.
I hadn’t been certain before, but now I was.
He wouldn’t look at me like this if he didn’t remember.
My fingers tightened on the stone wall behind me, my nails scraping against the rough surface as another gust of wind pushed rain sideways into the alcove, and I scooted closer to the door on my left.
“You’re American,” he said, after a few more seconds, pulling a black umbrella from inside his coat. It wasn’t a question.
“Y-yes,” I admitted, unable to tear my eyes away from his face. His beautiful face. If something were to happen, if the lightning struck me dead and my life were to end at this very moment, I wanted his face to be the last thing I ever saw. “I’m from New York City.”
“Yes, I know.”
The sound of rain filled the space between us, pounding the cobblestones hard enough that the world blurred at the edges. All I could hear was the constant din as he studied my face, watching me like I was a puzzle he’d already solved but hadn’t decided what to do with yet.
“What are you doing in Milan?” I asked, the sound of my voice barely loud enough to hear.
“Enjoying myself,” he said softly back, and my mouth went dry. “Why are you in Milan?”
My senses snapped into place, as if I had finally woken from a daze.
I was alone with this man—with my violist—but I didn't know him.
Not really. I never stopped to ask myself why he had left New York.
Why he was impossible to find. Why he took cash under the table for gigs, or why he seemed to only play at small venues.
But I didn't listen to the tiny voice in my head that told me to run. If I was being honest with myself, I had come here for danger. I wasn’t going anywhere.
I took a single step towards him, closing the distance between us as water puddled around my toes, and opened and closed my mouth for a few moments, trying to figure out what to say.
“I like music,” I said finally, motioning my head towards the door of the concert hall. “I came to watch the orchestra play.”
He watched me for a long moment, rain hammering down around us, his face unreadable except for that sharp, intense focus that made my pulse jump. “You mean you came to see me play.”
“No!” I said quickly, opening my mouth to say more, but his smirk made me stop.
“I’m not sure I play well enough to warrant a trip across an ocean.”
“You don’t!” I blurted, laughing once to break the tension as I shook my head. “No, wait. I’m sorry. I-I didn’t mean—” I stammered, struggling to find words. “Your playing is nice. You don’t seem so bad.”
His gaze dropped to my throat as he spoke, the words slow as they scraped from his mouth, “I can be.”
My pulse jumped, embarrassingly loud in my ears, and I bit my lip once at the idea of his mouth dipping down to mine. Our conversation was electric, and the realization that he was actually flirting sent goosebumps down the backs of my arms.
I opened my mouth again, daring to ask how bad he could be, when he stepped closer, his face leaning down to mine until I closed my eyes, expecting him to kiss me.
He didn’t.
His umbrella popped open with a click, and I opened my eyes to see it angled above us, dulling the sound of the rain to a distant pitter-patter on the opposite side of the black fabric.
Embarrassment colored my cheeks, but he seemed unfazed, and the world shrank to nothing more than the space between our bodies.
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m cold,” I shot back weakly.
“No,” he replied quietly. “You're not.” He exhaled sharply through his nose, and something almost like irritation flickered across his face. “Where are you staying?”