by Ward, Tracey
“Fine, whatever.”
“Sophomore year. Behind the football field in the woods. Mac Gibson, or Ol’ Mac Donghold as he was known to some for mysterious and probably disgusting reasons. A four pack of wine coolers and a full pack of cigarettes.”
“Are you enjoying yourself?” she asks blandly.
“Shh, this is my favorite part,” I whisper before raising my voice way too loud. “You, Katelin Reynolds, were nearly caught rounding second base with Ol’ Mac Donghold when he heard the fuzz coming. He, the brave and chivalrous boy that he was, ran into the woods and left you behind. You, being utterly wasted and totally shitty at it, cried, vomited, got caught, and spent the majority of that summer grounded in your room. Did I miss any of it?”
Katy stabs her hot fudge sundae angrily. “Mac ran away with my bra and showed it to the whole school the next day,” she mumbles.
“Mac ran away with your bra and showed it to the entire school the very next day,” I announce loudly.
Heads turn. Kids giggle. Mother’s frown. Mac’s dad glares at me from his place in line at the Frosty Freeze register.
“Fucking small towns,” I grumble under my breath.
Katy laughs, her mood instantly lighter. “Serves you right.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“How’s the job going? Are you saving up enough for the plane ticket?”
I groan in annoyance. “I think so, but I lost my deposit on the apartment I had set up. I’ll have to find a new one along with a fresh deposit.” I reach over and throw my melting ice cream into the trash, giving up. My hands are coated in an invisible stickiness that I brush at fruitlessly with a brown napkin. “It seems like every time I think I’m done paying for what happened something else comes up. I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t just say screw it and wait another year.”
“You can’t do that,” Katy tells me seriously. “You already put it off for two years after we graduated. If you put it off again you’ll never go and you have to go.”
“Why? What’s the point?”
“The point is you’re good!”
“And the other students there will be better.”
“So what? If you’re not the best you’re not gonna go?”
I shrug, looking out the window. “I don’t know.”
“Big fish in a little pond?” she asks knowingly. “Scared of being the little fish in the big pond?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, if you need to talk about it I know just the person you should go to. Kind of an expert on the subject.”
I turn to her, my brows pinched in confusion. “Who?”
She laughs, kicking me gently under the table. “Lawson Daniel, dummy.”
“I can’t bring this up with him.”
“Oh, okay. You can share saliva with him but you can’t talk to him?”
“We talk.”
“About what? How hot he is? How he wants to do you? His favorite yoga pose on a surfboard? Is it downward facing dolphin? Tell me it’s downward facing dolphin.”
“No,” I laugh.
“No it’s not or no you won’t tell me.”
“No, to everything.”
“Even sleeping with him?”
“Ugh, let it go.”
“Not until you let Mac Donghold go.”
I smile, shaking my head vehemently. “Never.”
***
The room is cool. It’s dry and dark, the outside world kept out. Kept locked away behind the curtained windows that let in little shafts of light speckled with clusters of dust kicked up by my fingers flying over the keys. An old xylophone sits silently in the corner, it’s golden wood notched and abused. A set of drums worn white by countless palms percussing its surface stands still. Listening. The entire room is listening, absorbing as I play. As I pour myself into the song. As I give it everything I have and come up short.
“Holy shit.”
My fingers stumble, my timing thrown off and my focus gone.
I spin on the stool to shout at whoever burst in and startled me, but my anger dies on my lips when I meet his eyes.
“Sorry,” Lawson apologizes immediately. He stands straight, pulling himself up from where he was leaning against the doorframe. “I kept my mouth shut as long as I could. But holy shit.”
“What are you doing here?”
Only a faint light is coming in from the hallway behind him, his face almost entirely cast in shadow, but I catch the flicker of a grin on his lips. “Believe it or not, your dad told me where I could find you. I think he did it just to get me off his property.”
“I doubt that was it,” I assure him, completely sure that it is.
He moves slowly into the room, circling wide. “You don’t have to lie. Dads don’t like me. It’s no secret.”
“He should at least wait to get to know you before he hates you.”
“He thinks he already does.” He stops on the opposite side of the gleaming black piano, one of the only instruments in the music room that’s undamaged, and puts his palms on the surface. “It’s creepy being back here.”
“It’s an elementary school,” I chuckle. “How creepy can it be?”
“How often do you come here?”
“Often. I’ve been coming here after hours since the fourth grade to practice.”
“I’m surprised you don’t have a piano at home.”
I hover my head over the keys, hiding behind my hair. “No, we do. The acoustics are better in here, though. And I play the same thing over and over again for hours. It gets irritating for anyone else in the house.”
And the piano my parents spent the entire household Christmas fund on six years ago is old and always out of tune.
“What were you playing just now?” Lawson asks. “It sounded complicated.”
I laugh, nodding my head. “It is. It’s not an easy one. It’s Schumann. Fantasie.” I drag my fingers unceremoniously over the keys, sending a string of nonsense through the air. “I’m not good at it.”
“It sounded good to me.”
