Love at First Note (16 page)

“Thanks. Sometimes I worry I made the wrong decision, but I don’t know. Things are good here too. I like being in Asheville.”

Elliott shifted so he was sitting sideways on the couch, facing me. His movement only made our knees touch, but in my hyperaware state, even that felt like a big deal. He smiled. “I think I like you being in Asheville too.”

There was an energy sparking between us—something slightly nervous and slightly
exciting and completely new that made my insides get all twisted. It was ridiculous how good it felt, how much it had me wanting to rub my fingers across the stubble on his jaw line or feel the softness of his lips against mine. I could tell by the look in his eyes he was feeling something similar. He leaned in, his gaze dropping to my lips, but then pulled back like he’d suddenly thought better of getting that close. He jumped off the couch, sweeping the ice cream bowls off the floor with such dizzying speed I hardly knew what had happened before he was halfway into the kitchen.

“So how long have you been playing with the symphony?” He spoke over his shoulder as he disappeared around the corner.

I tried not to sound too deflated. “Um. I guess it’s been three, almost four months now.”

He reappeared in the living room. “That’s it? I didn’t realize you’d been here such a short time.”

I shrugged. “That’s it. I moved in June.”

Elliott moved to the piano and sat down.
When he didn’t look up from the keyboard, his fingers jumping silently from one key to the next, I wondered if maybe I’d outstayed my welcome. I got up. “I think I’m going to head home.”

He stood from the piano bench. “No, don’t. I didn’t mean for you to go.” He pulled a kitchen chair around the corner and sat it a few feet away from the piano, facing him. “Here. Sit here.” He looked at me with such boyish enthusiasm I couldn’t help but grin.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Why?”

“Because it’s been a good night and I’m feeling a little . . . inspired.”
His right hand danced over the keys, forming the shadow of a melody—soft and sweet. He paused and looked up. “I think maybe there’s music in here somewhere. If you leave, you might take it with you.”

I moved to the chair and sat. “Just how long are you expecting me to sit here?”

He only smiled.

And then he started to play.

An hour later, I’d moved to the bench beside him, watching the melody pour from his fingers. His face was flushed, his eyes focused, and his attention wholly on the music he was working out minute by minute. At one point, after a ten
-minute stretch of nothing but music, I nudged him and asked if he wanted me to go. It wasn’t meant to be a selfish question. I could just tell he was in the zone. I didn’t want to distract him. He looked up and smiled. “Please don’t. I like you here.”

So I stayed and watched and listened as the song took shape.

“So this part here,” Elliott said. He played a few measures high on the keyboard. “This will be violin.” He turned. “You want to try it? I’d love to hear how it will sound.”

“I do want to try it, but . . .” I glanced at my watch and gave him an apologetic look. “It’s after midnight.”

He looked surprised. “Oh man. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it had gotten so late.”

“Please don’t apologize. This has been amazing. To see your brain work through the music like that . . . I’m glad I stayed.”

He shifted a hair closer, and my heart started pounding. I was close enough to feel his warmth, see his pulse pounding in the hollow of his throat. “I’m glad you stayed too.”
It felt like an echo of our earlier conversation right before he’d bolted off the couch, but this time he wasn’t moving away. His words were soft and slow and almost sultry, and I felt completely incapable of getting myself back to my own apartment. Walking shouldn’t be hard—left foot, right foot, and all that—but I couldn’t move, my hands gripping tightly to the sides of the piano bench where I still sat. I was keenly aware of his gaze moving from my eyes downward and lingering on my lips.

He leaned in, and I closed my eyes, waiting for his lips to meet mine. His kiss was feather
light at first, a soft brush against my cheek that moved closer and closer to my lips, one tiny kiss at a time. The anticipation was enough to drive me mad; when our lips finally touched, I leaned forward, one hand moving to his cheek, the other grabbing a fistful of his T-shirt while I deepened the kiss. Heat flared between us, a crackling, delicious tension that I felt all the way down to my bones. He moaned a low, guttural moan, then tensed and pulled away. “Emma, wait.”

“Sorry. Was that . . . too much?”

“No. Don’t apologize for that.
That
was amazing.” He heaved a sigh and dropped his head, his eyes staring into the floor. “But I don’t know that I can do this.”

I’m sure we can. And we should. Again. Right now.
“What do you mean? What changed in the past thirty seconds?”

He pushed his hands through his hair and shook his head. “Nothing changed.” He reached up and aimlessly brushed his fingers across the piano keys, forming silent chords one after another. He finally played an arpeggio that climbed two octaves, then shifted into a few measures of the melody he’d been working on just minutes before.
He let his hands fall from the keyboard and turned his attention back to me. “The thing is, I’ve been trying so hard to stay focused. But when you show up, I don’t want to focus on anything
but you. I can’t think straight when you’re around.”

