by Riley Knight
Once more, the phone rang and rang and then went to voice mail. Luca ran his fingers through his hair, then left a message asking in a way that was just short of demanding for Kiran to call him immediately.
Just for good measure, he texted Kiran too. Then he fell back onto his couch, aware of the smell of smoke that surrounded him.
What was strange to him was that he hadn’t heard anything about a fire in the city. There had been relative silence on the subject. When Luca went digging, he found a short article or two about it, but the lack of information in it was frustrating.
Yes, there had been a fire. Yes, an entire city block, pretty much, had been wiped out. Including, much to his dismay, the apartment building that Julian had lived in, which he’d confirmed with his own eyes.
He had no other ideas, though he knew he would wrack his brain for them. Other than talking to Kiran about it, though, he wasn’t sure what else to do. He would keep trying, of course …
Unless it was hopeless.
Ruthlessly, Luca pushed that thought away. There was only one way that it would really be hopeless, and none of the articles that he’d read, as scant on information as they’d been, had said anything about anyone being … killed.
God, even thinking the word made his stomach churn like he might actually throw up. He could never forgive himself for going off to Japan if …
But no. He wouldn’t accept that as an option. There was no way that the universe could be so cruel, anyway, to give him something that he so desperately wanted, even needed, like he did Julian, and then take that away from him.
He just had to keep trying. He wouldn’t rest until he found Julian, or until … until it became clear that it was hopeless to keep on trying. That was all there was to it.
Julian was the best thing to happen to Luca in his life, and when he found the man, the critical word there being ‘when,’ he was going to show him just what he meant to him.
Chapter Nine
Julian
Everything was gone.
Julian had lost his home, his work, and he had no idea if or when he was going to be able to see Luca again. He’d lost all of his possessions, meager as they were, and he hadn’t been able to afford insurance to cover any of it.
He and Ella had ended up in the hospital, though only for a short time to deal with the effects of mild smoke inhalation. Julian still felt like he had been chain smoking for about a year, and his voice was rough and ruined when he spoke, but he had been assured that he would mend.
By noon the next day, he and Ella had both been discharged. They’d been given oxygen masks and kept under observation to make sure that they didn’t have burns that might cause their airways to swell closed. They were both lucky.
Or so Julian had been told.
There was no long-term damage. Other than the fact that Julian now had no place to work, and even more importantly, no place to live. As he and Ella walked out of the hospital, both of them covered in soot, Julian tried to feel grateful. He’d lost a lot of things, but he hadn’t lost his life.
He started to walk, he didn’t even know where he was going. Back to the bar, maybe. Back to work. His brain was moving very slowly like it was having a hard time really fully understanding what had happened.
“Julian?” He dimly heard his name being called, and slowly, without a lot of interest, he turned back to look. It was Ella, who, he had to note, even in his dazed state, didn’t look all that good herself.
“Hmm?” Julian asked vaguely, but he slowed down and allowed Ella to catch up to him. In her eyes, he saw the same sort of distance, of restraint, that he felt through his whole body, making him feel cold and numb and distant.
“Where are you going?” she asked, and she took his arm. He allowed her to do so. She leaned on him, and he leaned on her, and somehow, that helped. Once he had that support, he felt a little bit less like he might just fall over, that his weak knees and shaking legs might just give out on him.
“I don’t know,” Julian admitted, after giving it some real thought. He’d just been walking because he’d been discharged from the hospital, and he couldn’t stay there anymore. “I guess I have nowhere to go.”
Which was his own fault, really. If he’d gone to Luca’s house before, he would know at least one place he could go. Luca was supposed to be home today, if he hadn’t been delayed.
Which, of course, Julian had no way of knowing. He was such an idiot. Such a scared, cowardly, pathetic idiot, who had freaked out about nothing and was now going to have to pay for it. He’d refused to do the thing that made the most sense, and now, because of it, he didn’t even have Luca’s phone number.
“Come home with me,” Ella said, and she wasn’t pleading with him. Her tone was perfectly reasonable, completely matter of fact, like it just made sense. And it did.
There was something in her dark eyes, though, that was begging him not to leave her alone.
“What?” he asked, somewhat stupid with the shock of the situation, with finding himself essentially homeless, with self-recriminations.
“I said, come home with me. I have an extra bedroom. I think both of us are going to be pretty tight on money for a little while, right? So why not go in together and have less rent to pay?”
She was so practical. Julian was just trying not to go to pieces, and she was already making plans for the future, plans that made sense. Julian shook his head, a little shock of amazement working his way through the indifference that filled his brain like high-density foam.
“Wow. You’re really on top of it, aren’t you?” Julian said, honestly amazed. He was having trouble stringing together a coherent sentence, and she was making plans for the future. He couldn’t help but admire that.
“I’m just as fucked up as you are,” Ella said quietly. “I guess I just deal with it differently than you do. So will you come?”
