Chapter 16 Marigold
Marigold
The space between us now is closer than it’s ever been.
Jamie has his fingers intertwined with mine, his forefinger shifting slightly like he’s tracing the inner contours of my knuckles.
The whisper of his breath on my lips is quiet and comforting, somehow.
I feel it in his chest, too, where my arm rests curved around his waist. I wish I knew what he was thinking behind those sea-glass eyes, half-lidded and watching me with dark pupils.
I trace the swell of his lips, soft and still damp to the touch.
“I’ve wanted this for a long time,” he admits, and a warm flush surges through my chest.
“Me too. Way too long.”
He smiles like he’s actually relieved, like some part of him still thought—after all this—that I’d say anything else. “I tried so hard to hate you. I really did.”
“You did a terrible job at that.”
“Clearly.”
He kisses me again, and when our lips part, he tucks a fallen lock of my hair behind my ear.
“Now, you just have to promise to stop being an asshole all the time,” I say. “Think you can manage that?”
“I don’t know. That might be too much to ask.”
“Dick.”
“Jerk.”
“Buttface.”
He takes a beat. “Buttface?”
“If the shoe fits!”
He slips an arm around my waist and tugs me in closer. I feel like a puppy nestled against the warm belly of its mother. Which, now that I think about it, is a pretty weird comparison. The point is: It’s extremely sweet and cozy.
“So what happens now?” I ask him. “Do we take this whole rivals-to-lovers trope all the way to Stockholm? Will you ravish me backstage after I destroy you in the rankings?”
“Only if you play very, very well.”
“I intend to,” I say.
But there must have been something about my expression, because a sudden frown overtakes Jamie’s mouth. “What was that?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m used to confident Marigold. Not…”
“You think I’m not confident?”
He shakes his head slightly. “Not right now. Not for a second, there. You…know you don’t have anything to be nervous about, right?”
I let out a brief laugh. “I have everything to be nervous about. It’s Stockholm. It’s one of the biggest piano competitions that there is. A career-maker. Of course I should be nervous.”
“You don’t need to be, though,” he says. “That’s my point. You’re too good. You already know you stand a chance. An excellent one, even.”
The way I would have paid so much money to hear Jamie say this, once upon a time.
But now it lands differently. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten too complacent—expecting more of him, now that he’s shed his whole asshole persona.
This past week, I’ve gotten to know a version of Jamie that I hadn’t seen since that first semester of freshman year.
He’s funny, and awkward, with a faint twist of insecurity that I glimpse sometimes, hidden in the reeds of his manufactured cockiness.
Or maybe it’s the new omnipresent threat of disability hanging over my head. The blunt reality that one day, not too far in the future, my body will fail me, and I won’t be playing at all.
This is my last chance. Or at least, one of my last chances.
I have to make it count.
I have to win.
A “good chance” isn’t enough. But of course, Jamie doesn’t know that—I can’t hate him too much for being kind, even if kindness isn’t what I want right now.
“Thank you for saying that. It’s nice of you.”
He smirks. “It’s also true.”
“So says my top competition.”
“And here I thought Xinyan was your top competition?” His eyes twinkle even in this half-light.
“Her, too.”
I don’t want to keep talking about this.
I can’t. It feels like poisoning something good to let myself get wrapped up in thoughts of Stockholm.
So I wrap myself up in Jamie instead, curling close to the heat of his body as he circles his arms tighter around my hips and presses his lips to the crown of my head.
This is enough.
Right now, this is enough.
“You know that even if you don’t win this thing, you’re still an amazing pianist,” Jamie says after a few quiet moments, his fingertips still toying idly with the ends of my hair. “Your entire career doesn’t rest on this one competition. You have time.”
Maybe it’s the postcoital haze, the dim light, and the musky smell of Jamie’s closeness. Or maybe it’s just foolishness. But.