“Because you’ve never heard it played well before. I’m clumsy with it. I get distracted, I dismantle the tempo. It throws everything off.”
“Distracted by what?”
“The song. The story.”
“It has a story?”
I grin at him. “All music has a story.”
He smiles, taking a seat in a metal chair to my right and leaning forward on his elbows. “What’s this one about?”
“Schumann was in love with a girl. She was nine years younger than him but a piano prodigy. They fell in love. Her parents didn’t approve.”
“Lot of that going around,” Lawson says dryly.
“Ha ha,” I laugh theatrically. “Anyway, they wouldn’t let them see each other so he wrote her music with hidden messages. Fantasie was one of them. It was a love letter. One she could play over and over again, knowing it was for her. When she turned eighteen he proposed, she accepted, her parents said no, and they sued them for the right to get married. A judge gave them the go ahead and so they did.”
“It’s a nice story. I can see why you like the song.”
“Yeah, well, that part is nice. Eventually Schumann tried to commit suicide, was tossed into a mental hospital, and died.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. But the song is good, right?”
He frowns. “I don’t know anymore.”
“Yeah,” I sigh. “Me either.”
“Play me something else.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“What do you want to play?”
“Fantasie. Flawless.”
“No. What do you like to play? What makes this fun for you?”
I stop to think, absently plucking at the keys as I do.
I look at Lawson. At his patient face, dark and daring in this space. Invading it and making it his. Taking it and giving it back to me better than it was before. He carries this unfailing peace, a natural
calm he learned from the sea. A certainty he has in his heart that he’s trying so hard to teach to me and I remember it in the feel of his hand on mine by the water. I clung to it. I needed it, needed him, to survive.
My fingers start to move, my mind made up before I know it. Before I realize what I’m doing.
What I’m saying without uttering a word.
I play Stay With Me by Sam Smith. And I play it for Lawson.
I close my eyes, playing from memory and making up the rest as I go. I take it and mold it, make it mine, give it life and form and I don’t give a damn about the rules because there are none. I’m lawless. Weightless. Unfettered and flying, and when he starts to sing along, his beautifully rich voice filling the room, I feel myself start to slip.
I’m sliding under the surface. I’m stepping deeper into the water with him, going past my knees, past my waist. It’s up to my chest, to my heart, and it’s filling it, flooding it.
And as afraid as I am, I’m not fighting it.
When the song is over, when my fingers have gone still and my heart is barely beating, I open my eyes.
He’s there. He’s in front of me and he doesn’t hesitate to lift me up off the stool as though I weigh nothing and put me carefully down on the flat top of the piano. His hips are between my thighs, his hands rising up my ribs, and I don’t hesitate to descend my mouth to his. To devour him, taking with my tongue as he takes with his hands, filling them with my body as I pass each shuddered, desperate breath I take into his mouth. As I pull air from his lungs to fill my own.
He works his magic, my clothes disappearing instantly along with his until we’re all heat and heart, skin and sweat pulling and pushing in all the right places. He moves me back, lowering me until I’m lying flat against the piano. His hands ride up my stomach to my chest, soothing my skin and bringing my blood to a boil. Then he chases them with his lips. With his tongue.
The way he plays me, I’m sure he could play Fantasie to a T. Every note, every chord, plucked to perfection.
I stretch my arms high over my head, curling my fingers around the edge of the piano top, my legs still draped around his hips on the opposite side.
“Lawson,” I moan, unable to hold it inside.
My body arches, bowing at the waist, and he runs his arm under it to keep me that way. To line me up with his body, ready to play the finale.
“Say it again, Rachel,” he murmurs, his lips against the sensitive skin of my stomach. “Say my name again.”
“Lawson,” I sigh.
He groans, his mouth racing up my body between my breasts as he slides inside me.
It’s not the way it was before. It’s faster, harder, more aggressive and more grappling, but it’s the same song in a different key. I still know it. I still recognize it, and the way we play it together is better than anything I’ve ever known. It’s tender and raucous. It’s sweet and desperate.
It’s Lawson and I.
Chapter Fourteen
“Why did you never go pro?”
Lawson stops, his chopsticks holding the fat piece of sushi just outside the reach of his lips.
When we left the music room – running and giggling like kids – Lawson insisted on buying me dinner. He also insisted that he knew a bar in Santa Barbara with the best sushi on the coast. I didn’t believe him because bars are great for greasy burgers and cheddar cheese fries, but a good squid nigiri? Not likely.
I was wrong. I was so friggin’ wrong. And I ate my words with a side of the tastiest cucumber roll I’ve ever had.
Lawson finally lowers his hand, giving me his full attention. “Why didn’t I move up to pro surfing?”
“Yeah. Unless that’s too personal a question.”
I’m relieved when he smiles. “After what we just did, there’s not much I’d put in the ‘too personal’ column for us.”
“Okay,” I agree with a grin. “So then why?”
He shrugs, leaning forward over his food and poking it with his chopsticks. “Bad timing, I guess.”
“I heard you were being recruited by a sponsor right out of high school.”
