by Tillie Cole
“What is it?” Excitement zipped through me like the electric pylons outside our house.
My dad’s hands covered my eyes. When we came to a stop, he stepped away from me and dropped his hands. “Okay, son. You can look.”
I gasped when my eyes fell on the wooden piano across from the table in our dining room. I ran over and stopped just before it. I swallowed and ran my hand over the wood. It was chipped and marked, but I didn’t care.
“It’s not much, Cromwell. I know that.” I looked back at my dad and saw his face flushing red. My mum stood in the doorway, tears in her eyes. I turned back to the piano. “It’s old and secondhand, but it’s in good working condition. I had it checked over.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, because to me, it was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. I looked back at my dad. He nodded, seeing the silent question in my eyes. “Play, son. See how she feels.”
My heart beat in a weird rhythm, racing and flipping as I sat on the creaky old stool. I stared down at the keys, and I could just read them, like a book. Colors attached themselves to the notes the keys would produce, and all I had to do was follow their lead.
I laid my fingers on the keys and started to play. Colors, so bright they almost burned my eyes, danced before me. Rainbows and spectrums took over my mind. Reds and blues and greens, all running ahead for me to chase.
I smiled as the music filled the room. As something happened in my chest. Something I couldn’t explain. When the path the colors led me down ended, I moved my hands back from the keys. I looked up to see my mum and dad watching me. Mum had her hand over her mouth, tears running down her face. But my dad wore a different expression. One of pride.
My stomach squeezed. He was . . . proud of me.
“How did that feel, son?” my dad asked.
I stared down at the keys and wondered how to put what I thought into words. It was funny; I could just look at music and play what I felt. The colors showed me the way. The emotions that took over me told me what to play. I could speak with my music.
I wasn’t so good with words.
I tried to think of something similar. When I looked up at the wall of pictures my mum had had hanging for years, I knew. I looked back at my dad. “Like when you come home.”
My dad seemed to stop breathing. He followed my eyes to the picture of him on the wall. The one where he was wearing his officer’s uniform. “Cromwell,” he rasped and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Like when you come home . . .”
My voice shook as I looked at Bonnie and said, “He took me everywhere after that day. He tried to get the right people to see me. People who, like me, could play.” I laughed. “He tried to play once. I tried to teach him.”
“How the hell do you do this?” He shook his head. “My boy, the child musical genius. And his dad, a tone-deaf fool.”
“I played and played. Composers in Brighton took me under their wing. When he went away on tours, I would practice and practice until he came home. Symphonies and pieces poured out of me month by month. And every time he came home, he would try harder. Try to help me reach my dream . . .” I closed my eyes.
“What is it, Cromwell?” Bonnie leaned in to kiss my cheek.
Taking a deep breath, I continued. “I was young. When I look back now, I see that I didn’t have much of a childhood. I toured the country, composing and conducting music I’d created. At twelve, fifteen, and finally at sixteen.” I stared off into the distance as my mind brought me to that day. “I was sick and tired.” I shook my head. “I was sixteen, and I’d spent most of my life creating music instead of going out with my mates. Playing every instrument known to man instead of dating girls. One night, I’d had enough.” A lump clogged my throat. “A night before my dad left on another tour to Afghanistan. The British Army was withdrawing, only a few companies left to keep an eye on things.”
I stopped speaking, unsure if I could say anymore. But when I looked up into Bonnie’s eyes, big brown eyes that were starting to fade in light, I knew I had to. She had to know this about me. And I had to tell it. It was like a cancer within me, eating away at me until there was nothing left.
I didn’t want to be dark and empty inside anymore.
I no longer wanted the anger.
I wanted to live.
“I was at another concert,” I said, instantly reliving the past. “I had just walked offstage . . . and I flipped . . .”
“Son! That was amazing!” My dad came around the corner of the wings. The audience was still applauding in the theater, but all I felt was anger. Red-hot anger ripping through my veins. I ripped off my bow tie and threw it to the ground. My mobile vibrated in my pocket.
