Where Dreams Unfold

by M. L. Buchman

  “The likes of you aren’t for the likes of me, Mr. Cullen. You should go home to your wife and children, I’m sure they’re missing you.”

  “Wait!” he called before she could turn away once more. “Just wait.”

  So she did. Standing there all alone, the lost girl fighting off a shiver on a warm sunny day, her jacket still clutched closed across her chest. The wind still toyed with the tips of her hair.

  “I’m not married.” Where the hell had that come from? He wanted to work with Perrin, not bed her.

  She eyed him skeptically.

  “She died four years ago. A drunk hit her with a car. Broad daylight in a crosswalk.” God Almighty! Why was he ripping his guts out in front of this woman? It almost killed his heart all over again to say the words out loud.

  The change was instantaneous. Sympathy poured out of her as her hand shifted from holding her jacket closed to holding her palm over her heart.

  “I’m so sorry. And I was teasing you about— You must hate me.”

  “No.” Bill closed his eyes, not knowing what he was feeling. “No, I don’t hate you. It’s just hard sometimes.”

  Perrin took a step closer and rested a hand on his arm. “You’re such a good father.”

  “What? What makes you say that?” He screwed up more days than he didn’t. His daughter was drifting away and he didn’t know why or how to bring her back. He didn’t spend enough time with Jaspar. They were both growing up so damn fast that he—

  “Because it’s hard for you. If it wasn’t, it would mean you didn’t care. Trust me, I know.” For a moment longer, the sad-eyed girl patted his arm. Then she began brushing at his shoulders, as if dusting him off.

  “What? What are you doing?”

  She dusted harder, squinting her eyes as if it were hard work. She moved around him until she was practically pounding him on the back.

  He tried to turn to face her, but she shoved against his shoulder to keep him in place and continued her way around him. Passers-by were eyeing them strangely. When she arrived once more in front of him, she brushed her hand lightly a few times over his heart.

  “There.”

  “There what?”

  “There,” Perrin now stood quite close before him, those sad eyes brightening. “You can now leave all that ‘bad father’ crap behind, I brushed it off you.”

  Bill could feel his jaw slacken, but clamped it shut before he looked even dumber than he felt. But he couldn’t help looking down to see what now lay at his feet. Nothing but the gray concrete of the walkway.

  “You think it’s as simple as that?” What kind of a ditzy—

  “Of course!” Perrin chirped merrily. “Wait. It didn’t work? What’s wrong with you?” She moved even closer and lifted up on his eyebrows and inspected one eye and then the other, her fingers cool on his brow. “That’s strange.”

  “What?” He was having trouble breathing she was so near. Her eyes were an incredibly pure blue. And the way she smelled. He’d expected perfume or at least an exotic-scented soap. Instead she just smelled immensely, deliciously female.

  “I have a terrible diagnosis for you, Mr. Cullen. Are you ready for it?”

  This should be good. He nodded with only a little hesitation.

  “You’re human. I can’t just brush that off you. Not even the Empress can do that.” Then she grew solemn. “If it were so easy, Bill, we’d all be so much happier, wouldn’t we? I’ll see you at rehearsal tomorrow. And I’m expecting you and your children in my shop tomorrow evening for dinner. I’ll get the pizza.”

  His light touch on her arm stopped her from turning. Toe to toe he let himself enjoy the sensation of being so close to her.

  “I think, Ms. Perrin Williams, that you may well be the most startling person I’ve ever met.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “You should, I think… Yes. You should.” He really was a lost cause. He couldn’t even pay a beautiful and kind woman a decent compliment without screwing it up.

  She rested a hand on his cheek. Then she leaned forward and rested her cheek against his.

  An electric shock rippled through him, like a static discharge on a doorknob, but without the pain. A sense of simple wonder coursed down through him. The small pleasure of being touched by an attractive woman for the first time since Adira. That’s all it was.

