“You should wear this.” He reached into the pocket of his shorts, took out a small velvet box and handed it to her without opening it. She curled her fingers around it, holding it firmly closed like there was a great hairy spider inside, instead of what she knew was a giant heirloom engagement ring. Actually, at that moment, the ring seemed scarier than a spider.
“You going to open it?”
“Later,” she said. Not now. Not on the boardwalk with people all around. Not while she felt scrubbed raw from everything that had happened over the past week.
He nodded once. “We’ll fly back to the States tomorrow. Things will settle down. Get back to normal.”
She nodded in agreement and tightened her hold on the box. She didn’t ask him what he meant by normal, because she was starting to wonder whether she’d ever experienced normal. This wasn’t normal. Kissing a man in public, then screaming at him, then having him give her a ring. Marrying him for a house. No, this wasn’t normal.
And what she felt for Ethan had even less to do with normal than their marriage farce did.
She’d been expecting that performing, playing for crowds again, being famous and staying in posh hotels would make her feel like herself again. Now she wondered if that had ever been the case. She was starting to wonder if she’d ever figure out what it was she wanted.
She looked at Ethan’s strong profile and tried to ignore the tightening in her stomach. All right, so there was one thing she wanted. But it was the one desire she should probably ignore.
Ethan had been wrong about New York bringing normality back. Waking up in the soft, luxurious bed was still too good to be her normal. Having Ethan to talk to every day, even if it was about mundane things, was better than normal too.
It was like having a companion, if not almost a friend. Someone to share things with. The details of her day. Three days a week she went to work with him and shadowed his assistant, learning different, somewhat menial office tasks. But she made a mean pot of coffee now and her typing was getting a lot faster than it had been that first day.
And yesterday, Ethan hadn’t come by the suite to pick her up in his car, so she’d simply called his assistant and asked her to come and share a cab. It felt … good. As if she was building a life. A real life—her life—not just the broken remains of a life that had never been hers in the first place.
Ethan was due to arrive, and she was pacing, trying to shake off her nervous energy, fairly certain it was futile. Even after a month with him, even though it had been three weeks since he’d kissed her, she just couldn’t relax around him.
She crossed the room to the piano and slid her fingers across the length of the keyboard. Excitement fired through her veins, her stomach tightened in that way that it did when Ethan touched her. Desire. A thrill. She’d been working on the song that had grabbed hold of her in Brisbane, but it hadn’t progressed easily. It was still harder to write music now than it had been.
She sat down on the bench and put her hands into position, flexing her fingers for a moment before pushing down on middle C. She added E and G and let the chord fill the empty room, let it fill her.
Then she followed the feeling. She saw Ethan, remembered how he had stood behind her that night back in Australia. How he’d touched her. She hadn’t let herself think of it, if at all possible, since their return to New York. But she opened her mind up to it now.
It was easy to put the feeling into her music, effortless. This wasn’t like the songs she’d written a year or more ago. Those songs had been born out of technical ability, mostly because she’d had to tame her creativity to make her teacher happy with the structure of a piece.
But this one held her. Her as she was, not beaten into submission, into a shape and form that her teacher deemed salable. Here and now, she was pouring out her feelings, dissonant and minor, filling the room. Uncertain but powerful, deep and all-consuming.
It didn’t empty her of the emotion, but made it stronger, growing inside of her, flowing from her fingertips.
She didn’t know how long she played, how many times she went through the piece so she could cement it in her mind. When she stopped she sat frozen, before letting it all overtake her.
She felt one tear slip down her cheek, then another. She put her hand over her mouth to cut off the sharp sound that was trying to escape. And then she stopped. She let it all happen, because she’d never done that before. She’d been trying to hold on. To her past, to a life she wasn’t certain she would have chosen for herself, but one that she’d been comfortable with.
And she’d never let herself truly grieve the loss of it. She’d never moved on. She’d cut off everything inside of her instead, and she’d lost her music. Not the crowded auditoriums and the CDs, but the music that had always lived in her, coloring the way she saw and heard the world.
It had been quiet in her when before it had always been filled with a rich, layered sound. Music.
She was finding it again. But different. On her terms.
“Are you all right?”
She turned around on the bench and wiped her cheeks, trying to hide the evidence of her crying jag. “I’m great.”
“You don’t look great.” Ethan, who did look great in his custom-made suit, stepped further into the room.
“Gee thanks, Ethan.”
“Why were you crying?”
“I have a song,” she said. And it sounded lame. It made sense in her head, but she imagined that Ethan probably wouldn’t get it.
“Did you finish the one you started back in Australia?” he asked, his voice rough. That pesky, shared memory again. She knew he was thinking exactly what she was thinking.
“Kind of. It was sort of a take-off from that. But it was … different too. I think I might really have something though. It’s been such a long time since … I’ve been able to do drills, songs I knew, but there was nothing new and … that made me feel like part of me had been cut off. Music has always been in me. That’s how it all started. I was composing music from such an early age and … my mother saw potential that needed to be capitalized on.”
“So it was lessons for you then?”
“With the very best instructor. Neil was—is—a genius. He was my support system until … until my mom ran off with all the money and it was clear I couldn’t … pay him anymore.”
“After so many years?”
“He gave up everything, every other pupil, for me. And it turned out my mother hadn’t paid him in two years. In the end, he just couldn’t stay anymore. I mean, after so many years of training it isn’t like I needed a teacher, but he was a coach. A mentor. The closest thing I had to a friend. He understood me. My mother was with me nearly twenty-four hours a day, traveling with me, making sure I did what I had to do to keep the money coming in. To keep the spotlight on us. But she never really tried to know me.”
Ethan moved to the piano, his palm flat on the glossy black surface. “It was her loss, Noelle.”
Noelle’s throat tightened. “You do know how to say some nice things, Ethan.”
“It’s a gift.”
He looked down at her hand. “You still aren’t wearing the ring.”
“I don’t … No. I can get it. It’s the bathroom.” Still in the box.
“You’ve got to put it on eventually. I’m planning an engagement party for us, you know. And we still don’t look engaged.”
She swallowed. “That won’t work.”
He leaned in and her breathing stalled. “No. It won’t.” He turned and walked from the