Page 89 of A Wish for Us

He sighed. “It’s how I started drinking. Taking the drugs.” He tapped his head, then his chest. “The emotions. The colors I would feel when things went wrong.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t cope. I used alcohol to numb the pain. And my life spiraled from there.”

“Your emotions get heightened too?” I stared at him, floored.

Lewis nodded. “I taste it too. And see colors.”

“I didn’t think synesthetes ever had such similar symptoms.” Lewis nodded. I felt a lightness in my chest I couldn’t describe. Because someone else knew. He understood. All of it. All of what sometimes buried me in so many sensations that I shut down. Built high walls to fortress the feelings. Who I really was.

Lewis closed his eyes, inhaled, then took something from his jacket’s inner pocket. He placed a silver hip flask on the top of the piano.

“It’s whiskey,” he said, staring at the hip flask. “I’ve been sober three years.”

I just listened.

“When I was asked to compose for the gala in a couple of months, I thought I could do it. I thought I’d mastered my demons.” He flicked his chin in the direction of the liquor. “I thought I had a grip on the emotions that rose in me when I played. When the colors came.” He laughed without humor. “When I opened up my soul.”

His gaze dropped to the piano keys. He played a single F note, the sound and bright-pink hexagon vibrating in the air. “But I have too many regrets, Cromwell. Too many ghosts in my past that I’ll never escape from. The ones that always come and find me whenever I compose. Because they are whatlives within me. My music wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t leave everything on the sheets of music.” He ran his finger down the filigree pattern on the flask. “But I can’t handle the emotions that come because of my synesthesia. I was stupid to think they wouldn’t resurface.”

“Have you drunk any?”

“Not yet.” He laughed again, but it sounded more like he was choking. “I just carry it around with me. To prove to myself that I can resist it.” Before I could say anything, he said, “I’m not composing at the National Philharmonic’s Gala.”

I frowned. Then Lewis turned to me. “I told them I had someone else who could debut instead.” As mentally exhausted as I was, it took me a few seconds to realize what he was getting at. A dormant heat that lived in my blood sparked to life as his words sank in. Shivers broke out along my skin, and I felt my pulse race. “The way you just played…” He shook his head. “It’s up to you, Cromwell. But if you want it, the place is yours. The program director remembered you from your youth. They now want you more than me. The musical genius who just one day stopped playing, making his big return.”

My heart slammed in my chest. “There’s not enough time. It’s too soon. And I’d have to compose an entire symphony. I—”

“I’ll help you.”

I looked at him curiously. “Why do you want to help me so much? It can’t all be to repay my father.”

Lewis glanced away, then facing me again, said, “Let’s just say that I have a lot of errors I need to amend. It’s one of my twelve steps.” He went quiet, and I wondered what he was thinking. “But it’s also because I want to, Cromwell. I want to help you compose.”

Adrenaline pulsed through me at the thought of being back on a stage, an orchestra surrounding me, giving life to my creations. But then ice cooled that excitement. “Bonnie…I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t…” My jaw clenched when I pictured her on her bed. Then in the wheelchair, and her face when she saw Easton’s blood on me. “I don’t know if I can.”

Lewis’s hand came down on my shoulder. “You don’t have to make decisions now.” He shook his head, and his hand slipped away. “I shouldn’t have asked you right now. It was insensitive.”

“No,” I argued. “It wasn’t… I just…”

“Take your time. They’ll hold the place open for a while longer.” I nodded. Then I looked down at myself. I was covered in blood. My hands…

“The keys,” I said, not knowing what the hell else to say. I had left some blood on the keys. On a Steinway. I grabbed my shirt and started rubbing at them to get them clean. But the blood on the shirt only made it worse. Lewis put his hand on my arm and stopped me.

I was shaking again. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, pulling myself together.

“I’ll fix it, Cromwell. Get yourself home and cleaned up.”

I opened my eyes and walked to the door. Just as I was about to leave, I turned to Lewis, who was staring at the flask. “It was good,” I said gruffly. “To talk to someone who understands.”

He smiled. “Or just anyone at all.” I nodded as Lewis stared back at the flask. “Your mother was always that person for me.”

My eyebrows pulled down. “My mum?”

“Yeah. She never told you I knew her?” His face paled a little. Like he’d just shared something he shouldn’t have. I shook my head. I had no clue what he was talking about. “We went to college together. That’s how she knew me. How your father knew to contact me.”

“She never said.” I wondered why she hadn’t. Then again, I had never asked her. Just assumed she’d heard of him from the world I was in. But there was no space in my mind to wonder any more about that tonight.

“Night, Professor.” I left him in the room with his demons and temptation. I walked back to the dorm, my feet feeling like heavy weights. When I got back to the room, it had been cleaned, I assumed by the college’s cleaning staff. Only faint stains remained on the wooden floor where Easton’s blood had pooled. The debris he’d thrown around the room had been swept up. I showered then sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the black paint he’d thrown on the walls. At the swirling eyes that he’d drawn every few feet. Eyes that watched every move I made.

Exhaustion wrapped around me, and I lay down in my bed. I pulled out my phone, brought up Bonnie’s name, and sent her a simple message:

---