She stared at the violin case like I was holding out a tarantula.
“It’s assembled and stringed,” I said. “I’d like you to play it so I can see if any adjustments need to be made.”
She cast an annoyed look around the corridor, then led me into one of the soundproof warmup rooms behind the stage. The room wasn’t that big, so we were suddenly alone, and close.
“I told you, you didn’t have to do this.” She took the case, but didn’t open it.
“I did have to do it. By the way, the instrument you’re playing now is a piece of shit. You didn’t buy that, did you?”
“I’m borrowing it,” she said through tight lips.
“Good. Give it back. I’ll have the Pressenda delivered to your apartment tomorrow.”
“Stop.” Her voice was sharp, even if she looked at the floor instead of me. “Stop trying to shove your kindness shit in my face.”
“This isn’t ‘kindness shit,’” I said, my own temper sparking. “This is a nice fucking violin that I spent many hours making for you, because you deserve to have the best fucking violin in the world. Now I need you to play it for me, so I can finish the goddamned thing.”
Her stubborn features crumpled, and she burst into tears, hugging the case against her chest. “I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you too. Come here.”
I took her in my arms, the violin case wedged between us.
“I don’t mean to be a bitch,” she murmured against my shoulder. “I don’t know why I’m angry with you. I mean, I know why, but I still love you. I can’t believe you still made me a violin.”
“I told you I would.”
She drew away from me. I held the case while she wiped at tears, then she sat in one of the two chairs in the small room. I sat in the other and took out the instrument I’d built for her.
“It’s only partially glued, so it’s delicate,” I said, handing it to her. “You don’t need to play that much. Just enough for me to see the way…” The way to finish it. Were we finished, Lala Nyquist and I? There was a new and uneasy tension between us. It would probably always be there, because I hadn’t had the strength to keep my dick in my pants.
“This is so pretty, Milo.” She ran a finger along the edge of the fingerboard, and around the curve of the lower bout. “It’s so beautiful.” She gazed at the trim I’d placed along the center of the scroll and plucked one of the strings. I could see her tumbling into love with it, and it made everything that came before this moment worthwhile.
“I used those strings you like,” I said. “The heavy-gauge gut. They’ll take a while to stretch, but they’ll suit this instrument’s tone.”
“You thought of everything.”
She was still gazing at it, like a mother at her newborn child. I nudged her knee with mine. “Play it, Alice. Let’s hear how it sounds.”
She looked teary again, but she collected herself and lifted the violin to her shoulder, positioning it beneath her chin. I watched to be sure it fit comfortably, that my measurements had been accurate. She settled right into it. “Nice,” she said. “Hand me my bow?”
I gave her the bow she’d used for tonight’s performance. I imagined she had bought that, because it suited her tone and playing style far better than the violin she’d borrowed. She closed her eyes before she drew it across the strings in an open A.
“It might need a little tuning,” I said.
“It’s fine.”
She played a few more notes, gently turning the pegs and using the tuners to get the tone she wanted. I watched her expression as she played a short violin piece by her favorite composer, Vivaldi. The fit was true, and the sound she produced lifted the hair on my arms. It was that amazing. This new instrument was as good as the Grapeleaf, or better, and it wasn’t even finished yet.
“Oh, Milo,” she said when she lifted the bow.
She was in love with the violin. I couldn’t give her everything she wanted from me, but I could give her this. She touched my hand, like words were beyond her. “How did you do this?” she finally asked. “It’s perfect.”
“Because I know you. I know what you need.”
I meant the words in reference to the instrument, but in the small room, with the emotions flowing, they sounded dangerously sexual. She turned the instrument over in her lap, trying to hide the blush that her Nordic skin always gave away. Then her eyes widened.
“Oh, wow.”
“What?”
She touched the back, traced her fingers over the small heart I thought I’d hidden so well in the maple and varnish. “There was a heart shape like this in the grain of my old violin. That’s kind of amazing, to have it happen twice.” She looked up at me then. My face must have given me away. “You did this? You made the heart?”
“Yes.”
“To make it look like my old one?”
I laughed, a rueful, self-conscious sound. “I had a small hand in making your Grapeleaf, Alice. When I was alone in the studio with it, applying varnish, I hid a heart on it too. My father never knew.” I paused, thinking of the many times he and my mother had pushed me toward Alice. “Or maybe he did. Anyway, it shouldn’t affect the tone.”
She blinked down at the heart. “Why didn’t you tell me you put a heart on the Grapeleaf? Why didn’t you show me? It would have made it more special to me.”
I laughed again. “You were in love with some other boy then, some adolescent Swedish beefcake. I couldn’t compete.” I’d been skinny and pimply well into my twenties, and always so dark against her joy and lightness. Her perfection.
She shook her head. “I wasn’t in love with that guy. Puppy love, maybe, but only because you were out of reach.” She traced the back of the violin, noting all the care I’d taken to create smooth, solid resonance in the fluid lines. “Thank you for this. For everything.”
“I hope it brings you a lot of money when you sell it. I’ll have it done in a couple weeks, if you want to line up some buyers.”
She gave a half-tearful laugh. “You know I’m not selling it. I’m going to have to find an apartment with a fire and explosion proof chamber built in, because if I ever lost this thing, it would kill me.”
She handed back the violin, and I put it in the case I’d also fashioned especially for her, or, at least, her instrument. She put away her bow and we stood to move toward the door, but we bumped into each other in the cramped space. I reached to steady her, smiling. She gazed back at me, not quite smiling.
I wasn’t sure what happened then. A spark, a need, a re-ignition of the pull we couldn’t shake. I cupped her face between my hands, pressing my fingertips to the lattice of her braids as our lips connected. Be gentle. Show her you’re not the monster she’s heard about. But I was that monster, and she shredded my control.
She whimpered at my violent kiss, and gave it back in kind. I was still holding the violin, she was still clutching her bow. The shit violin she’d played earlier was somewhere at our feet, so I couldn’t shove her to the ground and rip off her clothes even if I wanted to. We were in a soundproof room, and I wanted to make her scream, but this wasn’t the time or place.
“We need to talk,” I said, nudging her away.
“No. Talking won’t change anything.” She pulled me close again, staring in my eyes. “We need to take the leap and be done with it. Enough is enough.”
Chapter Fourteen: Alice
Blue yipped with pleasure when Milo escorted me into his living room, but neither of us stopped to pet him. We stashed the instruments on the kitchen counter, out of the reach of a certain dog’s curious, wet nose.
“Bedroom or dungeon?” Milo asked.
That was a stupid question. The dungeon was the place he could be himself, and the place our sparks really flew. “Take me to your dungeon, and show me more things,” I told him.
He hustled me down the hall. “Do you remember the safe word?”
“I’ve been dreaming about it,” I said, which was the truth.
We went inside and he flicked on the lights, more than he’d put on the first time. We undressed, shedding our clothes, eager to get naked together. I’d wanted to see him again for so long, unable to get the image of his nude glory out of my mind. The olive-toned muscles. The broad shoulders. The already-hard cock. It was then, as I stared at his huge, hard shaft, that I remembered there would be pain to pay to get what I wanted.
I looked around the dungeon, seeing it with new eyes. I thought he’d played hard with me before, but it had been, apparently, just a taste of what he was into. Would I survive this next encounter? I hoped so, because I wanted more. More of him, more of his urges, more of his hot, wicked perversions.