Page 65 of Riot Reunion
Normally I wouldn’t be able to tell her. Dash’s choice of music has always been off the wall. The guy’s never been fond of playing other composers’ pieces. Not even the classics. He much prefers to write his own stuff. But this? He told me about this piece while I was downstairs earlier making coffee. “Some guy over in Washington wrote it. Some kind of savant cello player,” I tell her absently. “He’s just a couple of years older than us, apparently. He's teaching the course Dash was trying to get into.”
“Hmm,” Elodie mutters sleepily. “It’s so beautiful. Sad. I bet he wrote it for a girl. It’s a shame Dash didn’t get the spot. Is he bummed out about it?”
“Nah. He said he knew as soon as he saw the other guy’s name on the program that he was shit out of luck. He kind of expected it.” The guy who wrote the music Dash is playing downstairs sent Dash an email, telling him that he believed Dashshouldhave been given the spot. Said he was disappointed they wouldn’t be working together on the course. I think that had been recognition enough for my friend.
A fresh hail of raindrops batters against the floor-to-ceiling windows. Overhead, the giant beaten copper dome above my bed takes the day’s grim, gunmetal grey daylight and turns it bright, filling it with warmth, scattering shards of light up the walls, sending them dancing over the plasterwork. A particularly pretty overlapping square of light falls over Elodie’s serene face, illuminating her cheekbones and her thick black eyelashes, fanned out against her pale skin.
The first time I saw Little E, it was in a photograph. She’d been breathtaking. Blonde-haired, though. Ever since she dyed her hair back to its natural dark color, she’s looked even more stunning. More herself. Right now, she looks like Sleeping Beauty, arranged so perfectly in amongst the welter of the sheets we fucked in this morning. I could stare at her until the end of time and never tire of seeing her face.
“You’re watching me again, aren’t you?” she whispers.
“I am.” She knows that she’s my obsession. I don’t hide it from her. What’d be the point?
“Do you love me?” she whispers.
“More than you know.”
She smiles—such a peaceful expression—her eyes still closed. “More than the sun?”
“Youarethe sun.”
This makes her smile grow. “More than the moon?”
“Fuck the moon. The envious moon. Already sick and pale with grief. That thou, her maid, art far more—”
“Don’t quote Shakespeare atme, Wren Jacobi. I’m being serious.”
“So am I. I’m themostserious when I’m quoting Shakespeare.”
“What about poetry? You love me more than poetry?”
My smile fades. A somberness falls over me, the gentlest, most heartbreaking of aches. A pain, lancing me through my chest, because I will never be able to convey to this beautiful creature precisely what she means to me. It’s the greatest injustice of all time. “More than Yeats,” I tell her softly. “More than Byron. More than Shelley, and Coleridge, and Wordsworth. More than any pretty thing that was ever put to paper, Little E. You eclipse it fucking all.”
***
ELODIE
I open my eyes,searching for him. He’s been so distracted all morning, but this change in tone worries me a little. He doesn’t normally sound so morose when paying me a compliment. And this one was such a doozy, too; Wren lives for poetry. For him to say such a thing…it filled me with a sense of falling not unlike the dizzying weightlessness you get right before careening down the vertical section of a rollercoaster.
He stands, framed by the window, his dark, wavy hair tousled about his face. The strong, proud line of his nose, along with the angular line of his jaw and his high cheekbones, are cast into silhouette by the truly miserable day on the other side of the huge panes of glass behind him. The faded Metallica t-shirt he’s wearing is one of his favorites. It’s thin as hell, covered in paint and bleach spatters, pock-marked with tiny holes around the hem, but that doesn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. Despite the cold, he decided on black basketball shorts today over his usual jeans. My breath catches at the sight of him, just like it always does. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at him without having to tamp down a raging storm of butterflies swirling behind my ribcage.
In his hand, he clenches hold of a thick paintbrush, wielding it like it’s a weapon, a dagger, and he’s about to use it to stab the canvas propped on the easel next to him.
“If you love me that much, then you won’t mind answering a question for me,” I say.
His eyes become distant for a moment. That used to happen a lot when we first met. He’d retreat back inside himself, pulling away, hiding behind a cold scowl or an extra dark pair of Wayfarer sunglasses. A twinge of sadness tugs at me—that I would see him retreating now, here, after all of the shit we’ve been through. He knows what I’m going to ask him, though. He’s too smart not to. And he’s not relishing the prospect of havingthisconversation. Setting down the paintbrush on the ledge at the bottom of the easel, he pads barefoot across his room and stands beside me next to the bed, his features stormy and distant.
“The details of it, then?” he asks. “What exactly happened between us? Why he’s so fucking hell-bent on having me?”
I nod, matching his solemnity. Is it wrong to feel so vindicated? That he’ll admit to me at long last that it was more than just a fling between him and Fitz? At least, that it was more forFitz, anyway.
Wren groans, sitting down on the bed stiffly, as if he’d rather be doing anything else. I know how much he’ll hate going over this; it means the world to me that he will. “He was such an asshole when he showed up to teach at Wolf Hall. Cold to Dash. Rude to Pax. Just…just a fuckingdick. He loved baiting them. It was an unspoken agreement between the three of us that we’d teach him a lesson for being such an arrogant cunt. The guys would raise hell in class. They were working up to something bigger. Probably wanted to try and get him fired or some shit. I’d already noticed he wasn’t as shitty to me as he was to them. He was definitely preoccupied with me.”
I raise my eyebrows at him.
“Okay. He wasverypreoccupied with me. His interest in me was different. At first, I had no idea that it was sexual. He cleared that up pretty fast, though. Had me meet him in the gazebo in the middle of the maze and basically taunted me into fucking him.”
It’s never fun, hearing about your boyfriend’s past sexual exploits. Even less fun when they involve a grown-ass professor who wound up being a deranged psychopath. I grit my teeth against the tangle of emotions that slam around the inside of my head, dispelling a confusing, complicated form of jealousy. I asked him to tell me about this. He can’t be faulted for being blunt when it comes to the finer details of their involvement.
