Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91635 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91635 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
His heart was a captured flame, as he stared at the box. “…what is that?”
“Delivery boy just dropped it off for you.” She pursed her lips, turning the box and peering over it. “No return address.”
It didn’t need one. It didn’t need one, when that orchid might as well have screamed Vic’s name. Amani tumbled to his feet and fumbled the box from his mother’s hands, tugging out the notecard and flipping it open on Vic’s elegant handwriting.
I hope you’ll still come. No one should have to miss the beautiful music you make just because I’ve been an ass. I’ll stay away, so you don’t have to see me.
Please come.
Please don’t ever stop playing, Amani.
-V
He always wrote the way he spoke, in warm tones laced with silent laughter and threaded with something deeper, more melancholy, until Amani heard his voice with every word.
Heard his voice, and ached.
Below the note was an address, a time—and taped to the bottom of the note was a bookmark-style printed program, advertising the Newcomb Textiles charity concert.
The concert, and the headline performer, cellist Amani Idrissi.
Fear, elation, confusion, yearning—they wrapped around him in a dizzying spiral. Vic…still wanted him to play the concert. Still wanted him to do this for himself, to find his love again, and Vic would exile himself from his own event just so Amani would feel safe?
But I want you there, he realized, as he set the box down on the bed and plucked the twine free. I need you there.
The box top lifted away to reveal ivory organza, silver embroidery. His takchita. The gown he’d left at Vic’s; the gown that had made him feel more beautiful than he ever had in his life. He gathered it up in his arms, hugging it to his chest, and closed his eyes.
He’d play the concert. He’d play the concert, and remember who he’d wanted to be before fear had chased him off course. And then…
He’d find Vic. He’d talk to him.
And hope to hell that he was the right one.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PUTTING THIS GOWN ON AGAIN was bittersweet, when the last time he’d worn it he’d fallen head over heels in love, and only realized it when he was sobbing over the man he needed in terror that he’d lose him right then and there. He stood before the mirror in the backstage dressing area at the concert hall, adjusting the silver brocade and fiddling with his hair and asking himself what the hell he thought he was doing when everyone out there in that audience except his mother would be judging him.
It wouldn’t happen again. Not like last time. His hands were fine. His hands were fine, his wrists limber…and he had his father’s cello. Worn and aged as it was, he had his father’s cello, and he would make it sing in his father’s voice in the way only he could.
But his heart was rabbiting, and he felt faint…so faint. Part of him ached to turn away from this and run, out into the soft-piled drifts of winter’s first snow. Out beyond the curtain he could hear the whispers and rustlings of the crowd while the accompanying pianist warmed up her scales, and he’d risked peeking out once, just once, only to jerk back behind the curtain with his heart thudding out of his chest. He’d seen enough to know that there were hundreds of people out there.
And he’d seen enough to know Vic wasn’t there.
Deep down, some part of him had hoped—hoped he’d come, hoped that typical Vic Newcomb obstinacy would make him too stubborn to stay away. But there was no debonair rapier of a man in a tux, watching him with winter-blue eyes that asked for—and gave—everything.
That was okay.
Amani could still do this. He needed to.
For himself.
But when the emcee started on his spiel and announced his name, he turned wooden—and he felt like a stiff-legged marionette as he crossed the stage to his waiting seat, his Stradivarius. The lights fell down low, casting the audience into dim shades of a palette of flesh tones and jewel colors, no longer people but simply shadows, ghosts. As long as he told himself that, he could do this. He could quiet the knots in his stomach; he could find his poise, his pride, making his spine straight as he bowed, then settled in the waiting chair and exchanged a nod with the pianist at his back. He shifted his posture, spreading his legs, smoothing his gown, before lifting his cello off its stand and settling it against him, the bow as familiar in his hand as a lover.
The pianist ran a testing trill of scales, waiting for his signal. Amani poised his bow over the strings.
And froze, his hand trembling, wrist turning weak as he stared out past the blur of painfully bright stage lights at every faceless nightmare blob that stared back at him. Stared at him, watched for his weakness, waited for him to fail. His fingertips went numb, his neck breaking out in sweat, and as the whispers started he sucked in a hyperventilating breath. It was happening again. It was happening again, his hands failing him, and he—