  Perrin pulled back, but didn’t remove her hand from his other cheek. She studied him carefully from just inches away. Then she leaned in and kissed him.

  Bill forgot to breathe, or think, or anything. He simply marveled at the sweet tenderness of her lips on his. He leaned into it: the warmth, the sensation, the trust. He didn’t know which overwhelmed him the most, but there was no question that “overwhelm” was the operative word here.

  Whether the kiss lasted a second or a handful of minutes, he’d never know. He just knew that when Perrin once again moved back, she’d left a taste of her behind. A taste that he couldn’t compare to anyone. Not to Adira, not to his first-ever kiss. This was wholly Perrin Williams. Whoever in the world that might be.

  “Well,” she whispered from a bare inch away, “that was certainly interesting.”

  “You sound like the Empress, but you look like the wacky designer.”

  “I’ll try switching that.” She composed a serious expression that he wasn’t buying for an instant. “We gonna have ta try that kiss again some day soon. Because if that was real… Holy Shit, Batman!”

  “Oh yeah!” Most definitely. “Real soon.”

  Chapter 5

  Perrin sat in the rehearsal space on the upper level of the Seattle Opera House about a mile from the Emerald City Opera’s offices. It was a beautiful space, nearly the same size as the main stage without all the extra space off to the back of the stage and the sides that Bill told her were called wings. The rehearsal space was actually on the top floor of the building, off the side of the upstairs lobby behind an unmarked door. Decorated in a soft beige, it had been turned golden by the tall windows at one end letting in the Seattle sunshine. A shining black grand piano replaced the orchestra.

  “This is just our first sing-through,” Bill had informed her. “We need to start getting the cast comfortable with the new music. If this were a repertoire opera, they would arrive three weeks before the opening rather than six and we’d move right into staging.”

  Perrin sat between Wilson Jervis and Melanie in a row of folding chairs along one wall. The principal singers sat in a circle in the middle of the stage, along with the orchestra conductor, the director, Bill, and the Chorus Master who would sing all of the minor roles for now.

  Bill had greeted her briefly, barely offering a smile, back in his bustling Overlord role. Perrin could be okay with that. One kiss didn’t change the world. She wouldn’t even try to count how many men she’d been in and out of love with over the years. Not as many as Jo and Cassidy thought by a long shot, Perrin enjoyed giving them a good story and something to worry about, but more than she’d care to admit.

  Some part of her was irritated at Bill’s apparent lack of ongoing interest. That kiss had certainly rocked her charts. The Tragic Prince, all his hopes and desires and needs had been wrapped up in that kiss. That she was the woman who had drawn that out of Bill Cullen ranked as a startling concept.

  That she had lost herself in that kiss, losing track of where she was and who she was, and simply been present in that moment was an even greater surprise. The one thing Perrin never was? Out of control. Deep inside, she had a very rigid grip on who she was and what she would do.

  But for a kiss like Bill’s, perhaps losing a bit of her control wasn’t a bad thing.

  The more she watched Bill as he organized the rehearsal, the less put out she felt about his simple greeting.

  Everyone came to him with questions. He had two assistants who
constantly brought him questions, some about Ascension, some about the Turandot closing this weekend. Singers took cajoling. The writer—the librettist she’d been corrected—and the composer were both there because it was a new opera. The former, a thin young man who practically shimmered with nerves and the latter a staunch woman who apparently thought lyrics were a waste of time and should be changed to fit her music or better yet, removed entirely so that they didn’t interfere with her creation. Clearly they were not on speaking terms and Bill had to handle all communication between them.

  All of this took Bill’s attention. As she watched him, she began to see quite how good he was at what he did. The conductor had heavily marked his score with questions, but Bill had found a way for the composer to work with him rather than slugging him as she seemed more prone to do. The singers actually cared what order they sat in around the circled chairs. One man was so big that a sturdier chair had to be found.