“Middle school,” he corrects.
“And in all these years it’s never been the right time to live your dream?”
“Who said it was my dream?”
“I don’t know. Everyone in town?”
He looks up at me from under his eyelashes. “And people in town know everything, don’t they?”
I smile, conceding the point. “Alright, so we all got you wrong. About a lot of things.”
“Almost everything.”
“Please. You love to surf. You love to fool around with girls. You love to smoke pot. You love to drink.”
“That’s a strong word. I’ve done all of that but I wouldn’t say I love any of it but surfing. The rest is just filler. Filler that I don’t do as often as everyone thinks I do.”
“Filler for what?”
“Time.” He smiles at me lazily, but I can see something else there. Something just below the surface that he’s hiding. “I’m just passing the time, Rachel.”
“You never answered my question.”
“Which one?”
“Why you didn’t go pro.”
He forces a frown. “I thought I did.”
“No,” I reply solidly. “You evaded it and gave me the runaround, something you’re very good at, by the way. But you never answered me.”
He sits back in his seat and stretches his arms over the back of the booth in both directions. His wing span is large, eating the entire space and that coupled with his easy grin reminds me of a big bird of prey. But the guarded look in his eyes is that of the beautiful exotic that darts and weaves, never trusting. Always a blur. Never standing still long enough to be seen.
Lawson is a lot of things, and I’m starting to see that none of them are exactly what everyone assumes.
“I didn’t go pro right out of middle school because I didn’t want to be a drop out,” he explains evenly. “If I signed with a sponsor I’d be doing advertising and interviews, events and competitions all over the world, all year long. I couldn’t finish school. I’d have to get a GED and that might be fine for some people, but not me. I wanted to finish high school the right way with the people I grew up with. So I said no to the sponsor. I told them I wasn’t ready to go pro until I finished high school. They said good luck and moved on to the next guy.”
“And they never came calling again? Not even when you finished high school? You still win every competition you go into. They have to know about you.”
“They do and yeah, they called. Last year the guy they signed instead of me blew his knee out in a dirt bike accident. He’s wrecked, he can’t stand on a board anymore so they were looking for a new poster boy.”
“They called you?”
“They called me. And I said yes.”
I shake my head, confused. “If you said yes a year ago, what are you still doing here? Shouldn’t you be in Africa or Tahiti right now?”
He lowers his arms, reaching for his beer. “Bad timing, remember?”
And then it hits me – they called a year ago.
Aaron fell off the radar almost exactly one year ago.
“You didn’t go because of Aaron,” I say softly, afraid to speak the name too loudly. Afraid to ruffle his feathers.
Lawson only nods, his eyes vacantly fixed on his plate.
“Where is he, Lawson?”
He surprises me when he laughs shortly. “Right now? Uh, probably in the basement getting caught up on Game of Thrones.”
“The basement where?”
“At home.”
I gape at him. “Are you shitting me? Aaron is in Isla Azul?”
He watches me closely, his face calm but his eyes churning anxiously. “He has been for months.”
“Are you shitting me?!”
People all over the dimly lit bar turn to look at us. Tuesday drinkers, people who don’t care about jobs or hangovers anymore
, all looking at us in irritation for harshing their mellow.
Lawson puts his drink down and leans forward on the table. “Shh,” he hisses quietly. “Keep your voice down.”
“Are you shitting me?” I whisper shout at him, leaning forward as well. “Aaron Daniel is in Isla Azul?
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“Over six months.”
“Lawson Daniel,” I scold quietly.
“You can’t tell anyone.”
I slap his shoulder hard.
“Ow! What was that for?” he demands, rubbing his shoulder.
“You don’t tell someone something like that and wait until after to swear them to secrecy, you dick.”
“Either way, you can’t tell anyone. Especially Katy. It’s a secret.”
“No duh it’s a secret. It’s the biggest secret in town. Katy is my best friend and you’re telling me that I can’t tell her that the love of her life is alive and living less than three miles away?”
Lawson’s brows fall. “He was the love of her life?”
“Still is.”
“I didn’t know. I thought it was just a summer fling.”
“It lasted longer than the summer.”
“I know, but still. I didn’t know.”
I take a breath, recovering from the shock and my anger at the muzzle he immediately slapped on me. “Does he ever ask about her?”
“No,” he answers bluntly. “He doesn’t talk about much of anything but what an inbred piece of shit Joffrey is.”
“Am I allowed to ask the million dollar question?”
“Go for it.”
“Why is he hiding?”
“I can’t tell you.”
I slap his shoulder again. Harder this time.
He flinches, grinning slightly.
“You’re an asshole,” I curse him vehemently. “Why would you tell me all of that if I’m not allowed to tell anyone else?”
“Because I haven’t been allowed to tell anyone. Not even the guys. No one’s been over to the house since Aaron got back and the only people I can even mention it to are Candace or my dad, and not even them sometimes.”
“Why not?”
“Candace is going insane over it. She’s not sleeping, she barely eats.”
“Why is she so stressed?”
