In Harmony (23 page)

A buzz on the entry phone. The exact same noise it made when anyone arrived…so how come it felt different, knowing it was Connor? It was something about inviting him into the same place I spent so much time thinking about him…Connor the reality colliding with Connor the fantasy. Just down the hall was the shower where I’d been unable to get him out of my mind. A little further on, the bedroom where I’d used the dildo on myself, with his face filling my mind. The bed where I’d had
that
dream. How was I going to keep myself together, with all that around me?

I hit the button and, a few moments later, heard his low double knock at the door. As I reached for the handle, my heart was hammering.

What’s the matter with me? I’ve been lusting after him for a month.
I’d thought that was bad—sitting in rehearsal after rehearsal thinking about his hands or lips on me. But now I was actually thinking about
him.
Connor was wired deep into my soul, but I had to pretend there was nothing there at all.

I opened the door in what I hoped was a
I’m just your friend
way. “Hi!”
Too loud.

He was gazing up and down the hallway. “I can’t believe this is where you live.” Then he took a step inside and saw the size of the place. “
Jesus!”

“It’s not
that
big.” I closed the door behind him, feeling incredibly guilty. “I’m tidy. That makes it look bigger than it is.”

“Are you kidding? Watch this.” He paced out a length. “There. That’s the size of my apartment.”

He wasn’t even all the way across my lounge. I flushed. “My father chose it. He pays the rent. I would have chosen somewhere smaller.”
Liar,
I thought.

He cocked his head to one side. “No TV?”

Most people didn’t spot that. It takes a certain sort of mind to notice what isn’t there. “Yeah. My father sort of…doesn’t like television. We never had one when I was a kid, and when he furnished this place—”

“He
furnished
it?”

I hesitated. “Is my life sounding really weird now?”

“A little. Although some things are starting to make sense.” He leaned against the wall and regarded me with those blue-gray eyes that saw everything. “If he doesn’t like TV, he’s either an academic, a hippy or an arty-type. You don’t strike me as having been raised by a hippy, so my money’s on arty-type.”

“Pianist.”

“A pianist who makes enough money he can send his daughter to Fenbrook and put her up in
this.”
I watched him put it together. “Karen Montfort.
Hugo
Montfort?”

I nodded.

“My music teacher in Belfast used to play his CDs. Shit! Hugo Montfort….”

I pointed to the table. “We should get on with it.”

He eyed the table as if it was a pit of snakes, but nodded and sat down. I could see him looking at the towering pile of lecture notes I’d assembled.

“Don’t panic,” I told him. “We don’t need all of it. This is
everything,
right back to when I started, plus some stuff from Dan to cover the first semester.”

Connor frowned. “Yeah, you started late. Where were you, that first semester?”

I looked at him. “You remember that? You didn’t even know me back then.”

He got that look again, just for a second, as if he was battling with himself. “This new girl started and got straight A’s,” he told me. “Everyone remembers that.”

“Apart from my presentations. I was in Boston, first semester. I don’t want to talk about it.”

He nodded, and I immediately felt guilty. He’d opened up and shared so much of himself with me, and I still couldn’t tell him about that day they found me on the roof.

I took a deep breath and told him my plan for helping him with his essay. I couldn’t catch him up on every lecture, and I wasn’t going to try. For one thing, I was pretty sure that he’d absorbed a good amount of the material from the lectures he’d attended. For another, he only needed a small subset of them to get the knowledge he needed for the essay. We’d go through the question together, then he’d tell me what he understood by it and what he thought he’d need to cover in the answer. I’d catch him up on any lectures he’d missed, using my notes. And then he’d dictate the essay to me, and I’d type it out. It wasn’t cheating, really—I was just acting as interpreter between the written notes he needed and his brain, and back again.

We worked side by side for hours, because we found that across the table from each other felt too weird, like I was lecturing him. Side by side had its own drawbacks, though. When he leaned in to look at some music, his head brushed my hair and all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. When I pointed to something on the essay question, I brushed his hand and we both looked at the offending contact for a second, not saying anything. Every silence felt huge, every look we exchanged loaded with meaning. But still, I couldn’t tell him how I felt. What if it was all just me? What if I said something and he just looked at me in amazement? What if he
laughed?

“I’m making coffee,” I said abruptly and fled to the kitchen. While the machine did its thing, I rested my forehead against the cold refrigerator door and took a long breath. I couldn’t tell him. If it went wrong, then what? If we couldn’t rehearse together—if he even didn’t manage to get his grades up—I was doomed.

I opened my eyes and straightened up. Unless I got some sort of clear signal from him, I had to keep it to
friends.

“You okay?”

I span around. He was standing in the doorway, watching me.

“Fine.” I passed him his coffee. “Let’s work.”

The essay didn’t have to be in until the end of the week, so there was no reason we had to get it done that night. But once we’d started, it felt like we couldn’t stop—not only were we worried about losing momentum, but I got the sense that Connor was actually enjoying himself. With the barrier of his dyslexia lifted, he was able to put everything he’d learned at Fenbrook to use—and as I’d suspected, he’d picked up a lot more than people had given him credit for. When you can’t easily write stuff down, you get
very
good at listening.

We worked for another two hours straight and broke for coffee. Another two hours put us past the halfway point and we both agreed that stopping would be wrong, so we ordered pizza. A final three hours put grease stains on my lecture notes and a finished essay on my laptop.

And we realized it was one in the morning.

“I’ll call a cab,” he said.