Nick: Can’t believe you bailed again. Missed a great night.
“Son?” my dad said. I closed my eyes and counted to ten.
“I’m done,” I said when the anger didn’t go.
“What?”
I pushed past him and headed to the dressing room. I slammed the door open and reached for my bag. I needed out of this tux before it strangled me.
“Cromwell.” My dad shut the door, keeping out the world. Because that’s all he ever did, kept me locked away creating music. No childhood, hardly any friends, and no fucking life.
“I’m done.” I threw my jacket on the floor. I put on my t-shirt and jeans. My dad watched me, a confused look on his face.
“I . . . I don’t understand.”. His voice shook. It almost made me stop, but I couldn’t. I knew Lewis had been out there tonight. The composer he’d tried to convince to take me under his wing. But I was done. I was so fucking done.
I spread my arms. “I don’t have a life, Dad!” I shouted. “I have no close friends, no hobbies but music, and nothing to do but write symphonies. Play music. Classical music.” I shook my head, and I knew that now I’d started I wouldn’t be able to stop. “You’ve shopped me around to as many concert halls as you could. Enrolled me in more orchestras than I could count and whored me out to any composer that thought he could teach me something. But none of them could.” I laughed, almost faltering when my dad’s face paled. “This is so easy to me, Dad. The music I create just pours from me. And once upon a time I loved it. Lived for it. But now?” I pushed my hands through my hair. “Now I hate it.” I pointed in his face. “You have made me hate it. Pushing me. Always pushing me.” I laughed. “I’m not a damn soldier, Dad. Not one of your squaddies you can bark orders at and I’ll fall in line.” I shook my head. “You’ve taken the one thing I loved from me by taking away my fun. My passion. You’ve ruined it for me. You’ve ruined me!”
The room was thick with tension as I tried to calm down. I eventually lifted my head to see my dad looking at me. He was stricken. Tears were in his eyes. My heart cracked at seeing my dad, my hero, so hurt by my words. But I couldn’t take them back. Anger had me in its hold.
“I . . . I was just trying to help you, Cromwell,” he said, voice cracking. He stared at the tux discarded on the floor. “I could see your potential, and I just wanted to help.” He shook his head and loosened his tie. My father was always dressed to perfection. Not a thing out of place. “I have no talent, son. I . . . I can’t understand what lives within you. The colors. The music.” He swallowed. “I was just trying to help.”
“Well you didn’t.” I threw my bag over my shoulder. “You ruined it. You ruined it all.” I pushed past him and threw open the door.
I had just stepped into the corridor when he said, “I love you, Cromwell. I’m sorry.” But I kept walking, not saying anything in return. I never went home that night, for once getting drunk and staying out with my friends . . .
“He was gone the next day when I came home. Left for the next tour that would last nine months.” A dagger stabbed in my stomach.
“Cromwell. You don’t have to—”
“It was only four days later when they took him,” I blurted. Now I was talking, I was unable to stop. “They took him and his men.” I remembere
d my mum coming in to tell me. I remembered my heart pounding in my chest, so loud I could hear it in my ears. I remembered my legs shaking so much I didn’t think I’d be able to walk. And remember my lungs becoming so heavy that I couldn’t breathe. And all I could see was my dad’s face in the dressing room. When I’d struck him in the heart with my words.
“It was months before they were found.” Bonnie shifted closer and pulled my head to her chest. I wrapped my arms around her waist. I held on, distantly noting the odd sound of her heart underneath my ear. “There was a knock at the door one day. When my mum answered, it was a man from the army. Mum sent me to my room. But the minute she walked in the door, I knew. I knew the minute I saw my father’s dog tags in her hand.”
“Cromwell,” Bonnie said. I heard the sadness in her voice.
“They killed him. They killed them all. And they left them to rot. My dad . . .” I choked on my voice. “My hero . . . was killed like an animal and left to rot.” I shook my head, holding tighter to Bonnie’s warmth. “And he died thinking I hated him. Hated him for doing all that he could to make my dreams come true.”
