by Kallysten
I stopped abruptly at the question and looked at him with my coldest gaze. The street was, for the most part, deserted, but it was well-lit, and cars were driving by regularly enough. Killing him wouldn’t have been as easy as snapping my fingers, but it wouldn’t have been much of a challenge, either. I put all that into my eyes, and while I didn’t utter a word, he seemed to understand and swallowed hard, his throat clicking audibly. He did not, however, take a step back or run away, which was usually the result when I gave anyone this particular look. Maybe that was the reason why, when I turned away, took three more steps, opened the door of my townhouse, and stepped in, I didn’t close the door behind me.
Or maybe, now that I’d led him home, it would have been a waste of time and effort not to let him in.
By the time I’d shrugged out of my coat, Rachid still hadn’t come in. I was debating slamming the door in his face or compelling him to come inside when he finally did, of his own choice, and closed the door behind him. He did so very carefully, as though afraid to make a noise. He then stood there, both hands pushed deep into his pockets, his shoulders a little hunched. He gave me a half smile and a shrug.
“Well, I’m here,” he said. “And I’m still not sure what for.”
There was something in the way he looked at me that hinted he had a guess, and that guess involved a lot less clothes on both our parts. He confirmed that by taking off his jacket and hanging it up beside my coat. With a snort, I turned my back on him and strode down the hallway toward the music room, my high heels clicking on the wooden floors. I didn’t invite him to follow. If he’d come this far, I supposed he’d come down a corridor, too.
I have had a music room with a piano in every home I have ever owned, and my offspring always take care to think of me when they furnish a new house or apartment, and arrange for a music room, too. Neither of them loves the piano anywhere as much as I do, but they are competent players. I taught them well.
In this house, the music room was tented with dark green velvet that sometimes seemed black depending on the lighting. It made the space feel quite cozy. The baby grand in the center of the room was black, of course, while a handful of sofas, loveseats, and armchairs in various shades of ivory and cream surrounded it. The only other piece of furniture in the room was the writing desk in a corner with a roll-down top, and that was where I directed my steps.
While I shuffled through a few folders, looking for a specific piece I was almost certain was in this desk, I could hear Rachid walk in behind me. Judging by the sound of his footsteps, he had stopped right in the doorway. And judging by his quiet, “Oh,” he was beginning to understand why I had brought him here.
“That’s a beauty,” he murmured. “Bösendorfer?”
I didn’t know many people who could name a piano’s manufacturer with nothing more than a quick glance from a few feet away.
“Give it a try if you want,” I said as nonchalantly as I could muster, still searching through folios full of half-completed pieces and snatches of melodies that needed more work.
I’m not in the habit of leaving things unfinished, but some pieces need more time than others to develop fully. Sometimes, they are just meant to match a person I haven’t met yet or an event that hasn’t happened. Sometimes, I need to reflect on that person or event for a while. It’s all right. There’s no rush. I have all the time in the world to finish every piece of music I have ever started.
Behind me, Rachid began to play. They were only scales at first, going up and down the keyboard, a fast glide of his fingers as though he were practicing. He did it three times and then, abruptly, switched to a sonata—Beethoven, if I wasn’t mistaken. I threw a glance back over my shoulder, amused.
“You played my music for hours in a bar full of strangers, but now that you’re in my home and on my piano you’re playing Beethoven? Seriously?”
He chuckled.
“Well, I’d have been a lot more reluctant to play your pieces if I had known you were listening.”
“How come?” I asked, browsing through another folio—finally the one I’d been looking for.
He went through another few bars before answering, and by then I’d turned around and leaned back against the desk, the folio still open in my hands but my attention on him. I’ve never been a big fan of Beethoven, and it has less to do with his music than with the man himself. We met once, very briefly, and I can’t say I cared much for him.
Listening to Rachid’s rendition, however, I could forget the composer and take in the music and nothing more than the music. Every note, every nuance, every emotion was coming through crystal clear. This was what music was supposed to be: a hand that touched you in the deepest, most secret part of your soul, that caressed and soothed you so that, when the last note finished quivering in the air, you felt at peace with the world around you.
“They’re your notes,” he said in a soft voice that barely rose over the beauty he was coaxing from the piano. “If I hit a chord wrong, no one in the cafe would know any better. I can pretend it’s my interpretation of the piece, my spin on it. Maybe Ludwig would turn around in his grave if I did this—” He added a few extra flourish notes to the next bar. “But I’ll never have to face him and explain myself. However, if you’re right there…”
He looked up at me with a half smile and let the end of that thought hang between us, carried by the last few notes of the sonata. They lingered in the air, an almost tangible presence. Vampires don’t get goose bumps, but at that moment my body didn’t seem to care.
“If you’d played my music poorly,” I said after clearing my throat, “you wouldn’t be here now. And you wouldn’t ever have played another note I wrote. I’d have made sure of it.”
He gave a little laugh.
“And you wonder why I’m nervous about playing your music now.”
Rolling my eyes at him, I pulled the three sheets from the folio and walked over to the piano.
