Endless Possibility: a RUSH novella (City Lights 3.5) (8 page)

I held my hand out to nothing, as if I could hold on to whatever was making the lazy spin I felt in my body, and slowly it stopped. Voices bombarded me with questions I couldn’t answer.

“Stai bene?”

“Posso chiamare qualcuno per voi?”

“Chi è con questo uomo?”

I felt around for my cane and someone pressed it into my hands, while someone else slipped my bag over my shoulder. More strange hands helped haul me to my feet.

“I’m okay,” I said, my voice a croak. “Okay, grazie. Grazie mille.”

“Where do you go?” asked one man in a thickly accented voice. “I help.”

I was about to politely decline, but my legs felt like jelly and my hands shook. The migraine was roaring in the background.
What is wrong with me?

“Where do you go?” the man asked again. “Hospital?”

“No, no. No hospital. Hassler,” I managed. “Hotel Hassler.”

I heard whistling and shouts, and then I was being guided into a cab—or so I hoped. My rescuer climbed in beside me.

“Per favore, Hotel Hassler, e rapido.”

“You don’t have to…” I started, but gave up. I didn’t know how much English my helper knew and the cab was already moving anyway.

It had been a short walk from my hotel to the Trevi: the cab arrived in less than five minutes. I dug for my wallet, but felt a hand on my wrist.

“No. Sit.”

I nodded weakly. Sitting was good. Lying down would be better. After some back and forth in Italian, the door opened on my side and my rescuer was helping me out. He guided me up the steps and into the cool of the hotel. I knew he’d led me to the right place—the sounds and smells were as I remembered them.

“Va bene, adesso?”

“Uh, sure. Thank you. Thank you, very much. Let me pay you for the cab…”

“No, no.” A rough hand patted my shoulder. “Prenditi cura di ti. Take care, eh?”

Another nameless, faceless stranger, here and gone again. My world was populated with them; guardian angels I would never meet again, but who made it possible for me to take the next step to Charlotte.

I made my way to my room on the third floor, and sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to collapse down and sleep, but something damn close to fear held me rigid.

“It was the heat. And exhaustion,” I said.

And the migraine? Two in two days. That’s never happened before.

“Stress,” I answered, and that seemed right. God knew I was stressed beyond all reckoning, every fucking second of this trip.

Faint relief loosened me and the exhaustion swooped in. I told my phone to text Lucien for more Azapram in the next city—Barcelona, Spain—and then set a timer for a nap. I wanted to sleep for a million years, but Charlotte had a show that night and I couldn’t miss it. Rule #1.

I woke in the throes of my usual nightmare, choking on nothing, struggling for air. I sucked in a deep lungful, and tried to remember where I was. A bed. I was dressed—jeans and a t-shirt. My shoes were still on and the room felt hot and airless.

Rome. I’m in Rome.

I pushed the button on my watch.
The time is 6:07p.m.

Fuck! I thought I set a timer, but apparently I screwed that up too. Charlotte’s show was at seven. That gave me less than an hour to shave, shower, dress, eat, and find my way to the concert venue. In my state, I needed
at least
two hours to accomplish all that. And that’s when I wasn’t feeling as if my bones were filled with lead. But missing one of Charlotte’s shows was out of the question.

Pushing all my fears and unease over the dizziness out of my mind, I felt around the side table for the hotel phone. After a few frantic tries, I found the button that called the front desk and ordered a plate of spaghetti, because that was all my feeble brain could cough up. Italian food=spaghetti. Pathetic.

“And your wine?” the woman asked.

Italians didn’t get out of bed without a glass of Chianti first, judging by how many times I’d been offered wine in Venice and Florence.

“No wine. Just water. Please.”

I felt my way to the bathroom, to the electric razor I’d set up by the sink. I shaved my thin scruff of a beard a little thinner, then wrangled the water temperature into submission in the shower. I was hurrying as fast as I could, but once the water hit me, I slumped and turned my face to the spray, my weariness expanding and spreading through me with the water’s heat.

Charlotte. Where are you? Why aren’t you here with me?

As if on cue, desire for her rampaged through me, swift and hot. My body missed her as much as I did. Fiercely.

With my sight gone, I experienced intimacy with Charlotte almost entirely through touch. I couldn’t look at a photo of her, and soak in her smile or the beauty of her hair falling around her face, or the swell of her breasts against her dress. I had to touch her to remember her, as all of my memories of her were sensation only.

And god, I missed touching her. I missed the way her lips felt on mine as she smiled. I missed the silky strands of her hair through my fingers. I missed the soft weight of her breasts in my hands. I missed her kisses, especially the maddening way she’d skim her tongue over my lips, then graze her teeth with a hot little gust of breath, before finally giving me her whole mouth, granting me entry. Christ, just that kiss made me hard. Every time.

I imagined it then, of having her in the shower, up against the wall, naked and wet; her skin warm and slippery…I groaned and took myself in hand, needing the release, the relief. Some shred of pleasure in this wasteland of misery.

But I couldn’t have even that. My supersonic hearing picked up a knock on the outer door. Room service. I didn’t have time to finish, and figured it would probably be best to
not
greet the guy with a raging hard-on. I turned the water to icy cold and the heat of passion, imagined though it was, flamed out. My anger, however, only burned brighter.

With a tray of delicious-smelling food waiting for me, I ran my hands over my suits, trying to remember which was the dark gray sharkskin, and which was the light navy. I couldn’t concentrate. My fingers, like tired eyes, couldn’t focus. I spent a good five minutes I didn’t have trying to remember where I’d put my goddamn ties. By the time I was dressed, the spaghetti was cold but I sat down to devour it anyway.

