Zach huffed loudly, his chiseled face souring before her eyes. Whoever that was on the answering machine, Zach was not happy to hear from him. He rubbed his neck with his hand, then picked up his glass and downed the remainder of his Scotch. Violet leaned forward to uncap the bottle and refilled his proffered glass. A little bit dripped onto the leather chair where he was sitting, and he swiped at it with the hem of his T-shirt, teasing her with a glimpse of his flat, tan stomach.

“Now I’ll smell like a distillery.”

Violet capped the bottle and placed it on the end table between them, cuddling up into the corner of the couch. He pulled the blanket off the top of his chair and handed it to her. She realized she’d shifted closer to him, but she didn’t care. The Scotch and the fireplace were making her feel warm and cozy, and she was surprised to discover how comfortable she felt with Zach, how easy it was to slip back into a friendship with him. She winced internally at the word friendship, then forced herself to lighten up.

“Whatever will your mother say?”

He grinned. “You’re getting drunk, Violet.”

“So what? I’m a big girl.”

“You’re not that big—”

“You’re evading the question, sir. Who was that charming character on the phone, and for what is he offering forty?”

“You always did have a way with words.”

“It’s my gift. Now, spill it.”

“That was Malcolm Singer, lead singer of Savage Sons.”

“His last name is Singer? Well, that’s original. He didn’t have a thesaurus around when he chose that name?”

Zach tilted his glass and clinked hers gently. “Spoken with the disdain of a true writer.”

“Quit side barring via flattery.”

“Okay. My agent worked out an aggressive deal with Cornerstone because my songs have been pretty successful. I generally get a five-thousand dollar advance and then the royalties come much later, after the song’s been tweaked, recorded and launched. Sometimes it takes years to see a big check. Malcolm needs four songs right now and he’s offering me double the advance upfront: forty thousand dollars out of pocket to finish his new album.”

“With royalties later?”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“And you are . . .?”

“Turning him down. Obviously.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Because you’ve developed lunacy in the decade since we knew one another?” She sat up straighter. “We’re artists, Zach! When someone offers you forty thousand dollars, you say ‘Thank you very much’ and write a few songs!”

He took a deep breath. “I have to get off the hamster wheel, Violet. I’m wasting my life writing shit songs for mediocre bands. At some point I have to say no.”

“And you choose now? Now, when someone’s offering you that much money?” She tried not to think about her own dwindling bank account.

“Since when does money mean so much to you?” he asked.

She thought she saw disappointment in his eyes and in the way his body shifted subtly away from her, and it made her feel bad, like she was falling short of his expectations or something. Not that she owed him anything.

“Since I became an adult,” she snapped. And since I felt the fear that comes with a drastically dwindling bank account, an unstable income and writer’s block as far as the eye can see.

He winced, speaking with derision, “An adult who lives in tony Greenwich.”

“So?” She was playing into his suspicions but she didn’t set him straight. She didn’t owe him explanations about the state of her finances.

“So write another book as good as the last one and I bet you make a million this time.”

Her mouth dropped open and her eyes widened. “What did you say?”

“It was good, Violet. Me and Then You? It was really good.”

Oh, my God. Her breath hitched and her whole body slumped in wind-knocked-out-of-lungs surprise, except for her eyes, which shot up, capturing his. She searched his face and the earnestness there made her eyes water.

“You read my book.”

He shrugged, taking another sip of Scotch.

“Zach?”

“Yeah. I read it.”

“It was chick lit. A beach read.”

He blushed, which she guessed was an uncommon reaction for him because he reached up and rubbed his cheeks with his palms. “I knew the author.”

“What did you think?” she asked, half dreading the answer. Me and Then You was a thinly veiled, fictionalized account of her and Zach’s story. In a million years, she never thought he’d read it, and she certainly didn’t think she’d ever see him again and discuss it with him.

He found her eyes and held them, and Violet perceived such sadness in his, such longing, she flinched, her heart beating faster and her skin tingling with awareness.

“It was about you and me . . . ,” he whispered, twisting his body so he leaned over his armrest, his face closing the distance between them. “And it made me realize all over again what I’d . . . how much I . . . Violet . . .”

“I should go to bed,” she said abruptly, turning away from him and scooting forward until her feet hit the floor. She folded the blanket neatly, unable to look over at him as he leaned back into his chair. She was overwhelmed by the tone of his voice and the stark vulnerability that looked so out of place on his tough face. She was embarrassed and confused, and her body was not cooperating with her plan to maintain boundaries, trembling and quivering in places she’d forgotten were a part of her anatomy.

“Well,” he said, “you stayed for more than one drink. Thanks for that.”

