21. STORM

Up to this moment, I’ve never really thought about how quickly I got used to being called Storm. How quickly I got used to everything about this new life – Nick, the house, the dogs. The simple life where I don’t have to worry about everything all of the time.

“Jessica,” I say. “My name is Jessica Armstrong.”

Nick frowns. “You don’t look like a Jessica. I’ll stick with Storm.”

“I’m glad. I like it much better.”

“So now I know your name, that you’re from Arkansas, and you’re a brilliant musician.”

“And that I got tangled up with Arkady Volkov,” I say bitterly.

“That, too.”

“Do you want to know how that happened?”

“Only if you want to tell me.”

Who is this man? How can someone go through life the way he does, not questioning, just accepting? He has more in common with Samson and Delilah than he does with other people. What could I possibly have done in my miserable little life to deserve someone like him?

“I honestly don’t know where to start,” I say.

“At the beginning?” he offers.

I laugh and shake my head. “Trust you to cut through the bullshit. Okay. I was born in Sweetwater, Arkansas to a couple of farm laborers.”

Nick nods. “There you go.”

“We never had much. Lived in a little wartime house on the outskirts of town so we could be close to my parents’ work.”

My stomach knots at the memory. “The only heat came from a woodstove in the kitchen. We would have been evicted if we’d actually had to pay rent, because Mom and Dad spent pretty much every non-working moment getting monumentally drunk.”

“When did you start playing piano?” Nick asks.

That’s a better memory.

“In school,” I say. “We took music in class and my teacher, Miss Sidley, had me try out the piano. I took to it like a duck to water. She ended up giving me a little Casio keyboard so I could practice at home, because she knew we didn’t have any money.”

I squeeze his hand. “It was the most generosity anyone ever showed me, until I met you.”

“So you practiced.”

I nod. “And I got good. Really good. Pretty soon I was reading music and memorizing entire songs. Music was the only thing that ever made me feel like I had any control at all.”

“When did you start performing?”

I close my eyes, willing myself to stay calm as I conjure the memories.

“When I was twelve,” I say. “I played at a county fair. My teacher had invited a music professor from Little Rock to come watch me, and he put me in touch with someone in New York who said I was a prodigy and that I needed to move there.”

Nick beams at me. “A prodigy? That’s amazing.”

“Not exactly,” I say, staring up at the canopy over the bed. “My parents saw it as their chance to get out of Arkansas. A private music academy offered a scholarship, which was just enough to cover a shitty little apartment in Jersey. I started taking the train into Manhattan for private lessons every day, all while being home-schooled. Except my parents’ idea of home-schooling was getting hammered while I read text books.

“My tutor at the academy wasn’t much better. She was a bitter old bitch who didn’t have the natural talent to make it as a pianist herself, so she became a teacher. She drilled the lessons into me and humiliated me whenever I didn’t measure up to what she wanted.”

“I’m sorry,” Nick says. “No child should have to go through that.”

His sympathy is almost enough to bring me to tears. No one’s been on my side since Miss Sidley gave me my Casio all those years ago.

“After a year or so, my tutor started booking performances at concert halls around Manhattan. Pretty soon I had an agent and was making real money at it. That’s why Chad recognized me tonight.”

Nick blinks. “He what?”

“Not totally,” I say. “But he must have seen me perform during that time.”

“Mm.” He nods. “So you were on your way as a musician. What happened next?”

I smile bitterly. “My parents discovered heroin.”

We lie there in silence for a while before Nick finally says, “That sucks.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Pretty soon all the money from my performances was going up their noses, then later into their veins. Even though I was working with some of the world’s most prestigious symphonies, we were still living in that shitty apartment, flat broke.”

“And no one would help?”

“I never told anyone,” I say, on the verge of tears again. “I was ashamed. Everyone always wondered why my folks never came to the performances. It was because I never told them where I’d be playing, for fear that they actually might show up. Not that they cared, as long as the checks kept coming in.

“Then one night, they did come. It was at a private party for some rich patron of the arts in the Hamptons. I honestly don’t know how they found out about it, or how they got there. They stumbled around telling everyone I was their little girl, that I was their pride and joy, oh, and by the way, anyone got any smack?

“After that, the calls stopped coming. I was eighteen and my career was over.”

“What did you do?”

“I left a month after that final gig, with just the clothes on my back.” I give him a wan smile. “Kind of like you leaving Russia.”

“Except you didn’t have anyone to help you,” he says.

“No. I managed to scrape by, teaching piano and waiting tables. For a couple of years, it was okay. I made enough to rent a room in Queens, feed myself. The whole time I never spoke to my parents.”

Nick nods, frowning.

“Let me guess,” he says. “That was until they tracked you down to tell you they were in debt to a Russian drug dealer.”

My face glows with heat at the shame of the memory. “I don’t know how they survived without my money all that time; maybe they worked for Arkady. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mom was prostituting herself. All I know is that suddenly they owed $50,000 and I was the only chance they had of getting square.”

“Why didn’t you send them away?” Nick asks. “You didn’t owe them anything.”

I bite my lip as hot, shameful tears begin to course down my face.

“They’re the only people I had,” I say. “They said they were sorry for everything, that they were trying to make a fresh start. I believed them because I wanted it to be the truth.”

“But it wasn’t.”

I shake my head. “Two weeks after I worked out my arrangement with Arkady, they disappeared. Somehow they’d managed to keep the apartment in Jersey, so I ended up living there while I worked at the strip club. I haven’t heard from them since.”

We lie there in silence again, holding each other, breathing, not sleeping. Not surprisingly, Nick doesn’t have anything to say, so I continue.

“Then everything that I told you about Arkady happened. And that was when you found me on the boat. That’s the end of the story.”

“You’re wrong,” Nick says, kissing my forehead. “That’s the beginning of the story. And we’re still in the first chapter.”

I managed to compose myself while I was talking, and I’ll be damned if I let a line like that set me off blubbering again. I’ve got a better idea for working out my feelings, and not just the ones in my heart.

“Do you have another one of those little packages?” I ask, reaching under the covers for his member and giving it a squeeze. He responds instantly to my touch.

“Yes,” he gasps. The fact that I’ve caught him off guard makes me smile.

“Then get it. Tonight’s lesson isn’t over yet.”