Wildalone (29 page)

When the girl in red took her first steps toward him, everything turned quiet. The guitar was just a humming. The old woman's throat sang with barely more than knots of breath.

Rhys leaned over and began to whisper the words to me:

                                         
If one day I called you

                                         
and you didn't come
,

                                         
bitter death could descend on me

                                         
and I wouldn't feel it.

The girl hit the floor with her heel, only once, then leaned backward—shoulders sinking, still high above the floor, baring her neck for the guitar to crawl over it. Her right foot flashed to the side (a single warning), throwing the train of her dress back in place. Her arms broke and unbroke their exquisite spirals: enchanted snakes, drawing the man in. Then the two of them stepped into each other—filled with grief, as if the world had long ago come crashing down around them—and fell in love inside the music, through it, even though for the entire dance their bodies never touched, not once.

When we walked out of Tapeo, the chaos on the streets continued. Rhys checked the time.

“Are you ready for the rest of Halloween?”

“How much more is there?”

“The best part. It's not even midnight yet.”

Midnight
. My eyes searched the sky, I couldn't help it. Somewhere up there, four hundred light-years away, a cluster of stars was already rising . . .

THE “BEST PART” TURNED OUT
to be a posh party—masquerade ball—in a loft overlooking the Boston harbor. Everyone had to put on a mask at the door and was then ushered through a pair of heavy black curtains.

“May I have the password?” A male Grim Reaper nodded at us ominously from behind a velvet rope.

I glanced at Rhys, half expecting the magic word to be, once again, Estlin. But he smiled, lifted the rope, and let me go in first.

“Don't worry, the guy is just kidding. They should have opted for a Kubrick theme but didn't.”

“They” were probably the undisclosed hosts who owned the venue. It was enormous. A massive cube of windows with an internal suspended bridge, giving you the illusion that a gondola was about to glide across the floor and whisk you on a tour of a steel-and-glass version of Venice.

We took drinks from the bar and walked over to the nearest window. Rhys had wanted to show me the harbor, but something behind me distracted him.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, false alarm. For a moment, I thought I saw Jake.”

My hand became unsteady and I swished my glass, to hide the real reason for the sound of ice clinking. “What would Jake be doing here?”

“He's involved with the charity organizing this. Comes every year, yet this time backed out at the last minute.”

“Why?”

“No idea. Something happened to him in New York. But whenever I ask, he blanks out like a dead man.”

I suspected the reason for Jake's absence: he had probably found out that Rhys and I were coming.

“It has to be a woman, Thea. Just has to be. Although I can't imagine why anyone would break Jake's heart. How the hell does it get any better than my brother?”

I took a sip from my vodka tonic. Jake's heart—broken. I no longer had to guess, from hints or errant words or piano scores he happened to leave behind. Still, knowing only made me feel worse. What if I had made the biggest mistake of my life? Losing the guy who could have been my soul mate, while I let his brother parade me in front of him like a trophy doll. Dinners at their house. Vacations on the Vineyard. Even here, in Boston. At Jake's own party.

When a group of people accosted Rhys to hear his take on some recent scandal involving the charity, I went to get another drink. The bar was crowded. Noise. Dense heat of bodies. Bottles and glasses flying about, from
the hands of bartenders who rushed as if a fast-forward button had been jammed to a permanent “on.”

Suddenly, a hand placed an empty glass next to me.

I recognized the long fingers instantly—their shape, the slow shift through the air as they made their way from the glass, down to the edge of the bar, and rested on the marble. I was afraid to move.
Jake.
Standing behind me, so close I could probably feel his chest if I leaned back an inch—

Then he was gone. I turned around but there was no one, only a costumed crowd of strangers.

Later that night, I saw him once more. Like everybody else, he wore a mask. Yet I knew it was him, the way he leaned against the wall—lost in shadow, arms folded over his chest, head tilted back, observing. I felt his eyes across the room. This time they watched his brother dance with me, claim me in the music as he did in everything else: with his hands, with his lips, with every part of his unrelenting body. From their distant place in the dark, they looked on as Rhys bent me back and kissed me—long and hard, as if nothing was to be left of me after that kiss—and they took it all in, quietly, like poison they had come to seek on purpose.

I wanted to run over to him. Tell him that I knew everything, how he felt. That I felt the same way and at this point the only solution would be to talk it over, the three of us, and decide who stays and who leaves. But once again, he decided on his own. Took off his mask, then turned around and left.

Rhys, of course, saw nothing. It was always going to be like this. Jake might be sitting at a table with the two of us. Or watching us from a distance. Or even not be there at all—some subtle sign of his presence could simply emerge in the room, and everything would be ruined.

Unless—

“Take me somewhere and make love to me.”

Rhys froze. “What?!”

“Anywhere, it doesn't matter.”

“I thought we agreed to wait?”