“He knew you loved him,” Bonnie said, and I lost it in her arms. “He knew,” she whispered into my hair, before kissing my head. I fucking fell apart. And Bonnie stayed with me right through it.
When I could breathe again, I said softly, “I played that night, when we were told. I played that piece . . . the one you just heard.” The pain of that night was still as fresh as three years ago, the colors just as vivid. “Then I never played again. Classical, that is.”
Bonnie’s hand stroked through my hair. “And the EDM?”
I sighed, feeling the rawness of my chest from the confession. “I had to play.” I laughed without humor. “I had no choice. My dad had been right, I needed music like I needed air. But after Dad . . . I couldn’t touch another instrument. I couldn’t hear classical, never mind play it. Compose. So I turned to EDM.”
I lifted my head and met Bonnie’s watery eyes. She ran her finger down my cheek.
“I like EDM because the colors are so bright.” I tried to make her understand. “It gave me the outlet I needed, a chance to play. But the emotions aren’t as strong.” I took Bonnie’s hand and placed it over my heart. “The other music, the classical, it makes my emotions too strong. It consumes me. But it fuels me too. After Dad, I was numb. So numb that I never wanted to feel again. With EDM the process was less . . . everything. I love it. It’s music after all. I like it because it doesn’t make me feel.”
I smirked. “Until this summer, when with one insult, you cut that numbness wide open. Your music has no soul.”
Bonnie winced. “I’m sorry. I would never have said that if I’d known.”
I shook my head. “No. It was the push I needed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the start.”
“The start of what?”
“Of the music coming back to me.” I thought back to my mother. “My mum remarried earlier this year, and it destroyed me. I got lost in the nightclub scene, the girls and the drink.” I felt Bonnie tense. But it was the truth. “Then Lewis took the job here and contacted me again.”
“Your dad contacted Lewis about you years ago?”
I nodded.
“He loved you.” Bonnie smiled and kissed my hand. “He loved you so much.”
My vision blurred with tears. “Yeah.”
Bonnie moved closer still until she lay on the same pillow as me. “You honor him by being here, Cromwell. By finishing that piece. By playing any instrument you had given up on three years ago.”
“But the way I left things . . .” I tucked my face into Bonnie’s neck.
“He sees you now.” I froze. Bonnie wore such conviction on her face. “I believe that, Cromwell. I believe that with everything I am.”
I kissed her again. Bonnie’s lips had started to change in color. A tinge of purple to the previous red. But they were no less beautiful. “What happened at the hospital?” I asked. Bonnie’s face fell. It took my stomach plummeting with it. “Bonnie?”
“I’m in accelerated failure.” Her words were like bullets to my chest. I opened my mouth to ask her to explain, but she beat me to it. “It means I have only a short time left until my heart can’t take it anymore.” I was frozen, unable to move as I stared into her eyes. Her eyes that held more strength than I’d ever seen in anyone before. “I won’t be able to attend college anymore. In a short while, I’ll be too weak to leave this room.” I could hear what she said, but my pulse was slamming in my neck, the blood rushing around my body.
“You gave me back music,” I said. Bonnie blinked at the sudden change in conversation. Then her face melted. I took a deep inhale. “It was you, Farraday. You gave me back what I’d lost.” I ran my thumb over her bottom lip as her eyes glistened. “It was you who brought the music back to my heart.” I paused, trying to find the words to say what I meant. I had to settle for, “You helped my music rediscover its soul.”
“Cromwell,” she murmured and kissed my lips. I could feel her lips tremble. Then her eyes closed and she confessed, “I’m scared.” My stomach fell and my chest ripped in two. “I’m scared, Cromwell. I thought I had more time.” Her tears tumbled from her eyes and tracked down her cheeks.