The forced lightness in his voice made her look up. “Zach, we’re really different people now. I write chick lit. You write heavy metal. I’m Greenwich, Connecticut, and you’re Greenwich Village. I’m Ralph Lauren, and you’re Black Sabbath. You turn down thousands of dollars for a single song, which I think is terribly foolish and . . .” She bit her lip, shaking her head. “I’m not here to rekindle a college friendship or catch up with you. I don’t need distractions. I need to write.”

His eyes had narrowed as she spoke, and when she finished, he was looking at her with that disappointed expression again. Like she was all about money and work and status now when she used to have depth and meaning. She chafed at his misperception of her, but she’d partially chosen her words in an effort to alienate him. She knew it was for the best. It would put distance between them—distance that she needed, that would keep away feelings confused by ancient history.

“Whatever you say, Vile.”

“I’m not trying to be rude, I—”

“Rude? Hell, Violet, I was just trying to be friendly.”

She stood up, clenching her jaw, annoyed by his insouciance. “Yeah. Kissing me earlier was really friendly.”

He stood up, too, towering over her. “Not like you were pushing me away.”

“Try it again and you’ll get a different response.”

He smirked at her, his thumb rubbing his lower lip again as she tried to look irritated with him. Her traitorous eyes darted to his lips and then back up.

“More of a response?” he asked, his voice low and gravelly.

She imagined her knee connecting with his balls. “Yeah. Definitely more of a response . . . in your groin.”

It took her only a second to realize that while she was alluding to injury, his eyes flashed like he’d taken her meaning to be that he’d get hard. Shit! That’s not what I meant! But her discomposure was just the chink in her armor that he needed to press his advantage.

His arm hooked around her waist, yanking her up against his body as his lips found their mark. She pushed against his chest halfheartedly before her hands went slack and she gave herself over to the pressure of his tongue parting her lips. She slipped her hands up the landscape of the toned muscles under his T-shirt, sliding slowly over the contours of his neck until her fingers sank into his hair, tilting his head so that her tongue had better access to his mouth.

His other arm wrapped around her body, and he forced her hips up against him, grinding into her, the inadvertently promised response to a second kiss unmistakable, straining against his jeans. It flitted through her mind that she should raise her knee just to call his bluff, but her body had turned electric as he held her, and doing anything to jeopardize the heaven of full-body contact with him was not an option. So she forgot about him breaking her heart. She forgot about him rejecting her. She forgot that she had a deadline bearing down on her. She forgot about her money woes and Shep dying and the mix-up with Deep Haven. She forgot about everything but Zach Aubrey and how he made her feel, how he had always made her feel. She leaned into him, cradling the rock-hard bulge between her hips that prodded her through the thick material of his jeans, frustrating her even as it turned her insides to liquid heat.

“Damn.” He sighed and released her lips, softly pressing a trail down her cheek to her ear, where he grabbed the soft skin between his teeth, biting lightly. His warm breath made a shiver sail down her arm.

“Violet-like-the-flower, I want you so bad,” he growled softly into her ear, drawing out the words so slowly, her eyes almost rolled back in her head from wanting him. Muscles deep in her body contracted, clenching, remembering.

As she closed her eyes to lean into him, a verse passed through her mind.

 

Treacherous heart

Beaten, bloody

Sobbing yes

Wilts with shame.

 

Shame. Her brain forced her to remember that  he had been very clear, heartbreakingly clear, once upon a time, that he didn’t care about her, didn’t return her feelings for him, and that despite a weekend which had blown her mind emotionally and physically, they were better off as friends. No matter how good it felt to be held and kissed by him she’d be stupid to forget he had turned his back on her once before. Despite that comment about regretting how they left things, he’d never apologized, never explained himself.

Shame on her. Shame on her for not being smart enough to protect herself the moment she realized who he was. Shame on her for wanting his hands to touch her. For wanting them everywhere – on and inside every inch of her body. Shame.

She went stiff in his arms, except for her breasts, which brushed against his chest as she tried to slow down her breathing. He drew back to look into her face, flinched with what he found there, and released her.

Without another word, she turned and walked quietly up the stairs.

***

Zach watched her go, hands on his hips, not even attempting to conceal his rampant hard-on. He ground his jaw in frustration. Being with her, touching her, was like taking a hit of some ridiculously awesome-feeling drug that made him only want one thing: to be naked, watching her head thrown back in orgasm as he buried himself inside her over and over again.

He heard her door slam upstairs.

“Fuck!” he snarled, hating himself for wanting her to the point that he could barely think about anything else. Hot, hot waves ran across his skin, and his erection pulsed uncomfortably, urgently, against his jeans. He took a deep breath, trying to ignore how much he wanted her, trying to think of anything but how her nipples would taste in his mouth, how she once flooded hot and wet for him, how it felt to sink into her so long ago. He swiped at his sweaty forehead with his palm and adjusted his pants, trying to get more comfortable, but it didn’t help.