Julian nodded without hesitation. What was there to think about? Basically, he had two options, go home with Ella or go find a nice bridge to sleep under.
“I’ll come,” he said, and he saw a flash of relief in Ella’s eyes. She really didn’t want to be alone, and Julian, somewhat to his own surprise, found that he didn’t want to, either.
“We’ll take a cab,” Ella said, and Julian nodded again. Their cars … they had probably both been totaled in the inferno that had swallowed all of the rest of Julian’s life whole and left him with nothing.
Well, neither of them were probably all that safe to drive, anyway. So Julian let Ella take over, let her sweep him into a cab, and collapsed into it when it arrived.
Only once they were settled did Julian reach into the pocket of the suit jacket that he still wore. He did it almost on instinct, and when he felt the crisp, folded sheets of paper within, he realized that he hadn’t quite lost everything.
Yes, he had lost his home, his work, his car, and probably Luca, because he couldn’t think of a way to reach the guy. He would go back to the bar, or where the bar had been, and he would do his best to find him, but he knew that, as horrible as it was, there was a chance that he would never see him again. And that was his fault.
The papers in his pocket, though, the only thing that he currently owned other than the clothes on his back, they showed that he hadn’t lost everything. The song that he’d waited years to write, the song that Luca had inspired him to write, it was right there on the paper, black notes and words on pure white paper.
It wasn’t much, but right then, it was what he had. The paper with the song on it, and his best friend. It was something, and he clung to both with everything in him.
* * *
It had been three months since the fire, and at first, Julian had gone back to the bar every day. Then it had slowed down to once every two days, and gradually, he was only getting out there once a week or so.
Maybe it would be healthy if he stopped going at all. It was full of bad memories, after all, but it was also full of really good ones. As the weeks passed and t
urned into months, though, the place became less and less recognizable.
The former bar, the charred remains of it and the rest of the block, were cleaned up within a few weeks. It was only a short while later that the building started, and soon enough, the apartment buildings and shops started to fill in the empty space left by the fire.
Life went on. Julian, staring around at the changes that had been wrought in that area, had to admit that a lot of them were for the better. There was a real effort to clean the place up, to make more housing. More people would have places to live and work because a fire had burned down a dilapidated old building.
Luca was never there. By now, Luca had to be back from Japan, he figured, and he had the idea that Luca would come here to find him. It was, after all, what they had planned.
Julian couldn’t stay there all the time, though. He had found himself a job, nothing much, but a coffee shop near the apartment where he was still living with Ella had needed someone, and it was damned convenient.
It helped him pay rent, and it kept him from basically camping out at the site of the old bar, which was probably a good thing. Probably. Though it was deeply tragic that he and Luca might be missing each other, each of them coming to the bar to find each other.
Or maybe he was just projecting. Maybe Luca had only come here once and had seen the place burned down. There was really no way of knowing.
For a while, Ella had helpfully strained her mind, trying to remember Kiran’s phone number. But neither of them knew Kiran’s last name, or Luca’s for that matter. It all seemed very hopeless.
Ella seemed to move on with her life. She found another job, too, and talked about going back to school. She would always love music, she said, but she had learned that it was too flimsy a thing for her to hang her life on.
Part of Julian wished that he could say the same thing. That he, too, was done with music being anything but a hobby to him. Ella clearly still loved singing, and her warm contralto filled the house more often than not. Once bitten by the music bug, it was impossible to go back, as far as Julian could tell.
He couldn’t let it go. His work in the coffee shop would never be anything but a way to pay the bills. He was the sort of person who needed to have a passion for his job. A lot of people, like Ella, could settle for having a job that paid the rent, and live their lives outside of work according to their passion.
It would be a lot easier if Julian could do that, but he couldn’t. Every day he worked at the coffee shop, he hated it a little bit more. And it wasn’t even a bad job. The customers were nice enough, and he liked his co-workers. It was decently pleasant.
But it wasn’t his passion.
Oddly, though, it wasn’t him who decided to record his song. It was Ella. Or, rather, it was Ella who had the idea, and who talked him into it.
He was just sitting on the couch in the living room that didn’t quite feel like his, looking at the papers. All this work to write the song, and now that he had it in his hands, it was almost painful to look at.
“What’s that?” Ella asked, coming into the room, grabbing the remote and clearly intending to watch something on television. Some Netflix, probably. She was always binge watching some show or another.
“It’s nothing,” Julian tried, but he really should have known better. Ella shot him a bit of a look, settling down on the couch beside him and just waiting, her face expectant.
Damn it, this woman just knew him far too well. And living with her these last few months had only increased that.
“It’s just this thing I wrote,” Julian amended, and Ella arched an eyebrow at him expectantly. She didn’t need to say anything, and she knew it. Julian could read everything clear as day in her eyes.
Sighing, he handed it over and braced himself. Or tried to, anyway. Could he actually be prepared for what she might say about this? If she didn’t like it, if she made fun of him, would he be able to take it?
