8. ROWAN
eight
ROWAN
The morning after Julian told me about the melody, neither of us talked about it.
That was how we worked, Julian processed in silence, I processed in motion.
He sat at the kitchen counter with a book he wasn't reading.
I cleaned a knife that was already clean.
The apartment felt smaller than usual, the walls pulling in around the thing we weren't saying: that the man I'd fucked and the man Julian had played for was carrying something neither of us knew how to fight.
"Walk?" Julian said, without looking up.
I grabbed my coat.
We left the apartment and headed toward Main Street.
The fog was low today, clinging to the ankles of the buildings like a white shroud.
We walked in a synchronized rhythm we'd perfected over the years, our shoulders occasionally brushing, but the quiet between us was loaded with everything from the night before.
Julian broke the silence first, which was unusual. He usually let me be the one to crack.
"The melody," he said, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk ahead. "When I played it, my hands weren't doing what I told them to. It was like something else was steering."
"Something from him?"
"Something through him. There's a difference.
" Julian slowed his pace, his brow pulling tight.
"Rowan, I've studied music my entire life.
I know every piece I've ever played. That melody doesn't exist in any catalogue, any composer's archive, anything I've ever heard.
But my fingers knew it like they'd been practicing for years. "
I didn't like the way that sounded. It reminded me too much of the way the town operated, slipping things into you so quietly that by the time you noticed, they'd already taken root.
I'd felt it the night I was with Oleander, the cold pressing in at the edges of the room, the shadows leaning closer.
I'd told myself it was Hollow Vale being Hollow Vale.
But Julian hearing music that didn't belong to him was different.
That was the town reaching through someone.
"You think it's connected to whatever he's carrying?" I asked.
Julian was quiet for half a block. "I think whatever his husband opened, it's not just sitting in that apartment. It's looking for instruments. And I don't mean pianos."
The thought settled into me like a stone dropped into deep water.
I thought about the way Oleander smelled like cologne that wasn't his, the way the temperature in his apartment had shifted the moment I touched him, the way his grief seemed to have a physical weight that pressed against everything around it.
I'd been treating him like a man who needed protecting.
Julian was suggesting he might be the thing we needed protecting from or at least, the thing that was using him might be.
"So what do we do?" I asked.
Julian looked at me, and the expression on his face wasn't fear. It was the focused, almost clinical look he got when he was working through a difficult piece, measuring the distances between notes, looking for the pattern underneath the chaos.
"We stay close," he said. "If that melody is trying to reach me through him, then I need to understand what it wants. I can't do that from a distance."
I wanted to argue. Every instinct I had was screaming that getting closer to Oleander meant getting closer to whatever had turned the air in his apartment into something predatory.
But Julian wasn't asking for permission.
He was telling me what he'd already decided, and in our relationship, that was the one thing I'd never overruled.
We kept walking. The fog thickened as we moved toward the center of town, and the buildings seemed to lean in closer, their Victorian facades tilting at angles that made my head ache if I looked at them too long.
As we crossed the street near the hardware store, I saw him.
Oleander was standing on the opposite sidewalk, a used paperback clutched in his hand like a shield.
He was wearing that heavy coat again, looking smaller than he had in the dark, his dark curls messy from the wind. He saw us before we could look away.
I watched his face go white as his gaze traveled from me to Julian, and then to the way Julian's hand was resting on my forearm.
The connection was instantaneous. I could see the moment the math clicked in his head, the body language, the shared space, the history written in the way we stood.
He just stared, his brown eyes wide and fractured, looking like someone who had just realized they'd walked into a trap they'd helped build.
Julian didn't look away either. He squeezed my arm, his grip firm and possessive, marking his territory in a way that was entirely for Oleander's benefit. The air between the three of us hummed with something none of us were ready to name.
Oleander turned abruptly and started walking in the opposite direction, his head down, his pace frantic. He looked like he was trying to outrun something he couldn't see. I felt a sharp pull in my chest as he moved further away.
Julian let go of my arm, but he didn't stop looking at the retreating figure. He watched Oleander disappear into the mist, his expression shifting from anger to something much more dangerous… curiosity.
"Yeah," Julian whispered, his voice barely audible over the wind. "That's what I thought."
He didn't say anything else as we continued our walk, but I knew the peace in our kitchen was gone for good. The melody Julian couldn't shake now had a face, and I was the one who had brought it home.