Pride and Pancakes

by Ellen Mint

  The sound of broth slurping into a bowl drew her attention. Hunger rumbling in her stomach, Beth quickly bundled up her work and the laptop, leaving room for both of them to eat. He placed down the first bowl filled with brown water and white noodles. “Which would you prefer?” Tristan asked softly.

  “Beth. Anymore, if I hear Min-Ji I expect to be harangued by my cousins for not having a husband or a new nose.”

  That caught him, Tristan pausing with his dinner tucked tight to his midsection. “What could possibly be wrong with your nose?”

  Pressing the tip of her pinkie to the bulb that wasn’t tiny and high enough, she chuckled. “You’ve never been to South Korea.”

  He laughed at her dodge and sat beside her. They’d moved the chairs farther apart to give each other room that newlyweds clearly didn’t need. But even still, she could feel his presence beside her, and it wasn’t off-putting. “Bottoms up, so they say,” he said, his spoon hanging over the attempted offering.

  “Just, so I know what I’m getting into, what did you make?”

  He too seemed uncertain of his Frankensteined dinner, circling the noodles into a knot. “With the peanut butter, I attempted to make a Thai peanut sauce. There’s a dab of hot sauce in there from my personal stash…”

  “Oh.” Beth dug into her purse. “If you wanted hot sauce, you should have asked. Any particular variety?” She had an entire sampler platter of small glass vials to get her through meals. As each one clanked across the counter, Tristan’s face lit up. He selected the garlic and ginger-infused one, a favorite, to flavor up his dinner.

  She picked the same, dousing hers in twice as much. Even if the peanut sauce was a dud, at least she could burn her taste buds out. “Here’s hoping we avoid food poisoning,” Beth called, swirling her spoon around the noodles. Tristan was too deep into tasting his own creation to argue. She tried to watch his face for clues, but it was a rock.

  What was the worst that could happen? Plunging the ramen deep into her mouth, she tasted the chicken salt of the cheap packets, a hint of garlic blasted by ginger and the clogging, grainy soot of peanut crackers. Beth swallowed it and returned for another bite, this time siphoning the pure broth into the spoon.

  “It’s, uh, it’s interesting,” she said diplomatically.

  Tristan raised his bowl, stirring the slop around and staring deep into its abyss. “Another failure to add to the pile,” he announced, causing her jaw to drop. With a shrug, he said, “I never claimed to be a good cook.”

  Knocking her shoulder into his, Beth leaned so far over the gap she nearly fell into his lap in the process. “If you pick around the grainy bits, it’s almost palatable.”

  The two laughed together, savoring their unique and mostly edible ramen dinner. Snow tumbled outside in the jet-black world, Beth for once not caring.

  Chapter Nine

  The one good thing about being trapped in a cabin thanks to oppressive weather was that she had no choice but to write. There were no work requirements to attend, no sudden deadlines to race. Her boss seemed particularly intrigued by the idea of a reporter trapped with their person of interest, for once gifting Beth all the time she’d need. Sure, she had to send the occasional update, but as long as she kept insisting that ‘Mr. Harty remains uncooperative’ with a sprinkling of ‘He’s now noodling on the guitar’ to whet her editor’s appetite, she was free.

  Beth sat cross-legged on the couch, her laptop resting in the middle as if it were her egg to protect. To her surprise, Tristan sat beside her, resting his ass on the edge of the couch to fit the guitar head poking into the cushions. But it also meant he had to face her the entire time.

  It wasn’t his occasional glances and even the rare smile that surprised her. It was that she didn’t mind letting someone in close while she was working. While she’d had her headphones on to try and create privacy, he’d started strumming a melody she’d never heard, and she’d shut off her music to listen.

  The tune was slow and mournful, very much a breakup or loss song. Yet he played it with a strange smile on his face, as if he was happy with the sad turn of events. Firelight danced against Tristan’s face, smoothing away the wrinkles and shifting his blue eyes to a haunting purple. The low flames shadowed his ears poking below the piles of copper-toned hair, elongating them, and he took on an elfin appearance. His stark, almost harsh, features certainly helped the fantastical illusion. The aloof and patrician demeanor he wore from his wide forehead to the tip of his chin turned cold but beautiful.