My hand fell over her chest where her heart was. I felt its erratic and too-slow beat under my palm. The feel and sound was a pulsing circle of auburn in my mind. She stilled as I touched her. Then she covered my hand. “How is it possible, Cromwell?” She took in a shallow wheezy breath. “How can a heart be so damaged, yet feel so impossibly full? How can a heart be failing when it’s filled with so much life?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered, devastation sweeping through me until it was all that I could feel.
“And how can I live with the sadness of knowing that I won’t get to compose with you? That I won’t finish what we started?”
“We will finish it.” I held her tighter. “I don’t care if you’re bed-bound. But we’ll finish.”
Her eyes closed. “You promise?”
“I swear it,” I said firmly. “And when you get your heart, we’ll hear it performed by the school’s orchestra at the end of the year.”
“I won’t be able to play anything as we compose,” she said, humiliation lacing her words.
“Then I’ll play.”
“I won’t be able to write.”
“Then I’ll write it for us.”
“Us.” Bonnie smiled. This time there was no sadness in her eyes. “Us,” she repeated. “I like the sound of that.” She closed her eyes. “It sounds like a song.”
“You’re the lyricist.”
She nodded. “It’s my dream. To put words to music. To bring them to life. I’m not much of a performer.” I wanted to argue that fact. The night I’d seen her at the coffee house, that’s when everything changed. “But my dream would be to write for others.” She looked to me. “What’s yours?”
“To just make music.” I sighed. “Music that means something.”
“Wouldn’t it be something if our two dreams collided?” I smiled, because I saw it in my head. Saw Bonnie by my side, writing lyrics as I composed the music. Her by my side, bringing life to my notes.
“It would be something,” I echoed. Bonnie yawned. As her eyes began to drift closed, I heard her song, “Wings,” that I’d layered over my mix. And I smiled.
Us.
“Cromwell?” Bonnie sat up, putting on her pajamas. I watched her. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to take my eyes off her again. She lay down, her eyes pulling shut. “Put your clothes on, Cromwell. Before my papa comes down in the morning and shoots you.”
Despite feeling the rawness in my chest, and despite the fucking ten-ton weight of fear I felt knowing that Bonnie didn’t have long until her heart could take no more, I laughed. Bonnie smiled, eyes still closed, and I dressed. But I lay back on the bed, not even giving one shit about my damp clothes, or the fact that her parents
could find us like this in the morning. I pulled her to me as she lay under the comforter, vowing to never let her go.
“Crom?” Bonnie said, her voice laced with sleep. I smiled at the nickname that had just slipped from her lips.
“Mmm?”
“I love you,” she whispered and obliterated what was left of my heart.
“I love you too.”
Music filled my head as I thought of her fight. As I heard her wheezing breath and saw her lips deepening in color through the lack of blood from her heart. It was a melody just for her. To keep her strong. To inspire her to fight.
I knew I’d record it as soon as I went home.
Because she had to survive.
I couldn’t take another loss. But the loss of what could be, that was what scared me most. Because I was sure we could be something special.
She just had to survive.
Chapter Twenty
Cromwell
Two weeks later . . .
I walked back into the dorm room to darkness. I went over to the curtains and pulled them back. Easton was in bed again. He threw the duvet over his head. “What the hell, Crom?”
I stood beside his bed and pulled the covers back. Easton whipped around. He stank of alcohol. I’d just got back from sleeping over at Bonnie’s, but I knew he’d only just got in.
“Get up. I need your help,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. I looked at the painting on the easel. Another dark, messed-up piece. I got it. Christ knew I got it. I could see the pain he was in every day as he walked around, lost.
He saw Bonnie, and when he did he was all smiles. Even as she started to fade. As her days at college became less and less frequent. As her legs grew weak and she was forced into a wheelchair, and when her breathing got so bad she needed oxygen through her nose every day. A piece of me died each time I saw her body giving up. And I wanted to scream when I saw the fight in her eyes. As she held my hand, gripping on as hard as she could . . . the once hard grip now as light as a feather.
Easton was getting worse. But Bonnie needed him. Hell, I needed him. He was the only other person who understood all this.