  When Renata Donatello made her entrance, the room had gone quiet as all attention shifted to her. Renata had taken one look at the Empress’ dress and insisted on wearing it to the rehearsal. Perrin and Jerimy had made some quick alterations this morning, thankfully ones that didn’t require rebuilding the whole costume, then added the red lining. The compliments that swirled about the room upon Renata’s grand entrance left Perrin feeling a little giddy.

  “That is the dress I want,” Melanie leaned in to whisper. “I want to be powerful like that. That’s how every woman wants to feel. You have such incredible skills, my friend.”

  Now Perrin was having trouble breathing. To have one of New York’s most successful models say such things… Perrin could only marvel at what it took to actually feel a stamp of approval, as if what she’d done for over a decade didn’t count until this moment.

  Two years ago, she’d still been struggling on her own. Now she had practically abandoned the front of the shop, adding a manager and an assistant, and was spending most of her time designing and building. Not that she was complaining, that’s what she loved best, it was just surprising.

  And to have a woman who was constantly clothed in the finest designer labels insist on having one of her dresses… It made Perrin feel oddly capable and suddenly twice as uncertain, as if she were faking being a designer as hard as she was faking being even close to normal.

  Melanie had a point though. While the Empress’ dress wouldn’t be quite right for her, something closely related would work. Melanie was too sensual a woman for the austere look of the Empress. The punch of power would look good on her, but she needed something other. Perrin flipped to a fresh page on her pad and began sketching a few ideas while Bill organized the singers.

  Perrin became focused on the design, building layer upon layer of detail for the dress she’d design for Melanie until she realized that a rush of sound was carrying her forward. She looked up startled to see the singers already well into the first act.

  Opera had never been part of her repertoire. She preferred a good band for dancing and didn’t really care what era. Blue Scholars, The Band Perry, and The Black Keys shared her playlists with Maroon 5, Madonna, and Styx. Nothing had prepared her for the powerful wall of sound that the opera singers produced with just their voices.

  It was in Italian, which didn’t help her much, but it didn’t matter. Renata was not ordering around Carlo; instead the Empress was crashing a mandate down upon the Prince’s head. When the barrel-chested deep bass of Geoffrey Palliser joined the fray, the room practically shook with the Overlord’s derision. The Prince’s soaring tenor fought for freedom, but found little space between the wall of the Empress’ power and the bulldozer of the Overlord’s driving rhythms.

  It was so completely different from anything she’d heard before it was hard to make sense of it. Even the symphonies that Jo and Cassidy had occasionally dragged her to were no comparison. These weren’t instruments, these were people. They weren’t hurling music at each other, but rather it was a battle of pure emotion expressed through singing.

  The sound swept her along. The mezzo-soprano Princess, her lower-voiced, contralto Maid-servant Confessor, and the high-coloratura True Love vied for the Prince’s attention. The audience’s hopes and fears would swing back and forth between them. Whichever one triumphed, it would reshape the future of the kingdom, perhaps alter the fabric of the very world.

  The final five-voiced chord of Act I crashed Perrin back into her seat and the dim world of reality. It took her a moment to reorient herself in the rehearsal studio space. Several of the singers were talking about the roles, but Carlo and Geoffrey, apparently old friends, were catching up on the latest Italy versus England soccer rivalries.

  “What do you think?” Bill was squatting before her chair and looking at her with the kind smile she’d been missing earlier.

  “I think I’m in love!” Perrin could still feel the sound of the music vibrating through her.

  “Not with Carlo, I hope. I might get jealous.”

  Perrin placed a finger on the center of his forehead and pushed until he fell back on his butt.

  # # #

  “Wow! This is so cool!” Tammy had taken up her brother’s adjective.

  Jaspar, on the other hand, had only one comment to make about Perrin’s shop, “Ugh! Girl clothes.” And then he’d immediately put on his best bored look, one that Bill knew all too well. Though his son did stop to admire his reflection from the dress made of little mirrors. Bill convinced himself that the mannequin’s chest was simply the largest expanse for Jaspar to observe himself in and that Bill shouldn’t read anything deeper into it. When Jaspar started making faces at himself, Bill felt better. A little.