“I’m not sure thinking straight is really all that important.”

He gave me a small smile and shook his head.

“Are you saying you want me to go?”

“No.” He answered quickly. “Of course I don’t, but you saw how my agent reacted when that photo surfaced from the festival.
I know I told you a little about my album struggles, but it’s worse than I let on. My career is in a really rough place right now, my label literally watching my every move. They are waiting for me to screw up and will jump on any reason they can find to drop me.”

“Why would
they
drop
you
? I thought they wanted another album.”

“They wanted it months ago. The fact that I haven’t delivered
makes me a liability. The second they think I’m not prioritizing to give them what they want, I’m done.”

“But you could walk away, right? They don’t own you.”

“They do. Every ounce of my success is tied to that label.”

“Still, they aren’t the only record label out there. Surely you could find someone who would
let you play what you want.” I was starting
to feel like a nine-year-old arguing about the stock exchange—
completely out of my depth. Plus, I had to sound a little desperate. He was telling me he didn’t want our super-amazing, hot-and-steamy
kiss to happen again, and I was essentially begging him to reconsider.
I
did
have some dignity.

“
It’s more complicated than that,” he said. “If I fail to deliver what they want, they could sue me for breach of contract. I came to North Carolina for the express purpose of getting away from anything that might serve as a distraction.”

“And I’m a distraction.” I tried to stand, but he reached over and grabbed my hand.

“You’re the very best kind of distraction. There’s just so much on the line. I have to be extra careful.”

I really wanted to believe his reasons were legit, and I for sure wasn’t going to whine about it, but rejection was still rejection. I pulled my hand away. “It’s okay. I get it.”

“Please don’t say that. I swear I’m not just feeding you a line.” He lifted
his hands and almost reached for me but then seemed to reconsider, running his fingers through his hair instead.

“Line or not, you’re still telling me to stay away.”

He sighed. “Maybe not completely. It was fun having you here tonight. But I think we need to keep things simple and stay just friends. At least until I get my album finished.”

It felt ridiculously unfair that we were even having this
conversation. That kiss was the most amazing thing I’d ever experienced, and now he was saying that was it? I understood dedication to career and craft, but
just friends
? I couldn’t decide if it would be worse to stay away or worse to still see him but not kiss him.

I stood and walked to the kitchen, picking up the ice cream bowls he’d rinsed and left on the counter. He followed me to his front door.

“I’m sorry it has to be so complicated,” he said.

I gave him a sad smile. “It’s okay. I’m a musician too, remember?
I know how important it is to stay focused.”

We said good night, and I slipped into my apartment, leaning against the closed door behind me. The entire evening felt surreal—from Elliott’s impromptu composing to the confession of his feelings to the
taking
back
of his feelings—it was hard to make sense of it all.

But I could make sense of one thing. I’d never experienced anything like that kiss.

I was still leaning against my apartment door when a knock sounded right behind my head—short, quick raps with a frenzied, frantic edge.

I swung it open.

“Elliott, what’s wrong—?”

He cut off my words with a kiss, his hands cradling either side of my face. I hesitated only a moment before wrapping my arms around him and pulling in close against his chest. Our first kiss had been gentle, but this was different, charged with a fervency that left me breathless.
A moment or two longer and he broke the kiss but stayed close. I leaned in, savoring the feel of his arms around me. He leaned his forehead against mine.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Feast before famine,” he whispered, then leaned in to kiss me again.

Over the next couple weeks,
my schedule was totally swamped, which I guess was a good thing. It made it easy to just be
friends
with Elliott. We hardly even saw each other. I had back-to-back
symphony weeks, the first for our Beethoven concert and the second for a series of daytime education concerts for the local
schools. With all the rehearsing and performing,
my visits with
Mom were pushed into the early-morning hours or after my
afternoon lessons, so it felt like I was constantly coming or going.

I did see Elliott at church and then outside on the front porch and in the entryway between our apartments a few different times, but I never had time for more than a quick hello. Even in those brief moments, the tension and heat still flared between us. He looked at me with an intensity that made me feel like he was seeing all the way into my heart. He didn’t even have to say anything more than “How are you?” It left me hungry for him, not just for his touch but for his conversation. He’d said feast before famine, and he was totally right. No Elliott in my life definitely felt like famine.

By the time Friday rolled around—the Friday I was having dinner with Blake—I was missing Elliott in a bad way. So bad I wasn’t even sure I could make it through dinner with another guy. Only Lilly’s scolding kept me from calling to cancel. “You said yourself it’s just dinner. You already said yes. Just go and have a good time,” she said.

Pretty sure she was just sick of hearing me whine.