  He was a statue of a beloved king lost in the depths of the snow.

  His fingers froze, the song evaporating as he crinkled the once and future proud nose. With the guitar tipped up on his thigh, he fished into his back pocket. A deep sigh erupted at his vibrating phone and he spoke aloud. “Barry, again.”

  With a clear display of annoyance, he typed a text at his henpecking manager. No doubt it was the same response as before. Still alive. Still snowed in. Nothing’s changed. They came every half hour, Tristan once asking Beth to respond when he was making dinner. He trusted a random reporter with his phone over the wrath of missing a text from the manager.

  Slipping the silenced phone away, he shifted to swing the guitar back into place. Beth shrugged. “At least he cares.”

  “Yes, and will forever see me as a fifteen-year-old with a snaggletooth, a bowl cut and shoes two sizes too big.” It was said with a laugh, but Beth stared anew at the man who’d come onto the scene already polished and buffed into a teenage dream. While he wasn’t some stock-photo model for a rocker, it was hard to see him suffering an awkward stage. He looked as if he belonged in those waistcoats and riding boots from period pieces, his features as aristocratic as a duke’s. The modern and rather drab attire seemed an anachronism upon his tight body.

  With a finger pressing deep into the guitar’s neck, Tristan strummed down the strings. The power chord echoed through the cabin and he posed with his hand high above his head as if ready for another. “I’m well aware of Barry’s faults,” he said. “He’s certainly not one of the best managers in the business.”

  Beth’s previous researching of the manager had dug up the fact that he’d been involved with creating some of the ur-boy bands that had plagued the late ’90s and not much after that. It was a surprise he’d wound up working with a boy then man who prided himself on creating his own material.

  “But he was always overprotective,” Tristan whispered as if to himself, “whether I didn’t need protecting, or didn’t know I did.”

  Ah. That would explain why the man coming out of retirement had sought the one he knew he could trust, even if the manager was out-of-date, out-of-touch and more hassle than gain. Trust in the creative field was worth more than gold.

  Worrying her fingers over the keyboard and leaving a string of gibberish on her manuscript, Beth tried to not think about the exposés that rocked the industry. Or what happened behind all those closed doors and casting couches people were happy to ignore. “You were lucky,” she breathed.

  “I was.” His gaze shifted inward. “When you’re a kid you have no idea how lucky you are because they don’t want you to know.”

  She’d never thought about how the near-misses in those reports would’ve felt. Lots of people were chewed up by the music industry, but what about the kids? The ones who went to auditions for the monsters in those pieces but never got the contract? Who woke up ten or twenty years later and thought, ‘Thank God that wasn’t me.’

  “Is that on the record?” Beth whispered. She knew she was bringing up the wall between them. That he’d no doubt, after once again being reminded of who she was, turn insular. But she had to.

  Tristan’s strumming froze, his head tipped down to glare at the strings as if he’d never seen them before. “That I was never molested?” His voice rumbled deeper, trying to use the hallmarks of masculinity to escape the unspoken fear. “Yes, it is. Though I don’t see how a non-fact will assist you.”

  Op
ening her file on Tristan Harty, Beth added what little he’d revealed and sent it off to the cloud. “Trying to find any angle I can. You know how reporters are.”

  She expected another diatribe bordering on a manifesto, but all she got was strumming. Deliberate, contemplative strumming.

  Pleased that he wasn’t going to call her any number of bottom-dwelling creatures, she moved to slide on her headphones and return to work. Before the strings of a movie soundtrack slipped into her ears, Tristan sat closer. “Do you know how to play?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “What?” That shocked the musician. “Nothing? You can’t play any instrument?”

  Struggling to keep her tone from turning cold, Beth said, “Contrary to the prevailing image, we aren’t all born with a violin in hand.”