After, I threw on my suit jacket and shoved my lifelines into my messenger bag, but for my phone. I asked it how to say, “Where is the ticket office?” in Italian and then spent another few harried seconds searching for my goddamn white stick that had rolled under the bed.

“
Dove si trova la biglieterria?”

“Great. How do you say ‘fuck me’ in Italian?”

“
Fottermi
,” my phone helpfully replied.

“You got that right.”

I asked the concierge to hail me a cab for the
Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, and slumped heavily in the backseat. My phone said it was ten minutes to seven while the GPS in my ear said the drive was fifteen minutes long.

“Fottermi,” I muttered. That one would come in handy, I thought.

Traffic was bad. At least I guessed it was judging by the herky-jerky starts and stops of the cab, and the intermittent swearing and honking I heard up front. I was going to be late, there was no way around it. And if the venue was the kind that didn’t allow late-comers to skulk in, I was fucked.

But seriously, who cared? All this goddamn rushing for nothing. For what? To listen to my girlfriend, but not see her? To not even hear her, if I were being honest; she was just one of three or five or however fucking many violinists a symphony needed. The bastards didn’t even have the sense to let her play solo, so why the fuck was I bothering? What was all the toil and suffering for? To make myself better? This wasn’t
better
!

Rage boiled through my blood, and that old Monster-conjuring hate writhed and coiled through me like a nest of snakes. How did I ever think that this would work? Or that Charlotte would even be there for me when all was said and done? What if she was pissed that I was right there the whole time and she never knew it? Or if she thought it pathetic that I followed her around Europe like a stray dog whose owners had moved on without him? What if she got sick of waiting?

What if she met someone else?

My leg had been bouncing with impatience but stopped dead at the thought. Every part of me ran cold and my rampaging litany went silent.

What if Charlotte had met someone else?

Yes,
wondered the snide voice in my head.
What if she met some guy, some musician in the orchestra? A flautist with a big instrument he wanted her to blow?

“Shut up.”

“Che cosa?” my cabbie demanded.

I ignored him. I had more important questions to answer. Such as: with whom was Charlotte spending all her time? Some dorky musician, perhaps, who could talk about librettos and sextets and tempos until the fucking cows came home? Or a suave bastard who took her to sidewalk cafes and bought her gelato or coffee or wine? Enough wine to get her tipsy that he could steal a kiss and she could decide she liked it? That she liked
him,
this guy who could see her face and tell her how beautiful she looked in the Italian moonlight, and who could visit museums with her on their off-days, or the Sistine Chapel, or the Trevi Fountain…

A guy whose advantage over me—besides his perfect 20/20 vision, of course—was his
presence
. He was there for her, sharing her journey, and while it wasn’t in Charlotte’s DNA to cheat on me, her heart was big and generous and full of love she was eager to share, that she
needed
to share.

Why not? It made sense that she’d fall in love with a musician, a more cultured man who didn’t swear as much as I did, or have
vision problems
, or mood swings, or …
who didn’t get drunk and allow her to be assaulted in an elevator by someone you called a friend?

Or that.

My fevered and jealousy-choked imagination even composed a sound bite of the email I was now sure waited for me on my laptop when I got back to the hotel.

Noah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen…

My hands clenched my white stick like it was her new boyfriend’s throat. I nearly told the cabbie to turn around. Towel thrown. White flag up. Stick a fork in me, I was done.

“Okay, Teatro,” the cabbie said, and I realized the cab had stopped.

I didn’t move. I didn’t want to. It was too fucking much. Too hard.

Quit your whining. You’re here, so go listen to her.

Well, why the hell not, I thought with a sneer. I had nothing better to do.

I paid the fare, and made my laborious way to the venue. Ushers guided me to my seat—always last row, corner—and I listened to some damn concerto or sonata or whatever the hell it was, waiting for the music to soothe me as it so often had other nights. Not this night. This night I was as impervious as a brick wall; the musical notes bounced off me like pebbles.

One piece ended, and the audience returned respectable applause while I thought about slouching down and having a nap. With my sunglasses on, who the fuck would know? And did I care anyway? Nope, I surely did not.

And then it happened.

A lone violin began to sing a soft, melancholy melody while the orchestra played behind—gently, as if not to disturb the soloist’s simple song. A delicate web of silver hung in the black of my imagination, whorls and garlands of sound, emerging from that single violin, until the entire Teatro was glistening in my mind’s eye.

I listened, hardly breathing, and when it ended, the audience was hushed. One heartbeat, one breath, and then an eruption of applause ten times louder than for any piece before.

I turned to the person on my left, found the delicate wrist of a woman. “Who was that?” I asked, and motioned at the stage. I hoped this lady spoke enough English to reply, though my heart already knew the answer.

“The program says her name is Charlotte Conroy,” said the woman with a Middle Eastern accent. “I have never heard of her, but she was quite extraordinary, wasn’t she?”

“Extraordinary.” I sat back in my seat, and the next piece began—some rambunctious Italian rondo I barely heard.

Okay, baby,
I answered, because Charlotte had been speaking to me, even if she hadn’t known I was there to hear it. She hadn’t met someone else—the idea was ludicrous to me now. She was waiting for me, and her heart ached for me as much as mine ached for her. I heard it in her music, as plain as if she were speaking words.

My anger melted away like wax in the hot sun.

I won’t give up,
I promised her.
I won’t. No matter how hard it gets, I swear to you, Charlotte, I’ll keep going. For you, baby. For you…

I climbed out of my chair the moment the last note of the last piece dissipated in the air, and headed back to my hotel, determined to make a fresh start in the morning. No more whining, no more tantrums. Charlotte was still waiting for me and I’d be damned if I didn’t do everything in my power to make her heartache mean something.