“False modesty doesn’t become you,” I said, mildly chastising. “You’re good. You’re better than good. And you know it. Stop pretending otherwise and play this.”
I’d sat at the end of the bench as I spoke, and now I set the sheets down on the stand in front of him. He looked at them, then at me, his eyebrows arching high.
“So, I tell you I’m nervous about playing in front of you, and your answer is to drop a new piece in my lap? It’s yours, I’m guessing?”
“It’s mine, yes. And it’s not in your lap; it’s on the stand. Now play.”
As his eyebrows arched a little more, I was taken by an awful doubt.
“You can sight read, right?” I asked, remembering that he hadn’t had any sheet music in front of him at the bar. Maybe he learned by ear.
Or maybe I had just insulted him enough to get him to start playing.
With an offended huff, he turned away from me and leaned closer to the sheets while pulling a pair of round, metal-rimmed glasses from the front pocket of his shirt. He settled them on his nose and studied the first sheet for a few seconds, his lips moving soundlessly, his thumb tapping the rhythm against his thigh. Then, without a word, he put his hands on the keyboard and started playing.
Almost fifty years had passed since I had heard that piece on a piano. I sometimes heard it in my mind, or at least bits and parts of it, but I hadn’t played it since the last time I’d been in Paris. Hearing it come to life so expertly under his fingers would have left me breathless, had I needed to breathe. Instead, it caused something to tighten painfully inside me as I remembered, or maybe truly understood for the first time, what this piece was about.
I often have a story in mind when I write music. A story, a person, a particular place or time; more often than not, these are the triggers that prompt a new composition. Not so for this one. I’d just let the music come to me and hadn’t let myself think about what it meant. Listening to Rachid play this slow melody, almost a lament, I finally knew what it was about. I knew that, when it was finished, it w
ould have a title. And I knew that title would be ‘Ethan.’
I’m not one to dwell on the past, but every note, every chord reminded me of my dead offspring’s smile, of his laugh, both so full of warmth, and both of which had become so rare as time passed and until his death.
Rachid’s fingers stilled on the keyboard in the middle of a bar, the same way I’d stopped, decades earlier, frustrated by my inability to find the perfect way to end this piece. I’d left Paris the very same night and hadn’t returned until now.
“It’s not finished,” he said, an edge of disappointment in his words. “Or is it missing the next sheet?”
I didn’t reply. Not in words, at least. I scooted on the bench, sliding closer to the center—and incidentally closer to Rachid. He must have understood what I meant to do because he withdrew his hands to his lap, leaving the keyboard to me. I started at the beginning of the last complete measure, half-closing my eyes and playing from memory rather than looking at the notes written down in front of me. By the time I reached the end, where Rachid had needed to stop, I knew what the next note was.
And the ones after that.
My fingers didn’t hesitate or slow down. I kept playing, working in the main musical theme of the piece and changing it, little by little, until I’d reached the perfect ending for this piece, left incomplete for fifty years. The wound of Ethan’s death started to close, just a tiny bit. It would take time before it didn’t hurt anymore, but I’d taken one step tonight, and I didn’t know what surprised me the most: that I’d never realized until that moment just how much I needed to heal, or that it was a stranger, someone about whom I didn’t know much more than his name, who had helped me see it.
A stranger who was now staring at me with wide eyes.
“Did you just…” He blinked twice. “Did you compose the end just now? Like that? On the fly?”
“After being unable to for fifty years, yes.”
He blinked again. “Aren’t you writing it down? Or recording it or something?”
I shook my head and settled my fingers on the keyboard again.
“I’m not going to forget. I never forget a note. I’ll write it down later when I have time.”
It wasn’t to show off that I started to play the piece from the start without looking at the score. Well, it wasn’t only to show off. I wanted to hear the whole thing again, from start to finish, and maybe change a note or two, but probably not more than that. What I didn’t expect was that Rachid would join in.
At first, he only set one hand on the keyboard and started to add in a few complementary notes following the main theme. When I didn’t object, his second hand joined in as well.
Had he been adding flourishes or jazzing things up, I would have stopped him right away. It’s not that I don’t like jazz, per se; it’s just not what I write. He wasn’t changing the melody or beats, however, merely echoing them, reinforcing them. And it happened again. Like at the bar, like a few moments earlier, I listened to his playing and I had the feeling that he understood my music, understood me in a way no one ever had before. Maybe not even myself.
It sounds over the top, doesn’t it? Believe me, I’m the first one to realize that. And I don’t even like having to say it so plainly. But if I’m going to tell this story, I might as well tell all of it, and that was how I felt: exposed. Under a bright shining light. Open.
And, I have to admit it, curious, too. I looked at Rachid’s fingers dancing alongside mine, their rhythm perfect, their gentleness as they pressed down each key exquisite, and I had to wonder how those same fingers would feel on my body. Would he know where to touch and when? Would he draw notes from me as lovely as the ones he pulled from the piano? Would he reveal my soul, then, too? Would I get a peek at his?
I think I told you before that I don’t usually care to get to know the humans I feed from, but I felt like I already knew him: the same way he exposed me when he played my music, he revealed himself, too. And I couldn’t wait to bite him and see if he tasted as good as he sounded.
