Page 58 of Fight

After Lena put the AirPod in her right ear and Jake pushed play on his phone; they continued to sit together staring at the vibrant panorama to the sounds of the gentle folk song.

It was a sad, slow-moving song interspersed with the short twangs and long draws of various string instruments. The lyrics felt especially profound to Lena as she sat on a black-lit beach with someone she’d only known a week, whom she already didn’t like, in a place built billions of years ago by the slow movements of the earth.

When the song finally ended, Lena wiped a tear from her eye and looked over at Jake gratefully as she handed him his AirPod.

“Thank you,” she said. “That was beautiful.”

Nodding, Jake gave her a hard look before he rose to his feet and put his AirPods back in the case.

“You better get some sleep, Helena,” he said, looking down at her coldly.“Tomorrow's going to be rough for you.”

Lena narrowed her eyes at him as he walked back toward where they’d set up camp.What an asshole.

She was ready to go back and try to get some rest, but she didn’t move from her spot for another twenty minutes as she continued to stare into the ethereal darkness.

Lena laid on top of the duvet covering her bed, watching the shadows from the ceiling fan run even circles around her room. The room was dark except for the glow from her closet, which cast a dim light over the room through the purple tapestry that covered the open doorway.

When she, Annie, and Morgan had returned home from the Blue Sky she’d pleaded exhaustion with a promise to have a deep, intense chat with them the next day. She’d closed the door to her bedroom with more than a little gratitude that this wretched day was coming to an end. Kicking off her yellow heels, she’d tapped her phone to launch her “Sad Piano Music” playlist, and laid down on her bed still clad in her apparently slutty seventies cocktail dress.

Sigur Ros’ "Samskeyti'' had just started playing when her phone vibrated. She picked it up to see the last name she’d expected after what had happened at the Blue Sky.

Jake:

Are you awake?

Without thinking, she picked up the phone and responded immediately:

Yes. Come to my room.

Thirty seconds later her phone lit up again.

Jake:

Door is locked.

Lena:

Key in gnome hat.

Morgan had a garden gnome that held both its hands in a rock-on symbol, which held a key to the house under its hat. Seconds after Lena sent the text, she heard noises downstairs over the sound of the music as the front door was unlocked, opened, and relocked before heavy steps creaked on the house’s old stairs.

Her bedroom door opened and Lena didn’t turn her head to acknowledge him as Jake shut the door behind him. A large shadow crawled over her before a heavy weight settled in next to her on the bed and they lay listening to the song’s slow rise to crescendo. They were toward the end of the song when Jake finally spoke.

“Why, Helena,” he said evenly as they continued not looking at each other.“I do believe this song is nothing but a six-minute piano solo.Didn’t I hear recently that six minutes was too long for an instrumental solo?”

Lena was silent for a beat before an involuntary laugh burst from her mouth, which broke free an avalanche of laughs that she seemed unable to control.She felt cleansed and giddy when the final laugh left her as she turned on her side to look at his profile in the dim light.

“There’s an exception to every rule, Jacob.And piano is the exception to that one,” she replied calmly as she studied his profile.He chuckled distractedly with his eyes open, watching the fan just as she had been. Lena watched him for a few beats as he lay there, calm and unmoving.

“Cynthia fired me today,” she blurted softly to his profile, her eyes unblinking.

He turned to face her then and she could see the angry red bruises that spread along his left cheek. His eyebrows furrowed in a questioning look that made his eyes look dark and fathomless in the soft light.

“Well that explains a lot,” he admitted in a deep voice. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Lena shrugged the shoulder she wasn’t lying on. “I’m embarrassed,” she confessed. “I’m worried I’ll need to go back home now that I don’t have a job. Maybe you, Sadie, and everyone else were right about me. Maybe this isn’t the place for me.” Her voice cracked as the words tumbled from her mouth and she shifted her gaze to the pattern on her duvet, her eyes stinging and emotion catching in her throat.

“Lena, you’ll find a new job,” Jake said dispassionately as he reached up to wipe away a stray tear from her cheek.

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