Page 96 of Crescendo

She folded her hands in her lap. “I’m on sabbatical,” she said quietly. “It’s not like I usually have a lot of time to go flying off to California… not even for the noodles.”

I swallowed, hard, a lump in my throat. Maybe we should have been more careful. Maybe we should have tried to make sure we didn’t develop these feelings for each other. But even now, digging inside me like this, I couldn’t find one damn reason to regret this.

I still hated this, though. Much easier to regret having brought this up, when we could have just gone living in our little daydream instead.

“I see,” I said, finally, quietly. “I guess you’re planning to just go back to medicine after all this… not like it’s the kind of thing you casually share your life with.”

She pursed her lips. “I know,” she said quietly, and she shifted. “Honestly… I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know why people are looking to me to win the competition and have my work played at the Royal Albert Hall. I’m not a musician. And I’m not even trying to be.”

“Just two agreeable months to refresh yourself.”

She winced, looking at me. “Lydia… I don’t want you to think you’ve just been a distraction. If you were—you know. If you werehere,if you were in London, it would be different.”

“Even if I were on the other side of the river,” I said, my voice more wistful than I’d been trying for. She smiled sadly at me.

“I’d cross the river every day to see you if that was what it took. But the ocean’s quite a bit… bigger, isn’t it?”

“I’d cross it,” I said, my voice light, thin. “I’d visit London so often that Adam would get tired of seeing me here and that Melinda would make jokes about me turning posh. Might even visit enough it drives Eliza back to Liverpool, since I’m sure the girl can’t stand to be in the same city as me that much. I’d be here all the time. But… I couldn’t just move. My home would always be in California. My work, my contacts, my… my friends. The ones I’ve known for years and years and years. It’s all there. I wouldn’t—I couldn’t just leave it all behind.”

She pursed her lips, nodding slowly, looking down. After a quiet eternity, she said, “I couldn’t blame you.”

I wish she would. Was it just me who felt so strongly, so intensely, that I wanted Ella to sayplease do, please make it work, I want it to work? Was it just me falling for her, and I was just a sabbatical?

Or was it just that life was never quite so neat and tidy, that it didn’t all resolve itself like a song, and that we all had to make sacrifices and hard decisions?

“I’ll be… sad, you know,” I said. “Not just to not see you anymore, but to not hear you anymore. I’m sure there has to be some way you can still do music. Even just a little. You have a gift, a… a talent. One that it would be criminal to keep from the world.”

She laughed thickly, shaking her head, looking down. “Lydia, you just like me.”

“And Clara saying the same thing? All our teachers? Dodge saying it, Hannah saying it, Bansi saying it?” I shook my head. “Never mind, Bansi would say it about anyone, but—regardless—it’s true, Ella. And you know it is, don’t you?”

She didn’t say anything, staring at where she folded her hands in her lap. I sighed, putting a hand on her back, but she suddenly felt so far away, like a casual touch was the very most I could do.

I guess I wasn’t using a strap-on with her tonight. Damn.

“Nobody can only be one thing,” I said quietly. “Your mind might be in medicine, but your heart is in music. Please… don’t make yourself too small to be seen.”

“It’s not that I want it this way…”

“I know.” I kissed the side of her forehead, standing up with a heavy feeling in my chest. “Well—I’m going to get upstairs and talk to my boring Californian friend. I guess we both ate early, so let me know if you end up wanting to get food or something later.”

“Lydia?” she said, and I paused in the doorway, glancing back at where she looked up at me with that small, sad look in her eyes.

“Yes, Ella?”

“I’m… sorry it’s like this.” She laced her fingers together. “I feel the same way about you, you know?”

What did it matter what any of usfelt,if those feelings only ever stayed buried deep down somewhere? If our actions never followed that?

“I know,” I said, truthfully. “And I don’t regret a thing.”

She smiled sadly at me. “Me neither.”

Ugh, dammit, I hated sad stuff. I trudged upstairs and flung my bag onto the bed once I got into the bedroom and I sat pouting on the foot of the bed like a petulant child, flopping back and staying there for a while before I took my phone and called Melinda.

I was greeted with the dulcet tones of nothing, and I sighed. She was probably in the middle of working. I had unfinished business with the both of them, though, so I went ahead and moved onto my next target, calling Natália, who picked up right away, switching to video call to show off her pão de queijo.

“Lydia!” she said. “Oh my god, I hate you.”

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