“I don’t really, though. Have time.” Even now, my foot isn’t quite right. It still feels like it’s half-asleep more often than not; I’ve taken to using my left foot on the piano pedals as much as I can.
“What do you mean?”
God. I shouldn’t have said anything. And now I have no idea how to respond. What am I supposed to say? Sorry for the clickbait comment, but I plan to keep you in suspense?
“Nothing,” I say. “Or…I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I can see the end point of all this, and it’s coming up on me so fast, and I…I have to be perfect. I have to, or else…”
The words catch in my throat, my voice gone slightly raw. He notices, brows knitting together slightly as he skims his fingertips over my cheek.
“Or else what?” he asks.
“Or else I’ll be forgotten.”
Jamie tips his brow against mine, bringing our faces so close that his features blur. The tip of his nose is cool where it brushes my skin. “You won’t be forgotten,” he promises. “I know that much for sure. The world will never forget you.”
I press a soft kiss to his mouth, and he slips both arms around my waist, holding me close. The truth about everything—my diagnosis, the real reason I’m terrified to lose—weighs heavy on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it down.
I don’t want to think about that right now.
Jamie’s bare skin presses against mine, his breath hot on my cheek and a few loose waves of his hair brushing my brow.
All I want to think about is this.
Living with Jamie is like a dream.
I never thought I’d be the kind of person to say something like that. Never thought I was one for drifting around the apartment in someone’s enchanted footsteps, soaking them up with every movement and word and fall of fingers on keys.
But here I am, and I can’t even hate myself for it, because I feel like I’m living in a fantasy—and after everything that’s happened these past several months, I deserve this little pocket of relief.
Some things don’t change, of course. We practice.
I sit on the sofa and take notes on Jamie’s technique and silently stew about how much better it is than mine.
I hide in my bedroom to scroll through endless posts on the multiple sclerosis subreddit, seeking out horror stories like that’ll dull the pain when my own future hits.
We argue at dinner about whether Midwestern politeness or New York candor is the better virtue.
And then there are the kisses stolen in hallways, Jamie pressing me up against the wall with his body taut against mine, his hands searching for the shape of my curves like he can never get enough.
The heat that burns between us when we share a piano bench, playing a duet, our wrists crossing and his knee tipping out to seek another point of contact.
One day I give in, abandoning the melody to bite his neck, dragging my tongue all the way down his chest.
I relish the way his breath audibly catches and slip off the bench to kneel between his thighs.
“Marigold,” he starts, the sound of my name rough on his lips as I squeeze him through his pants. He’s already rock hard. I wonder if he feels the way I do, constantly on the brink of dragging him close. Dragging him to bed.
I unzip his trousers, and he tilts his hips just enough for me to adjust the fabric out of the way.
I slide my hands up beneath the hem of his shirt and kiss the bulge straining against his cotton underwear.
Even with cloth in the way, it earns me another low rumble from somewhere deep in Jamie’s chest, his fingers slipping into my hair and tightening there.
I make him wait for it, dragging the moment out as long as I can before my own impatience wins.
I draw his cock free and kiss the hot head, gripping his strong thigh with my free hand.
He hums out a soft noise when I finally take him into my mouth, the piano answering with a discordant clang when the small of his back hits the keys.
I love the way I can make him react. The easy, pliable nature of his body—how responsive he is to every touch, like an instrument only I know how to play. I suck him until I can tell he’s close; then I pull back, shimmying out of my underwear and straddling him on the bench.
I sink down onto him slow, wanting to earn that moan that I tug from his lips. His hands grip my hips slightly too hard at first, fingertips digging in before Jamie seems to catch himself and relents slightly.
“Fuck,” he mutters, words half-incoherent against my mouth as I kiss him. “Do you know how impossible it is to act normally around you when you do things like this?”
I roll my hips down against his lap. “Like what?” I smirk a little—but I want to hear him say it.