A few hours before my date, just after my last afternoon lesson, my cell phone rang. Mom called me all the time when things were fine, but since moving home, my heart lurched whenever her picture appeared on my screen, a tiny moment of panic when I knew
she’d fallen and hurt herself or gotten bad news from the doctor .
. . or
something
. Whenever I heard her cheerful voice on the other end of the line, I breathed a sigh of relief. But this time, she didn’t sound so cheerful.

“Hey, Mom, what’s up?”

She sighed. “Are you sitting?” I could hear the strain in her voice.

“Oh no. What is it? What happened? Are you hurt?”

“Calm down, Emma. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Then why do I need to be sitting?” I perched on the arm of the couch in the living room just to be safe.

“I just caught your sister trying to dub the audio of you playing the Barber concerto into her own video.”

I immediately stood back up. “She what? Is that even possible?”

“Possible and almost finished,” Mom said. “If I hadn’t walked into her room when I did, she might have gotten away with it.”

I started pacing around the room. “Why would she, Mom? She’s smarter than that.”

“I don’t know, sweetie. Honestly I’m so frustrated with her right now, I could just . . . I don’t know what I could do. Your father and I are going to talk about it tonight and decide how to handle things. I just wanted you to know in case she tries to come to you for support.”

“Why would she come to me? It was my recording she was trying to steal.”

“She actually argued that to her favor, said she could have stolen audio from any number of performances on the Internet. She used yours because she figured if she got caught, you’d be the least likely to turn her in.”

“How comforting.”

Mom kept talking, relaying the justifications Ava had given her, but I was already stomping around my room, looking for my shoes and car keys. I didn’t want to hear Ava’s reasons filtered through Mom. I wanted her to tell me to my face what she was trying to prove.

“Is Ava at home right now?” I asked Mom. “Is she there?”

Mom’s voice sounded heavy, tired. “She’s at the high school. There’s a pep rally before the football game tonight.”

“A pep rally? She pulls a stunt like this, and she gets to go to a pep rally?”

“Don’t tell me how to parent, Emma. Your sister is grounded
after tonight, but she had responsibilities at the school—committees
she’s worked on. And she’s covering the game and the rally for the local paper. It’s an important day for her.”

It sounded like my mother was speaking a different language. Pep rallies and football games? When had Ava ever been interested in stuff like that?

“Fine. I’ll just go see her at the school.” I flew out of my apartment and down the porch steps, my anger growing hotter by the second.

“Please don’t go to the school. A confrontation isn’t what Ava needs right now.”

“A confrontation is exactly what she needs. Is she even thinking about what that video means? If my professor were to pull strings to get her into Cleveland and then discover it’s all a sham? Mom, that’s my name on the line.
My
credibility. Why would she do this to me?”

“I don’t really think she was thinking about you.”

“My point exactly.” I climbed into my car and slammed the door. “Thanks for telling me, Mom. I gotta go.” I hung up and tossed the phone onto the seat beside me.

It was possible that somewhere in the back corners of my mind I realized I might be overreacting. But the conflict between Ava and me had been building for weeks and weeks. She’d been ignoring me, belittling my efforts, refusing to recognize the importance of what I was trying to help her do. She’d never make it in the industry if she wasn’t willing to work hard. I knew better than anyone. The fact that she was flouting that knowledge and trying to cheat instead? It burned.

A memory of Ava calling and
asking me to come over to help her practice the Barber concerto flashed through my mind. It was the only time she’d
ever
reached out to me on her own. And she’d only reached out so she could trick me into making a recording.

I was still seething when I pulled down the long winding drive of Ava’s high school. There were cars everywhere—stupid cars of stupid people who
thought football was a good way to spend an afternoon. I had to park in the sophomore parking lot twelve thousand miles away from the stadium and hike my way through the crowd. The game hadn’t started yet, only the pep rally, so at least the ticket guy was forgiving, letting me slip into the stadium without buying a ticket. I tried to call Ava twice, then three times, and got no answer. When I called a fourth time, her phone went straight to voice mail. She’d turned her phone off completely.

I found her just outside the concession stand at the south end
of the stadium, dressed in annoying red, white, and blue, a tiny
Falcon painted on her left cheek.

“Ava!” I called.

She spun around, her eyes wide.

“Can we talk a minute?”

She hefted a box from the ground at her feet and carried it through the concession stand’s back door. “I’m sorta busy right now.”

A tall boy with sandy hair and broad shoulders took the box
from Ava’s hands. “I got this, Av. You can take a minute if you need
to.”

She shot him an annoyed look. “It’s fine,” she said pointedly. “I don’t need a minute.” She turned back to me, her arms folded across her chest. “I don’t have
anything
to talk about.”

“No? Maybe I’ll just talk, then. Maybe I’ll just bring up right here in front of your friends what you’ve—”

Ava lurched across the room and grabbed my arm, hauling me back into the late afternoon sunlight. “Shut. Up,”
she said through her teeth.