  Tammy took her time. She’d spent enough afternoons down in the Costume Shop with Jerimy that she actually inspected how some of the clothes were made. She “just happened” to pass close to him at one point during her inspection to ask him a question.

  “Are these really good, Dad?”

  “Yeah,” he acknowledged just as Perrin came over from chatting volubly with a customer now departing in a brand-new blue silk jacket that was clearly a custom fit. “Really good.”

  Tammy nodded and wandered off while Bill inspected the vision headed his way.

  Perrin wore a blazer of green and yellow that made her look like nothing so much as a leprechaun. She even sported a bright green hat, shaped like that of a racy secret agent, slanting forward and left, partly covering one eye. When she approached, he saw that she still wore the opera t-shirt beneath the blazer. It made for a deep pseudo-cleavage of black that reached to her sternum, without being the least bit indecent. No one should look good in such an outfit, but she certainly did.

  She greeted the kids and then leaned close enough that only he would hear. “I thought about not wearing the t-shirt just to make you crazy.” And then in the same breath but a louder voice, “Come on, kids. Let me show you something cool I just made for someone getting married in a couple weeks.”

  The kids followed her happily enough.

  Bill tried, but couldn’t. She’d riveted him right to the floor with the image of her in nothing but that deeply plunging blazer.

  # # #

  “Pizza as promised!” Tammy followed Ms. Williams as she led them like a girl scout troop into the back room carrying the just-delivered boxes.

  Jasp had offered Ms. Williams an “okay I guess” on the new wedding clothes she’d showed them. Then he’d rolled his eyes at Tammy in long-suffering pain. Dad had taught them good manners, but he and Tammy both knew Jasp’s pretending to have any interest at all was complete baloney.

  “She’s pretty,” Jasp offered up just in case Ms. Williams had caught his eye roll.

  Tammy couldn’t look away from the female mannequin, all dressed up for her wedding. It was like the dress in the photo on Dad’s bedside table. Well, not really, but it was enough to remind her of what it had fel
t like to have a mother and how much she missed her every day.

  Her dad was acting all weird when he finally joined them in the back room. And Ms. Williams was looking awfully pleased with herself. Then she set the pizza boxes on the big table. They hadn’t even spoken together, never mind anything else. Tammy had made sure to stay close to Ms. Williams, just to be sure. But she must have missed something that was going on.

  “I ordered two pizzas. Half a pepperoni for Jaspar, because all boys like pepperoni. Half a combo with extra meat for your dad because he probably eats too much of what the kids want and not enough of what he wants.” The boys dug right in.

  She turned to Tamara, “I got us half veggie and half Hawaiian. How’d I do, Tamara?”

  “Everyone calls me Tammy.”

  Ms. Williams took a slice of the veggie and looked at her over it. “I don’t know. I think I’ll stick with your full name, it sort of fits you better. You’re no longer a little girl.”

  “Only Mom ever called me Tamara, Ms. Williams.”

  Ms. Williams didn’t look embarrassed, or apologize like other adults Tammy pushed back against.

  “Your call. But it sounds like your mom was a smart lady. I’m Perrin by the way. I have no idea who that Ms. Williams person is.” She actually shuddered which made it kind of funny.

  “Tamara is okay, I guess.” Then she looked away. She needed to think about Perrin being all human and normal. She didn’t talk down to her at all, which was weird for an adult. It could be a setup, but it didn’t feel like one.

  Jasp and Dad had each taken huge bites. They were grinning at each other like idiots as they both hooted out cooling breaths over too-hot pizza.

  “Well, you certainly nailed those two lame-os.”

  Tammy took a small bite of her pizza, Hawaiian was her absolute favorite, then figured out how to tell if the woman was being fake-nice to a child. She kept her voice low, so that the lame-os wouldn’t hear.

  “Have you kissed him yet?”