Out of options, he strode to the front door and opened it, grateful for the rush of cold air that chilled his hot skin, almost painfully at first, then relieving as his body started to relax. Only then did he think about something else that made its way up to his consciousness, somehow bypassing his raging, urgent passion: her face when he’d told her he wanted her.

Her face had registered shame, and her eyes had said the rest: Get your dirty, tattooed rocker hands off me. Her cold, furious eyes had bored into his, and he couldn’t reconcile them against the eager heat of her body. Why? Because he said he wanted her? Had that offended her fine sensibilities?

Am I not good enough for you anymore, Greenwich? It’s all about status and money now, huh? A decade with the Smalleys hadn’t done her any favors, that was for sure. She’d changed from a deep, soulful poet into a spoiled, money-grubbing little sellout.

Like you have a right to talk about anyone selling out.

He closed the front door and returned to the fire, plopping down on the couch where she’d been sitting. The leather was still warm, which made him bristle about how things had just panned out. He picked up her glass of Scotch, holding it up to the light to find the imprint of her lips, then fitted his over the outline and threw back the rest of her drink. She wouldn’t be coming down again tonight, and it made him feel desperate to know she was so close and yet so far away.

Well, her eyes may have said he wasn’t good enough for her, but her body wasn’t in agreement. When she’d said “in your groin,” he knew she meant it as some sort of threat, but all the blood in his head had raced south, and he’d lost all sense of propriety and control, hauling her up against him like a caveman. And again, like earlier in the evening, she hadn’t protested, hadn’t pushed him away for several minutes, letting him pillage her mouth and touch her body. She’d liked it. On some level, she must have liked having his tattooed, rocker hands all over her.

He reached around to his ponytail and pulled out the black rubber band, flipping it around his wrist, then ran his hands through his hair, staring at the fire. A D-flat major chord filled the silence of his head. It was a meaningful sound for Zach. It was the original key of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” which was the first piece of music that had exploded into Zach’s five-year-old ears. It was the first piece of music that had demanded his attention. It had changed his soul and the course of his dreams.

He’d seen Rowlf the Dog play “Clair de Lune” on an old Muppet Show video, and even though Fozzie Bear was doing some slapstick bit with a candelabra during the skit, Zach had rewound the tape over and over again, ignoring the silliness, totally fixated on the music. He hummed the song to himself incessantly over the following days, finally picking out the notes on the piano in the parlor after church the following Sunday. When the choir director walked in to see little Zach playing a passable version of “Clair de Lune” without sheet music or any previous musical training, piano lessons quickly followed. As had summers at Juilliard in New York City and, eventually, a full music scholarship to Yale.

Reaching for his guitar where he’d left it behind the couch, he hefted the hard case onto his lap and unsnapping the lid. Inside sat his favorite acoustic guitar, the one he’d bought for himself six years ago after he’d made his first ten thousand dollars. A top-of-the-line José Ramírez Romantica concert guitar in light wood that had a garland of red and blue flowers encircling the sound hole and a bridge made of dark German mahogany. It was his favorite of the three guitars he owned and the only instrument that accompanied him wherever he went. He slid it out of the case and tuned the strings by ear.

Zach closed his eyes, clearing his mind, willing his fingers to remember the music he hadn’t played in years: “Clair de Lune.” He started picking the notes in traditional classical style, which had been his first introduction to guitar music, as opposed to strumming. His fingers ran lightly along the strings, pressing the frets and eliciting a slight squeak here and there from his relaxed fingerwork. His easy machinations coupled with the romantic chords made the guitar sound like a mandolin, like something older and more timeless, as the sorrowful tones of love and loss and longing took over the quiet of the room.

As he played the individual high notes at the end of the first section, the tones were so high and clear, they might almost have passed for a harp’s, and he winced in pain and pleasure at the sound, adjusting his confident fingers soundlessly for the four distinct chords. He took a deep breath before starting the lilting, heartbreaking arpeggios, his eyes burning under tightly closed lids as he thought of Violet’s face after kissing her, at her familiar, yet matured face, staring back at him with distrust, with anger. He poured his frustration into his fingers, moving them stealthily, silently, wringing wistful yearning from the strings, yearning bathed in regret, in the devastation of lost chances. And sad though it was, it was also . . . beautiful.

How long had it been since he had played something truly beautiful? Truly inspiring? His fingers moved swiftly into the broken chords, his right hand moving faster to keep up with the demands of the music, the desperation, the insistence, the cascading, rolling, moving waves of melancholy. And then he paused again, finding the original D-major tonic chord in an octave-higher repeat of the beginning with a picking-strumming combination, a liberty his stuffy Juilliard summer camp professor wouldn’t have approved of at all.