  “I…” He blushed bright red across his cheeks, Tristan fading at her tongue lashing. “I only meant because I grew up, where I grew up, everyone…” He faded to a mumbling with no easy answer to being called out. At least he didn’t jump to ‘Are you also good at math?’

  With the tension rising in the room, Beth returned to her writing. She was about to dive deep into her father’s early years when Tristan asked plaintively, “Do you want to learn?”

  A music lesson with Tristan Harty?

  God, that sounded like some contest one won by sending in enough box tops or magazine coupons. He extended the cherrywood guitar to her and Beth tried to pull in a breath. Fifteen years ago, girls would have ripped each other to shreds to be in her position. To jockey for his flitting attention, to dream that he’d sing a song just for her, that he’d fall head over heels and the two would go to the prom together.

  But she was thirty and well aware of her lagging talents. Beth’s mouth ran dry at the thought of playing around him. “I’m not sure if… Okay?” The small part of her that sensed a potential lede in this reached out. The rest was panicking. She was going to make an epic fool of herself in front of him.

  Why did she care? Taking the guitar, she folded her palm over the neck, the strings digging into her flesh.

  “Ah, that’s not how to hold it,” Tristan instructed, quickly flipping it around in her lap. Warm wood cuddled around her thigh, Beth got a feel for the alien instrument entrusted to her. It was heavier than she expected and almost too large for her size.

  “Feel good?” the musician asked.

  No. She nodded, trying to act as if the foreign muscle pulls and arm movements were completely normal. “Is…is this a special guitar?”

  “Why?”

  “What if I…I could break it?” she squeaked out and a laugh of pure joy erupted from the man.

  “As long as you don’t channel Pete Townshend, I think it’ll be okay. Start by pressing your finger here.” He pointed to a spot on one of the neck strings. “And here.”

  Gently, she placed her fingers over the hard strings, struggling to reach with her ring finger.

  “Now, strum with…I don’t have a pick but if you scrape down the side of your thumb, that should work.”

  Scraping my skin over strings? Sounds pleasant. Darting to the fingers hovering above hers, Beth wondered if he’d developed calluses over his thumbs. What would those feel like rubbed against intimate skin?

  Why am I thinking that?

  With a gulp and a prayer, she swung her thumb across the two strings he pointed to. An ungodly whine, as if she was slaughtering an entire village, broke from the guitar. Beth’s face cringed inward, but Tristan seemed unsurprised. “You have to press tighter with your fingers up here. Really tight. Don’t worry, you can’t strangle it.”

  “What if I snap it in half?” she gulped even while doing as told.

  “We check you for superpowers?” was his less than useful response. “Trust me.”

  There was no reason for her to. He could be setting her up to fail, watching that dim-witted blogger struggle with something he was born to do. The warmth of the guitar hugging her lap spread up her chest and Beth picked at the string.

  A single note echoed from the guitar, humming out through the fire-lit air. Beth’s face cracked into a cheesy grin. She wanted to leap up and crow about managing one note, but the teacher wasn’t finished.

  “Here, this is the next one.” He guided her finger lower down the neck and Tristan nodded. Giving another swipe of her thumb made a higher note erupt from the guitar in her lap. Before its reverberations vanished, he called, “Quick, repeat the same moves as before.”

  Beth struggled to remember where her finger went, swiping at the strings in the hope it was close enough. When the familiar note rang through, she glanced up at him. “Am I playing a song?”

  “Of course,” he snorted as if there was no doubt. “Okay, now you have to move it, ah…” The teacher, her only port in this confounding storm, clouded over. Tristan peered closer to the strings as if he’d never seen them before, and winced.

  “Sorry, I…I’ve never really done it in a mirror-reverse situation. Um…” He popped his lips, trying to buy for time while switching around the moves for her. “Ah! I know.”

  The hands that’d been fussing over her fingers suddenly wrapped around Beth’s waist. Her jaw dropped, but she gave in to him spinning her on the couch. With almost no force, he pulled her between his thighs. She sat up rod straight, uncertain what he was going to do next.