She still gripped my arm, and I shook her loose. “You have a lot of nerve telling me to shut up. Why did you do it? You at least owe me that much.
Why?
”

“I owe you? Are you completely demented? I don’t owe you anything.”

Her words stung more than I’d expected. “What does that even mean? You
stole
my music, Ava. You tried to
cheat.
How could you ever stoop that low?”

“You didn’t give me a choice! All you do whenever we talk is nag and harp and demand. It’s practice, practice, practice all the time. It’s exhausting, Emma. You’re making me crazy!”

“So talk to me about it! I’d rather you yell at me and complain than try to cheat your way into Cleveland.”

“You don’t get it. I don’t even
care
about Cleveland.”

“I can’t get it if you won’t talk to me! Please just help me understand what’s going on inside your head.”

She kept her eyes down, her shoe toying with the loose gravel scattered under our feet. “I don’t
want
. . .” Her words trailed off, and her shoulders slumped.

“You don’t want what?” I asked. “To explain?”

“No. I don’t
want
to play the concerto.”

For real? That was all? “Oh. Well, you can pick a different piece. Why didn’t you just say you didn’t want the Barber?”

She shook her head. “You’re not hearing me, Em. I don’t want to
play
. It’s not what I want.”

I could only stare.
Of course
she wanted to play. All she’d
ever wanted to do was play. “You don’t really mean that.”

“I do mean it. And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She turned without another word and headed toward the bleachers. It was like watching a stranger walk away. Did I know my sister at all?

I was numb driving back to Asheville. I tried to take a step back and look at Ava objectively, but it was hard to filter out my own emotions. As long as I could remember, Ava had always wanted to play violin—
just
like her big sister. It was our thing, something we shared and enjoyed together. My years in Cleveland had made it a little harder for us to really share our love for music in person, but everybody still knew music was in Ava’s blood just like it was in mine. Plus, she was so incredibly talented. If she actually did quit? What a colossal waste.

* * *

Elliott was sitting
on the front porch with a book when I got home. I glanced at my watch. Forty minutes till rehearsal started.
Of course.

“Hey,” he said, standing up. “You okay? You look sad.”

I frowned. “I’m okay. Just got in a big fight with my sister.”

“You want to talk about it?”

I wanted to talk about the price of peas in Indiana if it meant getting to stand next to him a few more minutes. Two weeks of keeping my distance had left me wanting.
“It’s . . . I don’t know. It’s dumb. Ava says she wants to quit violin, which doesn’t make any sense. She’s too good to quit.”

Elliott folded his arms. “It’s hard to know what you want at that age.”

I scoffed. “I knew exactly what I wanted at that age.”

He chuckled. “Lucky you.”

Lucky me?
“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No, sorry. I didn’t mean for that to sound like an insult. I’m just saying . . . not everyone is that lucky. I’m twenty-six and still don’t feel like I know exactly what I want.”

“You know you want music.”

“Well, yeah. But there’s a lot of ways music can be a part of your life. Maybe that’s what you ought to tell Ava. If she doesn’t follow in your footsteps, she could still find other ways to make music matter.”

There was wisdom in Elliott’s words, but they still bugged. It shouldn’t be personal, but I’d been so invested in Ava. Everything about what she’d done felt personal, like her quitting was an individualized attack.

I opened the front door. “I gotta get to rehearsal.”

“Emma, I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. I probably don’t know enough about your sister to have an opinion.”

I shook my head. “It’s fine.
I’m sure you’re right. And tomorrow when I’m not still angry, I’ll realize it and want to thank you for being so smart.”

He smiled. “I’ll look forward to it.”

I gave him a halfhearted smile and moved inside. He was lucky I’d managed that much.

“Wait.” He followed me into the entryway. “Can I buy you dinner tonight after rehearsal? Are you free?”

I raised an eyebrow.

Elliott read my expression and gave me a sheepish grin. “It’s just dinner. Dinner can’t hurt, right?”

Nope, dinner couldn’t hurt
anything. In fact, it would probably go a long way to turn my painfully awful afternoon around, even if I didn’t like what he’d said about Ava. For dinner and some time spent together, I was totally willing to forgive.

But I couldn’t have dinner with Elliott. I had to have dinner with Blake.

“I can’t. I . . . have a date.”

Elliott’s face fell. “Oh.”

“It’s not a big deal. He’s somebody’s nephew at church, and he’s just visiting and didn’t know anybody . . . I was trying to be nice.”

“It’s cool. You don’t have to explain.”

I glanced at my watch. Thirty-two minutes to grab a snack, change,
and get downtown. It was going to be close. “I really need to go. I’m sorry though. About tonight.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He reached for his apartment door. “Hopefully we can catch up later.”