Page 105 of Awestruck at Dusk
I walked out of the guest room looking like a zombie on a mission. My eyelids were shuttered as I headed toward the kitchen and grabbed a short glass where I poured some milk. I was exhausted and so desperate to get some sleep that I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t allow myself to drift away.
“Off to dream of him?” William’s grave voice spoke from the living room.
“Shit,” I muttered, stopping cold. He scared the hell out of me. I hadn’t seen William sitting in front of the piano when I walked out of the guest room. There wasn’t a single light on. “Well, the flowers are under my pillow, but I would have to be able to get some sleep first to get to the dreaming part. So no.”
William took his headphones off and placed them around his neck. He’d been playing the piano when he shouldn’t have. It could’ve snapped his stitches.
“I can’t sleep either,” he replied. “Come. Sit.”
I had nothing better to do but stare at the ceiling if I went back to my bed. It was hard to say no to William when he addressed me in that way. So I walked over to the piano and sat next to him. The wooden bench was long enough to fit us both sitting side by side.
“I didn’t see this piano the last time I was here,” I told him as he connected a second pair of headphones.
“Well, it’s been here all along. There’s a piano in every place I own. There just has to be, for situations like these.”
“How many places do you own?”
“Just three,” he replied, placing the headphones around my neck.Just three. “You know my grandfather used to say,the more buttons, the more buttonholes. So I try to keep things simple.”
“That’s a good saying but having three places to live isn’t as simple as you think,” I told him.
“That’s why I said,I try.” He laughed under his breath.
“Where’s the third?”
“Stockholm. It’s a small apartment that serves as apied-à-terre,” he said, carefully placing the headphones over my ears as if afraid his fingers would graze my skin. He was probably trying to be careful about his hand, but I was thankful for the lack of contact between us. I didn’t need him touching me right now.
“You shouldn’t be playing the piano. Your hand—”
“And you shouldn’t be sitting here with me,” he cut me off before I could finish scolding him. “But here we are, breaking the rules like we love doing.”
“Youlove breaking the rules,” I clarified. “No … You don’t even get to break them because you don’t have any.” Those last words oozed with bitterness as I remembered a few things I wished I could forget. Things that made my soul ache. But he noticed because he angled his head as if trying to decipher why that was.
“I do have rules. The only difference is that I make them myself,” he said. “For example, if I didn’t have any, I’d kiss you right now.”
I panicked.
“But I’m not going to do that. Not because I care about Nathan being your boyfriend, but because I won’t be able to stop myself. And I don’t feel like getting slapped right now, although maybe if we schedule that activity for some other day that I’m not as annoyed as I am right now, I might definitely enjoy you slapping me.”
“You’ve got enough mouths and lips to choose from,” I replied, faking confidence. “So I’d say that you wanting to kiss me right now is just plain greedy.” But my blood had fallen to my feet. Having William sit so close to me and saying he wanted to kiss me made my limbs evaporate. Yet another part of me was still furious, and I was having trouble hiding it from him.
“I can’t help but love when you get jealous.” He placed the headphones over his ears and placed his fingers over the keys to start playing the piano.
He played “Moonlight Sonata” for a few minutes and then switched to “Clair de Lune.” He played beautifully, but I was afraid for his stitched-up hand. As long as his bandage didn’t turn red, we were good.
“Play that song,” I told him after he was done with the previous song. “The one you used to play all the time in your apartment.”
“You heard that, didn’t you?” he asked with a laugh. “Do you like it?”
“I do. It’s sweet at the beginning, and then it rises and intensifies, and then it drops again—slows down,” I explained. “I can’t tell if it’s melancholic, but it definitely gives off nostalgic vibes, and I guess that’s why I love it.”
“Hmm,” he mumbled with a soft side-smile. “I love it too.”
He played it from the top, and I heard it loud and clear for the first time since I initially heard him learning it back in December.
“What’s the name of the song?” I asked once he was done. He took his headphones off, so I did too and returned them to him.
“I don’t know. You tell me,” he said, standing up and putting the headphones away. He took a few steps toward the living room couch.