  Slowly, warm palms slipped over the tops of hers. No way he could see the strings with her body blocking his view. But he seemed to know where they were even while the guitar was sitting in her lap. “How about I lead?” Tristan’s warm words tickled against the back of her neck.

  She should refuse. Leap to her feet, thank him for the lesson and return to her work. Keep up that necessary professional distance that’d seemed so easy before. It was just a day back that she’d wanted to pluck out his eyes, and now his body was curled around hers.

  Nodding, Beth tried to lick her chapped lips. A single whisper made it through her chattering jaw. “Yes.”

  Fingers, acrobatic, nimble and toned, smoothed over the back of hers. They outflanked Beth’s thinner digits, but Tristan didn’t overpower hers. He guided without force, pressing her back to the strings where she began.

  The same notes rang out as before, Beth’s fingers supplying the music but Tristan creating it. He puffed a single letter to match each note, the warm breath knocking in her hair. “G-A-G-E.”

  Upon repeating the sequence, Beth’s brain overpowered her body lost in the taut muscles pressing against all of her. “Is this Silent Night?”

  “You found me out.” He shifted her hands lower down the guitar which brought out the higher notes. “Did you know that—”

  “It was originally composed for the guitar due to the church’s pipe organ being broken?” Beth interrupted. The music stopped and he slid his chin across her shoulder to focus upon her. “What?” she said. “Everyone knows that about Silent Night.”

  His chuckle not only puffed against her ear and cheek but rumbled his chest up against her back. “Fair enough, you win the esoteric knowledge crown.” All the while his hands kept moving hers, the song reaching its end before returning for another verse. The music glided around them, stripped to its core in the crackle of firelight.

  She listened to not only the notes, his G-A-G-E resuming their tumble, but the pop of logs shedding their summer bark to the fire. Heat enveloped her body, his foot curling back in on the couch until his leg fully matched hers. His forearms molded atop hers, Beth watching from below her lashes how his biceps flexed with the musical movements.

  “Si-ilent night. Ho-oh-ly night,” Beth sang. Oh shit! The words slipped unbidden from her tongue, leaving a lump of shame burning up her gut. She’d just sung in front of a professional! A musician who loved nothing more than to critique every little thing he saw.

  She slithered her hand from his grip to slap to her mouth as if that could hide away her fumble. A soft chuckle broke from behind her, opening up the
pit in her soul. But he wound his fingers around her shielding hand and pulled it back to the guitar. With a steady baritone, he sang just to her, “All is calm, all is bright.”

  “I didn’t mean to…” Beth scrunched her face up even as she continued playing the song with him. “I know I shouldn’t sing.”

  “Nonsense,” Tristan scoffed, causing her jaw to descend to the gates of hell. “It’s a Christmas song. Every and anyone should be able to sing along with Christmas songs.”

  “You really…” She tried to peer over her shoulder at him, but she was locked in tight with the music. “Really like Christmas music.”

  His forehead and hair slid across hers as Tristan tipped his head down in thought. Still, the playing didn’t cease, his fingers strumming through the unending silent night. A soft voice so quiet she nearly missed it whispered, “My mother.”

  “What?”

  “You asked why I put out a Christmas album, in rather degenerate terms, I’d like to add…”

  Beth winced at the cruel cuts she’d given without realizing. She’d assumed he thought as little of the commercialization as she did. The soul poured into a simple carol playing to no one told her otherwise.

  “My mom loves Christmas, everything about it. We used to visit churches, soup kitchens, VFWs, anywhere that’d put up with a little kid holding a huge guitar. Even when I was in New York, trying to get my big break, I’d sit in the subway and play my stable of carols.”

  That must have annoyed everyone trying to get to work.

  “She always asked me to put one out. Slip it into the rotation between all my ‘serious work.’ I, being a teenager with five Grammys under my belt, thought I knew better.” The song stilled, only the trembling strings under her fingers breaking up the silence. But he didn’t remove his hands from hers, his body hanging off hers as if he needed her help.

  “So, when I decided to return, I knew the first album out would have to be a Christmas one,” Tristan finished. “And now you know the deep, dark secret, reporter.”