May

Standing with my cello, squinting into the blinding stage lights while the audience applauds—it is a single, transient moment that will flow away from me like water, like every other moment I have experienced. Nothing in life is permanent, I know that. But the memory of the moment, that is mine to take with me, mine to keep, forever. Memories are the one thing we’re allowed to keep. I bow once more and then rush off stage before I embarrass myself by bursting into tears.

It’s unusual for a first year to play a recital, but Professor Yarvik wanted to challenge me, give me something positive to work toward. I performed the Sixth Bach Cello Suite and the Elgar Cello Concerto with piano accompaniment. Yarvik, front and center in the audience, had tears in her eyes when she stood up with everyone else to clap. Daphne, Bethany, Rome, and Liza meet me backstage, piling flowers so high in my arms that I can barely see over them. Bethany takes my cello for me and latches it into its case since my arms are too loaded down to manage the task myself.

“I finally got to hear you play,” Daphne says, mock-groaning as she gives me an awkward, flower-filled hug. She’s got a girl with her tonight, a tall brunette with a pixie cut, and judging from how close they stand to one another, they are more than just friends. I nod and whisper, “Is she the reason you haven’t been sleeping in our room?” and when Daphne pulls away she’s trying not to giggle.

I finally told Daphne everything. With Rome’s encouragement—actually, “insistence” might be more accurate—I started meeting with one of the campus counselors, who urged me to reveal my history and dark thoughts to a small circle of trusted people. That way, if I stumbled, I would have a network of friends to lift me up. So. Daphne, Rome, Bethany, Liza. They’re my people.

We go out to celebrate after the recital, and Liza sleeps in Daphne’s bed that night before driving home the next morning. Somehow she convinced Aunt Bonnie to let her take the car for just one day. That’s no surprise, though—Liza always has been the strong one, the resilient one. She never really needed me, but all the same, I’m glad I didn’t abandon her in that final, irrevocable way.

The following night, Rome is back in my bed. He’s always in bed with me, always out of bed with me, always by my side with his jokes and his genius and his front flips off benches. Always with his hands on me, his mouth on me, giving while I take, giving even when I tell him that I cannot reciprocate his feelings, that someone else could give him the love he deserves. “I told you I wasn’t going anywhere, and I meant it,” he always tells me back. He says it again and again.

We’re spooning in my bed a few weeks after my recital, Rome’s warm body curled around my naked back, when I finally tell him about the Aspen fellowship. I didn’t get it. I’ve known for several weeks actually, but I was too disappointed to tell anyone but Yarvik.

I can almost feel his heart breaking on my behalf. He wants happiness for me even more than I want it for myself. More than he wants it for himself. I think he has some sort of weird savior thing going on, like, he couldn’t save his sister so he needs to save me, or some convoluted shit. He insists that isn’t true: “Don’t try to turn my love for you into something fucked up,” he always says. “My shit’s pure.” And I can’t accuse him of codependence when he comes out with such ridiculously sweet things.

“So what’s going to happen with the cello?” he asks now. “You have to give it up?” His lips are against my neck, his arm draped over my waist, his hand resting light on my belly.

“Yarvik spoke with the guy who owns it and explained my, uh…situation.”

He hesitates, and I imagine he must be thinking of the last four months, of the disordered rubble that remained of my mind after that horrifying day in the woods, of the many jarring stops and starts that gave us psychological whiplash as my brain performed the emotional equivalent of a computer reboot. On several occasions he’s found me balled up on the hard floor under the bed in my dorm room and had to drag me out and peel my arms from around my knees. Nearly every night those first few weeks, I roused him from sleep with my broken, desolate wails, so loud and haunted they sent rumors spreading through our dorm like a virus. Everyone knows now that I killed another student.

“And?” Rome finally says.

I’ve been dying to tell him about the cello; it will make him happy. “She must have made the guy feel pretty sorry for me. She told me today that his foundation has granted an exception and agreed to allow me to keep the cello indefinitely—for as long as I’m a cellist. I just have to submit quarterly documentation to verify that I’m still actively playing.”

I can’t see Rome’s face, but I can feel his grin from the way the energy changes in the room. He rolls over and climbs on top of me and kisses my neck, my chest, my neck again, my face, attacking me with soft, tickling scrapes of his teeth, and he says, “I’m so fucking happy for you, so fucking awesome, you fucking deserve this so much.” Then he’s trying to pull my underwear off, but I grab him by the arms and stop him.

“What’s wrong?” he says, and though it’s dark, I can see the worry in his face by the moonlight streaming through the window.

“One more thing.”

He settles on top of me, supporting himself on his elbows. “Tell me.”

“Since I can’t go to Aspen, Yarvik asked around about other festivals I could attend. There’s one in Italy toward the end of the summer. She sent them the video of my Aspen audition, and they’re offering to cover the tuition plus a stipend for travel.”

“Holy shit. Are you kidding me?” His smile is like a flower blooming. I could never tell him that, though. Can’t just put a feeling like that right out in the open.

“I know,” I say. “It’s crazy. The string quartet from the Conch Garden Symphony Orchestra coaches there. They say it’s really high-level.”

“That’s incredible.” He attacks me with kisses all over again.

“Will you come with me?” My voice is so small that I’m not sure he hears me over his joyful kissing, but then he stops and gapes at me in disbelief, his features almost blue in the dim light.

“You’d want me to go with you…to Italy?”

I shrug. “Well, I mean…just as friends. We’re just friends, obviously.”

He grins again, his eyes crinkling. “Yeah…obviously. You don’t love me for shit.”

I feel almost nauseous when he says things like this, or like I’m going to have a heart attack. Now the tightness in my chest takes my breath away. “I don’t love you, Rome. Not even a little.” I stare hard at him.

The smile melts slowly off his face. He knows where this is going.

“Do it,” I tell him. “Start with my hair.”

He mirrors my stare, though his is laced with the soft surrender of reluctant participation, and maybe a little sadness. And love. Always love. He lifts himself off me a little, still supporting himself on one elbow, and slides his free hand up under my head, deep into my hair. I stiffen, readying myself as he closes his fingers into a fist…and yanks.

He gasps along with me, cringes as if it is himself he has hurt. I grab him around the waist, claw at his back, and pull him down snug between my legs, tilting my chin up so he can rake his teeth over the skin of my neck. “Is that all you got?” I say, my words a rush of hot breath at his ear, and so he tugs again on my hair, hard enough that tears spring to my eyes, and then I’m moaning, begging him to hurt me and fuck me and call me ugly names.

It’s a sick and beautiful dance, this game we play together, a graceful merging of need that transcends the little lies we tell one another. It is the place where Rome can pretend he doesn’t enjoy the moans he pulls from me when he overpowers me, and where I can pretend I don’t notice that he comes hardest when I hurt the most. And it’s where I can drown myself in my feelings for him without having to admit them, where I can die a thousand tiny deaths instead of one big one because his touches, every one of them from the most docile brush to the most painful pinch, kill me just a little. It is death and resurrection, again and again and again.

So he’s got a fist in my hair and a hand at my breast, squeezing and pulling as he fills me deep and whispers dirty sex into my ear, and I’m dragging my nails down his back and pouring an ocean of love out through my exhales. And Rome, ever the giver, does me the kindness of pretending he cannot feel it.