He grinned, but his grin faded as he slowed down for the final bars, willing away the image of Violet’s confused, crushed, shattered eyes all those years ago, as he pulled on his jeans and left her alone in his dorm room. He savored the pain of the final chords, the final build, the final perfect peak of sound before one last arpeggio tease that killed the hope of more beauty, that offered a timid, plaintive finale, a last glimpse at a lost opportunity, a forlorn farewell.

And then his hands stilled, resting gently on the vibrating strings until they were peaceful and silent.

Had she not gasped softly, he’d never have seen her sitting on the bottom stair, arms clasped around her pajamaed knees as she fought to contain the tears that pooled behind her glasses.

He didn’t move, but his eyes reached out to hers.

“You were listening.”

She looked down, nodded.

He laid the guitar on the cushion beside him.

“Violet?”

“Do you know the words?” she asked. “To the poem? Verlaine’s ‘Clair de Lune’?”

He did, of course, but he shook his head no.

She spoke quietly but clearly:

“It begins, ‘Your soul is a chosen landscape . . .’”

“For what?”

“For ‘charming masqueraders and bergamaskers.’”

“Who do what?”

She paused and smiled, realizing he knew the poem by Verlaine every bit as well as she did. “They play the lute and dance, ‘almost sad beneath their fanciful disguises.’”

“Why? Why are they sad?” he asked, his questions leading her like a well-lit path, his eyes filled with hope and regret, with tenderness.

“‘They do not seem to believe in their happiness / And their song mingles with the moonlight.’”

“With the moonlight?”

“Mmm. ‘With the still moonlight, sad and beautiful, / That sets the birds dreaming in the trees / And the fountains sobbing in ecstasy.’” The last word hung charged between them for a long moment until it faded like the final notes of the song. She bit her upper lip, running a hand over her straight hair. “That was so beautiful. You played that once for me. Once . . .”

He leaned forward on the couch, resting his elbow on his knee to mirror her. Her expression before, when she’d broken off their kiss, still bothered him—not because she was judging him, but because he hated disappointing her.

“I look different now than I looked then,” he said.

“Yes, you do.”

“It’s just a costume. Inside I’m still me, Violet.”

“You.” She pushed off from the step. “Maybe that’s exactly what worries me, Zach.”

He stood up, suddenly feeling angry with her. “You think this is a coincidence? Both of us showing up at the same house in the middle of nowhere? Both of us unattached? Both of us wanting . . .”

“Wanting what?”

“Something real. Something meaningful. Something . . . beautiful.”

“I never said I wanted—”

“You didn’t have to. I can see it in your eyes, that life hasn’t worked out like you wanted it to.” He paused, rubbing the violet on his wrist. “This is the universe telling us something, Vile. This is fate.”

“Fate? Fate! Which means what? I show up here and you’re here, too, and . . . and you play ‘Clair de Lune’ and we recite poetry and then what? We’ll be best friends again?”

His fingers twitched and trembled as he indulged a sudden fantasy of crossing the room, picking her up in his arms, and kissing her as he carried her into his bedroom.

 “We were never just friends,” he said softly, repeating her words from so long ago.

She scoffed, but her eyes were furious, and underneath the fury, confusion and maybe even longing.

“Oh! I see. I’m supposed to fall for you again? Or just fall into bed with you? Is that the fate you’re talking about? Well, forget it. Either one. Both. I already know how that story ended.”

He pursed his lips and looked away from her, nodding. “I guess you do.”

“You broke my heart,” she whispered.

“You moved on pretty quick,” he said, sitting back on the couch and crossing his arms over his chest as she was doing. He hated himself as soon as the words left his mouth, and wished he could take them back.

“Oh! Oh, Zach!” she gasped, her face contorting with surprise and anger. “Didn’t I grieve long enough for you? After you rejected me? After you walked away from me? After I’d practically begged you to want me? Didn’t I wait around long enough to see if you’d change your mind?”

“Violet, I didn’t mean that. That was a shit thing to say.”

“That’s for sure.” She turned to walk up the stairs, then whipped around to face him with glimmering, furious eyes. “You walked away from me when I opened my heart to you, when I took a chance on you. I told you I was falling in love with you and you—”

“I can’t change that. If I could go back in time and change my reaction, I swear to you—”

“You can’t!” She swiped at her eyes, pushing her hair behind her ears. He could see her forcing herself to calm down, to be a grown-up, to be sensible, Greenwich Violet whose perfect hair was never out of place. When she spoke again, she employed that bullshit, cultivated accent he hated. “Anyway. That was a lifetime ago. I don’t know you anymore, Zach.”

“You can be as mad and hurt as you want, but that’s not true. You knew me then. You know me now.”

“Maybe,” she conceded softly, glancing at his guitar. “But I wish I didn’t.”

“Violet—”

Her eyes were clear and sure when they seized his, her voice low and serious when she said, “No more. I need you to leave me alone.”

Then, for the third time in as many hours, she turned and walked away from him.