It was too soon that we reached the end of this piece again. Much too soon.
“Keep playing,” I demanded as the last note was fading away, and while I did not try to compel him, he replied as readily as though I had.
He didn’t ask what he should play next and just segued into a new piece as easily as though it were a set he’d practiced to perform at the bar. He played another one of my compositions, one I hadn’t heard him play tonight but whose tempo complemented the music we’d just finished playing together, although its mood was brighter and lighter than that somber piece. And I knew, then, that however unconsciously, he did understand me and my music. How else could you explain that, after I’d shown him a piece composed about one of my offspring, he’d moved on to something composed about another one of them?
This was Lilah’s serenade, written after she’d left Morgan and me for a few years at the turn of the previous century because she’d fallen head over heels for a man. She’d denied it, of course; she always pretended she only wanted to ‘play human’ for a few years and didn’t truly care for whomever she left us for. But we’d seen it happen five times over the centuries, and every time she’d had the same look in her eyes, however much she tried to claim otherwise. She and Morgan were much more similar than either of them would have admitted, and neither of them could fool me. How I managed to end up with such romantic offspring, when I am anything but, is a mystery to me.
Stopping the pointless meandering of my mind, I focused on the music and how smoothly, how flawlessly it rose under Rachid’s touch.
“Nice choice,” I said, leaning a little more against him. I rested one hand on the keyboard and accompanied him, the way he had accompanied me, with just a few notes in counterpoint to the melody.
“I have pieces for four hands,” I murmured. “If you’d care to really play with me.”
“I’d like that, yes,” he replied, smiling as he tilted his head toward me.
I think he only realized at that moment how close I now was to him, and he licked his lips as his gaze dropped to my mouth. Distracted, he lost his rhythm and missed a couple of notes. I clucked my tongue.
“Come on, pay attention to what you’re doing. I thought you were worried about playing badly for me?”
Say what you will, but it is my long-held belief that there are few things quite as endearing as a grown man blushing. On Rachid’s caramel complexion, it was simply lovely to watch all that blood color his cheeks, the tips of his ears, his neck, and the triangle of skin exposed by the open collar of his shirt. I wondered how far down all that beautiful color went. I wondered enough, actually, that I decided to find out.
Removing my hand from the keys, I reached for the first button of his shirt. It easily came undone, as did the next one. Rachid faltered a little in his playing, losing his rhythm again, but another cluck of my tongue was enough to get him back on track.
For a second, I wondered if it was worry that had caused that slight misstep, but there was no trace of fear in his scent. Good. Earlier, I’d all but threatened him, but that had been before he brought back to life a melody I’d been unable to finish for so long. Did he understand I wouldn’t hurt him, or was it his familiarity with vampires that kept him calm? I hoped it was the former.
To the sound of chords not so much played as they were caressed into existence, I slid a hand inside the opening I’d created in his shirt and pressed it, palm down and fingers spread, against the skin of his upper chest. He was warm, warmer than he should have felt, even as devoid of heat as my hand was. Short of stripping him down—and while I fully intended to get there at some point, there was no rush—it was confirmation enough that his blush extended further south.
All that blood roused just for me…
I didn’t withdraw my hand right away. Instead, I moved it to the left until my palm rested over his heart. It was beating faster than the tempo of the music, but as soon as I found it, I forgot all about i
t, having discovered something much more interesting: the tips of my fingers were brushing against his nipple—and against the metal ring attached to it.
With a hum of surprise, I pushed at the ring with a fingertip, causing Rachid to shiver, although he didn’t miss a note this time. My hand moved to the right, but his other nipple, while it tightened against my questing fingers, was free of adornments. I pinched it gently once before returning to the left to tug at the ring and play with it. In a moment, I’d get a good look at it, but for now I enjoyed exploring the metal, warmed up by his skin, with nothing more than my fingertips.
It was a full circle, smooth, not very thick, wide enough that I could slip my thumb through it—then again, I have small hands, so that didn’t mean the ring was particularly wide. As I flicked the ring back and forth and ran my fingers along it, delicate shivers coursed through Rachid’s body. His nipple was a tight peak against the ring, and I imagined flicking my tongue against it and through the metal. I’d had lovers with piercings before, and they always were marvelously responsive to the smallest sensations.
They also rarely limited themselves to a single piercing…
“Where else are you pierced?” I asked, intrigued.
Still playing—though I admit I’d lost the thread of the composition—he turned a tiny smile toward me.
“I guess that’s for me to know and for you to find out.”
If that wasn’t meant to be a challenge, it definitely sounded like one to me, and I’d never been one to back down from a challenge, especially one coming from someone six centuries younger than me. Abandoning his nipple ring for now, I dropped a hand to his crotch, foregoing anything resembling finesse. When I cupped his cock through his pants, finding it half-hard after my ministrations to his nipple, he took in a sharp inhalation and bungled the next few notes, finally stopping just as my fingers found what I’d been looking for: the unyielding feel of metal against flesh.
