Page 71 of Not Another Love Song

She stepped toward him. “Will you play the violin part for me? Here. Now.”

He sat very still. And she waited.

“I don’t play violin anymore.”

Like an answer you memorize. Like reciting your address when you’re lost.

She lifted her brows at him. “Are your violin fingers broken?” She smiled. “Is your shoulder injured? Can’t support the weight?”

He didn’t smile back at her.

She pressed on. “You wrote the violin part.” She nodded over his shoulder at the sheet music on the screen. “You must have—”

“I wrote it in the program. Electronically.”

She stared at him. “So you haven’t played the violin since—”

“In seven years.”

Around the time he’d dropped out of Juilliard, then.

Gwen watched him. He was tense. Like someone had just asked him to swim with sharks. She moved toward the chair he’d sat her in to play the cello and turned it to face him. When she gestured for him to sit, he rose slowly out of the computer chair and walked to her. She opened her case and extended Squeaky to him.

“I can use my electric,” he said, looking over to the wall where Victor was hung.

“No, that’s all right.” She handed him the bow. “I want to hear this on acoustic.”

He took the instrument from her and sat, looking a bit lost. She started the track of her playing the electric cello and sat in his computer chair, turning to watch him.

He waited for sixteen measures, holding her violin delicately, like he could break it if he wasn’t careful. She leaned forward on her knees, like he would do to listen to her.

He lifted the violin to under his chin. His lips pressed together. And then he put the bow to the strings.

The sailing melody, catching the tail end of the arpeggios.

He frowned at something, but Gwen thought it was perfect.

He was perfect.

Harmonizing with her recording. Even though she was on electric, and he was on acoustic, there was something right about it.

Almost like Xander Thorne and Alex Fitzgerald had decided to play together.

He pressed through the quarter-note rhythm. And his eyes slid closed, his body humming with the melody. The way he moved. Flowed. Exactly like he’d tried to teach her with his chest against her back and his thighs tight against hers.

She felt as if she were watching him through a fogged glass. Something hazy in the background. Something fighting to come forward. He was Alex Fitzgerald again. Playing the Chaconne. Asking for channel subscribers with crooked teeth. She felt her breath catch.

She’d found him again.

His eyes closed, squeezing over the arpeggios and fluttering through the smoother sections. Remarkable. With her too-small violin in his huge hands, his fingers still found their way over the strings, dainty as ever, nimble as he’d been years ago.

The ending. She watched as his lips trembled with the vibrato of the strings.

She dragged in a breath and felt her lungs trembling with him. The bow lifted from the strings. The sound ceased.

Gwen stood as he kept his eyes closed, listening to something she couldn’t hear. Her hands dropped onto his shoulders, and her mouth pressed to his. He gasped against her lips, and she slid her fingers into his hair, whispering, “Alex.”

His arms reached up for her waist, circling her, the violin and bow still in his hands. And his body surged forward to her, pressing up and opening his lips.

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