Page 116 of My Lovely Tragedy
“Do you like it?” he repeats. “Here—I’ll play it again,” he blurts before I can respond and starts back from the beginning, immediately falling into the flow of the song—the song I wrotefor him.
As I watch him play, awestruck and aching, I wonder if he feels it. How he lives within the notes.
And as he hits the break I have been stuck on, he doesn’t lose flow as he melds into notes unseen, a perfect match.
“That’s it, my love. Absolutely perfect!” I praise him, tugging him into my arms when he finishes, chest heaving with excitement. He beams, absolutelyradiant.
He shoves himself into my chest and wraps his left arm around me, his right trapped by his chain. But where he holds me, he squeezes as tight as he can, stealing my breath. His warmth is transcendent, and his touch has never burned hotter—or made me feel as guilty.
“How did you come up with that?” I ask against his hair, lips brushing over the soft strands.
“Just listening to you play and thinking. I don’t know—it kind of just… came together.”
“You better go write it down lest you forget.”
“Oh!” He shoots up so fast, I nearly topple over with the bench as it tips. My arm shoots forward, and a discordantthunkrings out when my fingers slam against a few keys. “Shit, sorry.” He reaches down to help steady me, but I hold up my hand with a smile.
“It’s quite all right. Go on.” I shoo him away with a breath, and he scrambles around the bench, nearly tripping himself as he searches for his notebook.
“Where the fuck is it?” he grumbles as he digs around in the blood and sweat stained sofa cushions, tossing blankets around him, where they fall to the floor in disarray. “Come on,” he snarls, now dislodging them.
I watch with amusement, eyes bright and face aching from the stretch of my smile.
“Fucking stupid son of a bitch, if you’d stop falling asleep with the fucking thing in your hands…” I never thought I could find someone’s mindless, self-deprecating ramblings so endearing.
The boy is positively degenerate.
“Perhaps you should take a peek below the couch,” I say, taking pity on him. He lifts from digging in the crevices to stare at me before dropping to his knees and bending over, buttocks in the air, back curvedjustso.
I shake my head, dragging my index finger over my top lip. “Dirty little menace,” I rasp to myself, watching as he wriggles his ass back and forth before shooting up with an, “Ah ha!”
“Find it?” My gaze moves with him, standing in the evidence of his destruction. An angel in chaos.
“You knew where it was the whole time,” he accuses me with a feigned pout.
“Of course, I did.”
His lips twitch. “Asshole.”
I lift a brow and purse my lips. “Hmm.Perhaps.”
“You—”
“Did you forget the notes already?” I ask. His eyes widen.
“Oh, shit.” He drops onto the barren sofa, right on the covered springs, flips the notebook open, and starts scribbling. He sinks his top teeth into his cracked bottom lip, ensuring it will not heal as blood wells. The sight of crimson makes it hard to swallow.
I wonder if this is how he was always meant to be. So lively and bursting with unrestrained energy. Chaotic andfun,filling the room with his light. Nothing like the man I first met. Drunken and so angry. Suffocating in the pits of his own agony and despair. Wallowing in it.
Now his light, once snuffed, is now radiant and consuming, filling the smallest fissures with the very last pieces of him.
I cannot help but smile as I watch him scribble, more than likely already onto something else. I have wondered what it is he writes on those pages, but I have not dared to look. Sometimes our inner thoughts contain our deepest insecurities—the very ones that eat us alive—and I never want to force my darling to reveal more than he already has.
Our bodies say more than we think, and I am content with what I know of him. I needn’t see what he does not wish to share with me.
Ultimately, we must keep some secrets to ensure we remain standing when the ash and dust begin to fall.
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