Not that he thought that she would make fun of him. She teased mercilessly sometimes, but she also knew when things were important enough not to mock someone about it. This was one of those times, and he had no doubt that she would know that.
So he waited, his eyes scanning her face as she read. She hummed out the tune, reading the musical notation, and the relief he felt when she smiled, when her eyes danced with delight, was overwhelming.
“Julian,” she breathed when she had finished reading and softly singing. She turned to him, her eyes meeting his directly. “How long did this take you? This is amazing.”
Julian gave a wide grin, a little self-conscious about how obviously relieved he was and happy with her praise, but he couldn’t have held it back if he’d tried. It just seemed to burst out of him, a ray of heat and light and happiness that he had felt all too rarely in the last few months.
“It was about a week, I guess, by the time it was finished,” Julian said, trying, and failing, to hide how much he was glowing with her praise. This woman’s opinion meant a lot to him, and honestly, if she had been anything other than completely enthusiastic, he wasn’t sure that he would have ever dared to show anyone else anything that he’d written.
It was all still so new to him, and a little fragile. He was too close to the song, having worked on it so intensely, that he honestly had no idea whether it was good or bad. It just was.
“You have to record it.” Ella stood up, hurrying over to where she had an electric keyboard and turning it on. That was one thing about living with another musician, there was definitely no shortage of musical instruments around.
“What, now?” Julian asked, laughing. Meanwhile, Ella continued to bustle around, pulling out a webcam and setting it up so that it was trained right on the piano.
A surge of nerves raced through his body, zinging through him, making his heart pound faster and his breath quicken. It suddenly occurred to him that she was serious, and that she did mean now, and what the hell was that webcam there for, anyway?
“Look, we can put it up, right? And then maybe Luca will see it. Maybe he’ll listen to it, and somehow he’ll find his way back to you.”
Julian smiled a little. Ella was more romantic than she liked to seem, though she was never comfortable with being romantic in her own life. Only in his.
All of which was how he ended up playing his song for the very first time with someone else listening. Only it wasn’t only one person. It was potentially thousands of people, anyone who was on YouTube and who found it.
If Julian thought about that too much, he would go insane. He would pull the plug on all of this before it even really got started.
Part of him was tempted to do just that, but as he sang, he didn’t think about any of the people watching. Not any of the strangers, and not even Ella, his best friend, who was recording the whole thing.
No, he thought about Luca. He sang to Luca. The song flowed out of him like water, and at that moment, it was like he was back with his lover again. He sang, and it was like no one else existed, like he was talking right to Luca.
Before he knew it, the song was up on YouTube, and Julian gazed at the other songs on the site, comforted. There were just so damn many of them. There was no way that his humble contribution would even be noticed, but it had been a big step for him just to put it up.
He had originally had a different title for the song, but when he’d gone to type it in, he’d found himself writing something else entirely. For Luca. That was the title of the song, and when he looked at it, he somehow knew that it was perfect.
* * *
“Julian!”
Ella’s voice woke him early the next morning, and at first, he thought that he must have had to work that day and he’d forgotten to set his alarm. He did that sometimes, probably because, on some level, he really didn’t want to go in to work.
“I’m up, I’m up,” he grumbled, sitting up in bed and rubbing his eyes. The light had an odd quality to it, and he frowned as he glanced at the clock.
It w
asn’t even six in the morning yet. Not a time at which he was normally going to choose to be up. He gave Ella a look, not impressed. If this was some sort of practical joke, he wasn’t into it.
“Ella, what the hell?” he asked, and then winced back as she shoved something into his face, a wide, almost manic grin on her face.
“Read this!” Ella demanded, then practically bounced on her heels as she watched to make sure that he did just that.
“What the hell is worth reading at this time of day?” Julian grumbled, and he might have said more, only that was the time that his eyes registered what it was that he was actually seeing.
It was his song. For Luca. He shot Ella a curious look, but she just arched her eyebrows at him and then indicated with her head that he should keep reading.
So he did, and he frowned, then had to blink. Eventually, he put the phone down, rubbed his eyes to clear them, and then picked it up again.
The words stayed there on the screen, black print on a white background. The video itself had thousands of views, hundreds of likes, and dozens of comments, and all of the ones that he saw were positive.
All of this in less than twelve hours.
Amazing song, can’t believe you wrote this!
Hey, you should record more of your songs!
I WANT MORE!
And so many others. With numb fingers and breathing elevated, Julian closed his eyes and let the phone drop back onto his bed.
“A music critic saw it and shared it, and it’s exploding!” Ella was speaking so fast that her words all almost blurred together. “People love it, Julian!”
God. He had never thought that anyone would actually hear it. He’d dreamed about it, of course, mostly so that Luca had a chance of hearing the words that Julian had written for him, but he’d never actually thought it could happen.
When Ella hugged him, he hugged her tightly right back, and he dared to hope.
