Page 93 of Riot Rules
His door’s right there. Less than ten steps away.
Flashbacks of the night Mara bailed for L.A. hit hard. The party raging downstairs. Wren, fucked up and hugging me, right where I’m standing now. And then seeing Dash’s room for the first time, marveling at the piano next to the wall by the window, and the huge bed, low to the ground, and the books, and everything so innately, intrinsically him.
So much of the progress I’ve made over the past eight months is being whittled away just by me being here. If I don’t leave soon, I’m going to be right back where I started, fatally injured and emotionally bleeding out.
I move robotically, skirting my way around the landing, heading for the final flight of stairs. Only five more steps. Four more. Three. But then I’m right in front of Dash’s door, and all pretense goes flying out of the window.
If his door is locked, then that will be that. I’ll be saved. I’ll go up the stairs, grab my friend, and we’ll be out of here. My head pounds as I turn the handle… and the door swings open.
Shit.
I gasp in a jagged breath, gripping hold of the door jamb. I knew it was going to be hard, but…I wasn’t expectingthis. A striking pain lances between my ribs, piercing the center of my heart. How can it still hurt this bad?
It’s amazing how pain weaponizes our memories and turns them into bombs. I brace myself a second longer, fighting for the hurt to subside. It takes longer than it should for the blinding lightning bolt of agony to dull to a manageable burn. When I feel like I’ve regained enough of myself to stand without the aid of the doorframe, I slowly enter the room, fear eddying around inside the cavity of my chest.
His bed is a mess. Sheets rucked up in a muddle of Egyptian cotton. Comforter hanging off the bed, half on the floor. There’s a shirt on the floor—the one he wore yesterday. God, how pathetic that I know that—balled up into a tight wad, like he purposefully screwed up the expensive fabric and hurled it onto the ground.
The view out of his windows is once again a canvas of black and grey—eldritch shadows that hint at a canopy of trees, and the line of the mountain, rising up in the distance.
Just as I was the first time I came here, I’m drawn to the beautiful well-loved piano in the corner of the room. The objects that capture our hearts the most ring with an echo of us in our absence. When I see the smooth black and white keys, and the bench with the threadbare orange pad atop it, protruding out at an angle, as if Dash pushed away from his composition and left the room in a hurry, every single memory I have of Dash rushes at me, so overwhelming that my legs buckle.
Dash, standing amongst the headstones of Wolf Hall’s eight-grave cemetery, angry and frustrated…
Dash, sitting in a silvery pool of light in the orchestra room, head bowed, eyes closed, fingers flying up and down as he plays...
Dash, biting the finger of a glove, eyes awash with dark intent.“Fine then. Have it your way.”
Dash, holding me in his arms, laughing. “Sorry, Stella. You can’t see planets with the naked eye.”
Dash, at the observatory, his fingers twined in someone else’s hair…
I flinch away from the image, reeling from the bright sting of sorrow that accompanies it. How? How could he do it? I know, of all the possibilities and probabilities that could have unfolded for us as time went on, it was likely that he was going to fuck up. Dash’s cruel reputation and the truths he promised me when we first spoke prepared me for that. But I looked into his eyes and I saw the truth there, too. A truth that overwrote everything else.
He wasn’t lying when he told me that he loved me. He swore he would never hurt me. I believed those words because they were fact. So what happened? What changed to make him do something so mean and hurtful? It…it just doesn’t make sense.
Tears course down my cheeks as I approach the piano. My soul aches. It has for months, throbbing with the questions that I can’t ask, that Iwon’task, because they hurt too much to even raise silently inside my own head.
I run my fingers over the disordered piles of sheet music, studying Dashiell’s scribbled, messy notations across the staves. Dash was always so much better at communicating in this elegant language than he ever was in his mother tongue. Staring down at the variety of notes, the names of which I don’t even remember properly, I find myself wishing that I’d paid more attention in music class. I wish I could read the meaning behind each streak of carbon from his pencil and hear the beauty of the music that he’s created—
My eyes lock, refusing to look anywhere else, when I see the title Dash wrote on the piece of sheet music that sits on the very top of the stack. I can’t even blink.
Stellaluna.
My hands shake as I lift up the piece of paper, my eyes struggling to understand the complicated, frenzied scribbles that sweep across the narrow black lines. My chest squeezes even tighter when I see that the second page of sheet music is labelled with the same title. And the third. And the fourth. I pick up a good chunk of the stack, checking a page halfway down the pile, and that, too, is labelledStellaluna.
I know what this is. It’s the music he played for me at the party. Expanded on. Rearranged. Rewritten and reworked, over and over.
Click.
I drop the sheet music. The pile falls, sheets fluttering to the ground at my feet.
My heartstops.
Out in the hall, another sound breaks the leaden silence. This time it’s a creak. A loud one. A foot treading floorboards.
FUCK!
I move. Somehow, I keep my footfall light. I’ve never run this fast before in my life. I take the stairs three at a time, nearly breaking my neck twice. At the bottom of the stairs, I stick my head out of the front door, scanning the pitch black, searching for any signs of a car, but there’s nothing.
