Page 96 of Sunrise By the Sea

Tonight, she didn’t want to feel cold.

She checked her bra quickly. No. Don’t be stupid.

She looked at her face in the mirror though. Her cheeks were rosy pink, her eyes were sparkling from the Champagne. She looked . . .

She looked all right, she told herself firmly. If she was talking to a friend instead of herself she would be so honest and so kind, and say such nice things and tell her she looked lovely.

‘You look lovely,’ she breathed.

She didn’t change her bra. She did use a bit of mouthwash.

Then she grabbed the laptop, her fingers slightly shaky.

Just as she did so, she heard from next door the gentlest, sweetest melody playing. It sounded like a lullaby, soft and simple, but repeating, the tune twisting round and back on itself, changing and become deeper and more melancholic, or lighter and frothier, every time it moved up and down the piano. It was completely hypnotic and quite lovely.

She was about to head back, but before she did she leaned, full length, against the wall, spreading out her arms and her fingers. She could feel the vibrations of the music through the plaster, feel it move through her whole body. She felt, suddenly, filled with it, consumed with it; the voices in her head quelled, simply following the tumbling cascading melodies reaching out to her in a perfect moment of knowing that all she had to do was to walk two steps down and two steps up and she could fall into the house and the arms of the man who could make that sound on a piano; and if he could make something so pure and so beautiful out of an old piano, what on earth could he make out of her?

Chapter Fifty-seven

She pushed at the open door softly, trying not to disturb him. He turned round immediately, his hands leaving the keys.

‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t stop.’

He kept staring at her, unable to express how much those were words he wanted to hear. There was no music in front of him.

‘You wrote that?’ she said quietly.

He shrugged. ‘I write it now.’

‘That’s amazing.’

He smiled wryly. ‘I make it pretty for you.’

‘You don’t have to do that!’

‘. . . because you are pretty.’

She held up the laptop.

‘Are you sure?’

He stopped playing then.

‘Babushka? Of course. I want approved.’

‘Yes.’

She opened the computer and they sat on the sofa far apart, then as they realised they couldn’t both get on the camera at the same time, they squished up closer. Marisa was suddenly very aware of his leg next to hers; his thigh felt enormous. All of him was so very solid. She resisted a sudden, very strong instinct to touch his leg. But she very gently felt the pressure of his against hers; she returned it. Even this, the briefest of touches, of connections between them, sent her heart rate sky high; made her tingle all over, unable to be conscious of anything else happening.

Her hands fumbled opening the laptop; she needed two shots at remembering her password even as he politely averted his eyes which made her giggle.

Finally, leaning over him – and conscious, at all moments, of every single thing about him – she got onto Skype, and looked up to see if the little green light indicated her grandmother was online.

‘It isverylate,’ she said.

He looked at her.

‘Ah, you are right,’ he said. ‘It is such a shame you must go home.’

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