“Sit there and play duets with me,” he says. “Wear things like this.” He plucks at the soft fabric of my dress, which—to be fair—I’d known was too short when I’d put it on this morning. “Fuck me this good.”
I laugh soft and low as I move again. I want Jamie to lose his capacity to speak so coherently. I want him to stop being able to speak at all.
“Maybe I don’t want you to act normal,” I say. “Maybe I like you better like this: all tousled and desperate.”
He hums out a heavy noise and tips forward to drag his mouth along my collarbone. His hand finds my breast, his palm warm even through the cotton fabric. I pick up the pace, working myself on his cock. I want him past the point of no return. I want to watch him fall apart between my thighs.
The grip of his hand on my ass tightens, like he’s trying to pull me into a faster rhythm. I lean forward, my hair tumbling over like a curtain bracketing us into our own private space, sharing the same air. I lower my lips to his neck, teasing at his skin with my teeth.
“You win,” he mumbles. “I’m desperate.”
“You’re damn right.”
I brace my hands against the edge of the piano, shivering a little at the jarring sound those notes make when my palms unintentionally press against the keys.
I fuck him harder, chasing those moans. The hand that had been on my breast finds its way between our bodies instead, searching out heat and drawing a soft, tight noise from my own chest.
It’s maybe a little rough, the way I grip his hair after that, twisting my fingers into the loose brown waves and using it as leverage to snap my hips forward again, kissing him bruisingly hard on the mouth.
Punishment, I think, for all those times he acted so frustratingly oblivious to my presence.
Or worse, irritated by it. He doesn’t have anything to hide behind now—it’s all too clear, has been all too clear for a week now—what that simmering resentment was really about.
He doesn’t finish before I do, never does, even when it means he has to bite his lip hard enough I see the white of blanched skin beneath his teeth, his short nails digging into the flesh at my hip and his moans rough and ragged where he traps them between us in a fierce, sloppy kiss.
I almost want to hold back, drag this out longer—see just how flushed and desperate I can make him.
But my body has better ideas, and I give in to the surge of heat and euphoria that rides through me, muffling a soft cry against his shoulder as he tumbles helplessly after, spilling himself inside me.
It’s the first time we’ve fucked without condoms, and as awkward as it could have been—those next ten minutes running around with paper towels, searching for the all-purpose cleaner spray—it somehow isn’t.
Jamie’s laugh and his pink cheeks, half-amused and half-embarrassed, stick with me.
I want to make him look like that again and again.
Cessy, when she finds out about our fledgling relationship, is incandescent with glee.
“I knew it,” she insists. “I fucking knew it, you can’t hate somebody that much and not want to fuck them, it’s like a scientific impossibility,” which is rich coming from someone who claims she barely graduated high school thanks to her shitty grades in physics.
“What happens after Stockholm?” Jamie asks me one night when we’re in the shower after a marathon fuck session in which he managed to make me come not once, but three times, his name raw and rough in my throat. “When I beat you, I mean.”
“We break up and pretend this never happened. Obviously.”
He smirks and presses a kiss to my temple. His mouth is water-slick and hot. “Bold of you to think I’ll let you forget.”
“Watch me Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind your dumb face right out of my brain forever. You’ll show up for class and I’ll be like, Who is this ugly new kid?”
“Nah. You think I’m sexy. You’d be all up on me by week two.”
“Sure, till I found out about your sparkling personality.”
His hair is plastered to his face, cheeks flushed from the steam. I can feel him getting hard again, against my stomach, and I lean into it, pressing us together.
“Didn’t stop you from getting a crush on me this time,” he murmurs, moving his hips forward in a series of tiny thrusts.
“Amnesiac me is smarter than real me.”
My hands find his ass and pull him in rougher, faster. That, it seems, is enough to tip him over the edge, because he grabs my thighs and hitches me up with effortless strength, driving me back against the chilly shower tile. I laugh and kiss him, and it’s perfect; we’re perfect.
Nothing should ever change.