“We didn't.” Only one thing could free me of Jake, and I needed it to happen right away. “Make love to me.”

“Don't ask me again, Thea. I won't be able to say no.”

“Don't say no.”

He grabbed my hand and dashed out—running down the staircase, storming through the front door, and crossing the street so fast I could barely follow. Another door flew open and I realized we had entered a hotel. He went straight to the reception desk, throwing an ID and a credit card on the granite.

“I want your best one. Hurry.”

His hand reached out just as a keycard was landing in it, and he rushed into the elevator, leaving his ID and credit card behind. The doors hadn't even closed when he started kissing me, pulling the dress off my shoulder.

“Rhys, what are you doing?”

“Giving you what you want. Quick and anonymous, right? I didn't think you'd be into this.”

“Into what?” As I said it, I realized we were still wearing our masks and pulled mine off. “If you mean anonymous sex, that's not what I want.”

“No? Then what's with the sudden rush?” He pressed me against the mirror and its cold surface singed my back. “I'm guessing there are many things you think you don't want. But we'll have to change that.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, whether to be excited or scared. The elevator stopped. He headed for the nearest door across the hall, while I told myself that I needed to relax. That it was too late to change my mind. That even if I did, Jake was never going to change his.

We walked into the dark room. Someone had left the heat up and the air was hot. Unbearably hot. His mask landed on the floor; getting us both naked took him only seconds. Unstoppable, an avalanche, his body crashed over mine, sweeping me back, then down on the bed, bursting with impatience from what he had wanted for so long. I stiffened up, drowned in his heavy breathing. His weight. His sweat. All I could do was close my eyes and imagine it being different. Completely different. The way it could have been with Jake.

“What's wrong? Hey . . . are you crying?” He turned on the light. “Why are you so upset?”

I wasn't just upset. I was embarrassed. Confused. Sad. He wiped my cheeks and pushed my chin up, until I was looking him in the eyes.

“Please get this in your head: I want you. Like a mad fool. The way I never knew someone could be wanted. But your first time shouldn't be like this.”

“Like what?”

“With you in tears and terrified of everything I do.”

“Then make it be the way it should be.”

“It isn't only up to me, Thea. You need to be ready.”

“Maybe I am . . .”

“That's not the kind of ready I want.” He rolled back against the pillows and pulled me next to him. “There are things about me that you don't know yet. They're the reason I don't date, or fall in love, or get close to anyone. At least I try not to.”

“What things?”

He shook his head. “Now is not the right time.”

“It will never be the right time. Please tell me what they are.”

The list was already running through my mind: His love of freedom. His contempt for boyfriend labels. The swim team's parties, or whatever else he did when he wasn't with me. And worst of all—a genetic disease without a cure.
Fatal familial insomnia.
According to Carmela, the odds of a person developing it were one in thirty million. If the gene ran in the family, the odds became one in two.

“Rhys, I need to know.”

“Of course you do. But trust me, now is not the time. We've had a fantastic evening. Would be a shame to ruin it.”

I WOKE UP IN THE
middle of the night. Darkness. The half of the bed next to me—empty.

Where is he?

My chest began to throb, as if I had been stabbed in my sleep. Rhys had sneaked out, leaving me in a hotel room. Not even a good-bye.

Then I noticed the cigarette light. A red laser dot, doodling its silent trajectories over the balcony, on the other side of the drawn curtains.

I jumped from bed and rushed out—sliding my arms around him in the cold air before he had a chance to turn, glued to his back, tight, as if we were the only two creatures alive, suspended on a tiny concrete island halfway between sky and earth.

“How long have you been out here? Why—”

I couldn't say the rest. Up until now, this would have been the most natural question in the world.

He leaned back, into me. “Why what?”

“Why aren't you sleeping?”

“You're all the sleep I need.”

The red dot hissed bright, then took a plunge: twenty stories down, toward the ground.

 

 

 

 

 

 

M
Y UNEXPECTED TAKE
on Albéniz catapulted Donnelly into a nervous breakdown. She had assumed I would come back from fall break with a dazzling technique, but now all she could hear was a moody collage of ruptured sounds.

“I really hope this is some kind of joke, Thea. Because if it isn't, I wouldn't even know where to start.”

I tried to tell her about the flamenco and the Andalucían gypsies and the magic of the
brujas
—how they lived inside the music, waiting to come out, but could be lost in the chase for tempo.

“And that's all fine”—she rolled her eyes, making clear it wasn't fine at all—“if you are entertaining guests at a home soiree. But you'll be playing for some of the most discriminating ears in this country. Do you realize what that means? No one cares about tricks or special effects. What they demand is absolute, blemish-free perfection.”

I wanted to say that perfection was relative. Yet this woman had four decades of music on me. Who was I to argue?

My last hope was Wylie, and I suggested that perhaps we should let him hear my version of the piece before writing it off completely.