Page 27 of Electric Touch

“Very,” she points with her fork. “Taste it.”

“Yes ma’am,” I smile and eat a mouthful. “You’re right, it’s good.”

She smiles happily. We eat in silence for a while. Then she clears the plates and wraps up the leftovers. She puts them in a small fridge behind Apollo’s desk. I wonder about the two of them. Apollo is a good-looking guy. They would make a beautiful couple. I don’t know her well enough to ask personal questions. Plus, I’m not in the market for any kind of relationship right now.

Women are off the radar full stop. I won’t be able to offer anyone anything. As much as I hate to admit it, everything with Riley still fucking stings. Thinking about her makes me a combination of pissed, upset, heartbroken, and then pissed again. It’s a muddy place inside my head right now, so I’ll focus on helping this beautiful woman. That’s it. No matter how attractive I find her.

“What happened to all of your social media accounts?”

I pause before grabbing my guitar. Guess we are asking personal questions. Although she doesn’t know that it is a personal answer. I reel off the party line. “Management went in a different direction.”

Her mouth makes a little moue. I wait to see if she is going to ask anything else, but she looks at the guitar. “I’ve never held one before.”

“It’s easy,” I say, letting out a relieved breath. I pick up the one she is going to use.

“Do I stand?”

“No, right there is fine. Here,” I pass her the guitar. She sets it on her lap and holds it at the bottom of the fret bar. Her other hand is on the pick guard. “Set it down flat on your knee,” I tell her. “First thing you need to know is what a guitar is.”

“I think I understand that part.”

“I’m sure you could give me at least fifty facts about the guitar. You need to learn what the guitar is to you. Which means knowing what every part does.”

“I could probably tell you at least seventy-eight facts,” she grins.

I laugh. “Okay, genius, can you tell me what any of the things on this guitar are?”

She looks down at it, lifts it slightly and trails her eyes up the fret board. “You use these to tune it,” she says. “They’re tuning pegs and they sit on the headstock,” she indicates the top part of the guitar. I nod. “And these are the strings.”

“Anything else?”

“Acoustic guitars have six strings.” She counts them.

“Yep, they have six. See how each string has a different thickness? They’re rather inventively called strings one to six. One and two are the thinnest and they’re called plain strings because they’re unwound. Three to six are wound with metal to make them thicker. You want to hold it so the top string is number six.”

She shifts it and sets it up on her lap.

“When you move from thicker to thinner, you get an increasingly higher pitch. As the strings get shorter, the pitch increases.” I move her hand position and show her what I mean. “As you hold down the string in a different position on the fret board, the pitch increases each time. This is the fret board, and each of these is a fret. There are twenty frets. We’ll get to the notes later.”

I tuck her hand underneath the neck and help move her fingers so they cover the strings. She’s awkward about it, saying her hands are too small. I tell her she’ll be fine once she gets used to hand positioning.

I show her the rest of the guitar and discuss what each part does. The look of sheer concentration on her face makes me smile inwardly. She is going to take this seriously. I’m sure she will be proficient enough to play a full song within a few lessons. That excites me. This is going to take more than a couple of sessions. We spend more time going over all the technical aspects of playing a guitar. Before I know it, an hour has passed.

There are band things I need to do this afternoon so I can’t spare anymore time. She’s cool about it when I explain.

I pack up my guitar and turn to her. She got over her initial embarrassment at how she looked pretty quickly, and her confidence has grown again. “So how about the next lesson we’re not at your friend’s office?”

“Yeah, that would probably be a good thing. I’m not sure I’m talking to him at the minute.”

“Because of this?”

“He tricked me. I wasn’t prepared.”

“Would you still have come if you knew?”

“Yes,” she says. “You are a professional musician. I’ve seen and heard you play. Why wouldn’t I want someone like you to teach me? If I want to be good at this, then I need to be taught by the best. Not a high school music teacher trying to make an extra buck. Not that there is anything wrong with that,” she hastens to add. “I don’t belittle anyone who needs a second income. I know only too well pay scales for teachers in this country are too low. I don’t particularly need the money myself, although last night I posed for a life class-”

She stops talking abruptly. I stand stock still, watching her as she presses her lips together. I have literally never met anyone like her. She is so damn passionate about everything. I wonder if she is the same in bed.

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