I knew he couldn’t afford it. And I didn’t want him walking from the subway station—not in his neighborhood. “You can stay here,” I said as casually as I could.

He already had his phone in his hand. “Are you sure?”

I nodded at the couch. “Jasmine’s slept on it before. I’ll get you a blanket.”

I went to my bedroom to search for a blanket. Friends let friends stay over all the time, right? Even male friends of females. It didn’t mean anything.

I found him a blanket and a still-wrapped toothbrush and took them through to the lounge, then stood there looking up at him, the bundle clutched to my chest. “So. Um. Anything else you need?”

He looked at the bundle—the bundle…or my chest?
Of course the bundle.
“No. That’ll do me fine. Thanks, Karen.”

I nodded and stood there like an idiot.
Tell him! Tell him! He’s standing right here in your apartment and he’s about to spend the night! There’s never been a better time!

“Goodnight,” I said quickly and almost threw the bundle at him, then went to my bedroom without daring to look back.

I thought that once I was safely in my room, that would be it. It wasn’t—I had to figure out when to undress. Normally, I’d have stripped off and thrown on an old t-shirt to sleep in before brushing my teeth. But did I want to pad around the place bare-legged and with my panties on show? What if I ran into him? On the other hand, if I stayed dressed right up until I dived under the covers, would that seem weirder?

Possibly I’m overthinking this,
I thought.

I started to undress. When I was down to my panties—as naked as I was going to get—I stopped for a second and looked in the mirror. I tried to see myself as a man would see me—as Connor would see me. I knew my breasts were too small, my shoulders too wide. Was it even possible that he could find me attractive, next to all the busty actresses and lithe dancers at Fenbrook?

I imagined his eyes on me. I was sure I’d felt them in the practice room a few times, but what did that mean? Men will look at any woman. Had he kept looking? Did he want to see me? Did he
want
me?

I touched my hand to my cheek, watching myself in the mirror, and trailed it down over my breasts. My nipples were already stiffly pointing, almost too sensitive to brush against. My hand slipped down over my stomach. Lower….

There was a knock at the door. “Karen?”

I whirled to face the door. Adrenaline was suddenly crashing through me, my heart thundering in my chest. My mouth opened and a big, big part of me wanted to call out, “
Come in.
”

“One sec,” I said, and pulled on an old, soft t-shirt. I looked down at my bare legs and then dived into bed, pulling the covers over me. I took a second to run my hands through my hair. “Okay.”

He cracked the door open and then swung it wider when he saw I was decent. “Hi,” he said.

He was shirtless, his chest smooth and magnificent, broad pecs leading my eyes down to hard abs and a narrow waist. I’d had the image burned into my mind ever since his dressing room, but remembering it and seeing it were two different things.

“Hi.” The covers were around my waist. I suddenly wondered if he could see that my nipples were hard through the thin t-shirt, but didn’t dare glance down to look. Instead, I let my eyes rove down below his waist. He was in black jockey shorts, and his legs were thickly muscled and dusted with curly black hair. I dragged my eyes back up his body and sat there waiting for him to tell me why he was there.

“Sorry to bother you. But,”—he paused, staring into my eyes, and my chest clenched tight—“…do you have any floss?”

I stared at him, thinking I’d misheard. “Floss?”

“Dental floss.”

“I know what it
is.
Yes. There’s some in the bathroom cabinet.”

He nodded. “I thought so. I just didn’t want to go looking in case…you know.”

I made a quick mental list of everything in the cabinet. I wasn’t on the pill. I wasn’t on any medication. Nothing he shouldn’t see. “Thanks. It’s fine.”

“Okay then.”

“Okay.”

“Goodnight, then.”

“Goodnight.”

He hesitated for another second on the threshold and then backed out and closed the door behind him. I stared at the white-painted wood for several minutes. Had that been for real, or just an excuse to come in, to see if I was…what? Naked and ready? Had I avoided embarrassment by diving under the covers, or missed some massive opportunity?

I put a pillow over my face and screamed into it as loudly as I dared.

***

An hour later, I was still awake.

It didn’t matter that he was two rooms away. He was
there,
right in my apartment, as warm and alive and
real
as he could possibly be.

I imagined going in there and gently shaking him awake.
Connor, I have to tell you something.
But what if I was wrong? He was the man…why wasn’t
he
making a move, if he felt the same way?

I thought of how he’d looked at the door, how those smooth slabs of muscled chest would feel under my palms. How solid and unyielding he’d be if I pressed my body to his, all the way from lips to toe. I wanted him, more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life.

I let my hand, under the covers, find the softness between my thighs. Not rubbing, exactly, just…resting there. I imagined it was his hand, or the hard outline of his cock through his pants, and that was all I needed for the heat to start building.

He could be here, right now in this bed. All I have to do is go and talk to him.

I remembered the way he’d nearly kissed me, in the storeroom, and my whole body went weak. I wanted him to take me. I wanted him to—

“Fuck me.” My whisper was as quiet as I could make it, barely audible, but it was there. And hearing it, hearing my own mouth form that deliciously hard “k”, sent a wave of heat down my body, oily black and dangerously addictive. My hand
was
moving now, thin cotton pressed tight against my moistened lips.

All I have to do is go in there.

It was a game, almost. An edgy fantasy, because it could so easily become real. I rolled over onto my stomach, my hand beneath me. My cheek was pressed against the pillow, eyes on the door.
What if I just went in there, right now, and told him?
My hips were moving in small, firm little arcs, grinding myself against my fingers, faster and faster—