IS THIS A SEX THING?

LEVI

I wake late to the sound of her cello. I don’t know the piece, whether it belongs to her or some other great composer, but it doesn’t matter. Those rich tones seep into my bones, deep, wrapping themselves around me, inside me. They suffocate me from the inside out, choke me, cut off my air until all I can see, breathe, hear, feel is her music. It rips me apart, not all at once, but slowly, piece by piece, stretching, drawing apart sinew, and fibre, and bone, and I break.

I crawl out of bed and snag the bottle off the nightstand. I’m still half-drunk from the night before, but I don’t care. I take a huge swig of whisky and swish it around my mouth. I don’t need the liquor to get through, but it sure fucking helps. I stumble up the stairs, and down the hall toward the ballroom dressed only in a pair of silk sleep pants. Brie faces the mirror, her eyes are closed, her cello resting between slender thighs, and her head thrown back as the bow saws across the strings, wrenching my heart open a little more with every stroke.

Tears sting my eyes. I don’t even know why. What I do know is that it has nothing to do with Ali. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me. I’ve been carrying this weight, this wound for so long that I’m not even sure it’s about her anymore. Maybe I don’t hate myself because I had Ali and failed to keep her, but because deep down, I know I didn’t deserve her. I resent Coop because I know he does. I’d fuck Brie in a heartbeat, but I wouldn’t respect her or even want her afterward because I’m rotten on the inside—dark, depraved.

The longer she keeps her legs closed, the more I want her, but the second she gives in, I’ll destroy her because I love too freely. I’m quick to ruin any possibility I have of being loved in return, and even worse, I’m one of those arseholes who pushes everyone away and in the end is still surprised to find himself alone.

I lean against the door frame and watch. Her long hair falls over her shoulders, and her eyes are closed, but it’s the heartbreak on her face that stops me dead in my tracks. Seems the Angry French Girl has a heart after all, and I have to wonder who broke it, and where I can find him so I can beat his head in.

She opens her eyes and her gaze meets mine in the mirror. Her bow slips, she lowers her hand and her wide-eyed expression gives away her vulnerability before she schools her features into the hard mask she usually wears around me.

“How long have you been standing—”

“Don’t stop,” I whisper. “Please don’t stop.”

She frowns, but raises her bow again and I stagger through the room and stop just a few feet from her. I mean to sit, but instead, I go down like a sack of shit. And that’s where I stay, curled at her feet like a fucking trained submissive, clutching a bottle I no longer have any desire to drink from, with my tears pooling on the floor like a little bitch. Brie is slow to start up again. She’s no doubt watching me and trying to figure out when the hell I turned into such a pussy, but I don’t look at her.

I can’t meet her eyes and see pity in them, or worse, disgust. So I stare at the bottle clutched in my hands, and I hold onto it for dear life as she plays the first few bars of Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt”, because it’s the only thing I can hold on to. Because if I don’t, I may just cease to exist. I hold to it so tightly I don’t know how the glass doesn’t shatter, or how my bones don’t break.

I don’t know how long she plays, but it’s a long time. I recognise Elgar's Cello Concerto, and Adagio in G minor, then she plays “Heart Shaped Box”, “Losing My Religion”, “Numb”, and “In the End” by Linkin Park. After what seems like an eternity, but what could never be long enough, she sets her cello in its stand, and her bow back in its box, and lays down on the floor beside me. She doesn’t say anything; she just lies there. I don’t know if she’s feeling her own pain or getting high off mine. I guess it doesn’t really matter.

I reach out across the space between us and take her hand. She’s startled at first, and tries to pull away, but I yank it closer and eventually she interlocks her fingers with mine, and squeezes. We stay like that until the sun slips behind the house, and shadows crawl across the floor to greet us. Downstairs, Margaux prepares dinner, and the clanging of pots and pans echo through the empty halls.

“When I was a child, my father used to rap my knuckles with a stick as I played.”

“Jesus.” I roll onto my side to see her face, but she doesn’t look at me; she stares at the ceiling. “That’s fucked up.”

“I would play, and every time I faltered, I would get a hard slap across the hands. I would play until the pads of my fingers were so swollen I could no longer feel anything. And afterward, when the blood and feeling would return, that dull throb of pain made it seem as if I had done something worthwhile.” She laughs, but it comes out more like a sigh. “I would play until my back and neck ached, my fingers bled, and my knuckles were raw from the stick, but it was never good enough. I never pleased him.”

“Then he’s an idiot.”

“The first time I saw my father smile was when I made it into the Orchestre de Paris. He turned to me, his eyes welled with tears, and the ghost of a smile on his lips. He said, ‘You have brought great honour to our family, my daughter’.” She smiles, but it’s tinged with sadness. “When I play, I still imagine him there beside me, with his stick, ready to rap my knuckles. Even though he is bedridden now, and he can no longer use his mouth to form words, or tell me to play faster, to work harder, I still see him with his stick, and hear him in my head telling me I’m not good enough. I will never be good enough.”

“You’re fucking crazy, you’re the best damn cellist—possibly even the best musician—I’ve ever heard.”

“If I am good, it’s because he made me that way. Pain made me that way.”

“What are you saying, that I need your dad to come beat the shit out of me while I play?”

“No, I’m telling you to use it. This pain.” She startles me by placing her palm on my chest. “Whatever this is, whatever it is that causes you to drink, and bleed, use it to make you better.”

“I don’t know how to be better. I don’t know that I can be. I don’t even know who I am anymore.” There. I said it. I’m losing myself, and I don’t even know what to.

“Why do you never show the world this side of you?” Brie asks quietly.

“You mean broken and lying on the floor?” I laugh, but it’s devoid of humour. I’m a fucking rock star who plays to sell-out tours. Hundreds of thousands of women proposition me every day via social media. I can’t walk down the street in most cities around the world without causing a fucking frenzy. I’ve got a fat bank account, and a monster cock, and I’m lying on the floor of my chateau with a beautiful French woman who I’d give my left nut to fuck, but I’ve never felt so alone. I’ve never wanted to disappear so much in all my life. “I’m sure the fans would love that. The media would certainly have a field day.”

“I mean this vulnerability, this side of you that isn’t a cocky rock star.”

“Because I don’t let him out to play very often.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, Brie.” I roll onto my back again, done with these questions. Done with fucking everything. “The same reason you never let your guard down.”

She swallows and stares at the ceiling. “Do you still love her?”

It takes me several beats to answer, not because I’m uncertain, but because I am. “I don’t know any more.”

“Then why are you so sad?”

“If I knew, do you really think I’d be hiding out in the South of France with a crazy maid, paying an angry French girl to play for me?”

“I don’t know. I do not know you at all.”

“Then ask,” I say, my irritation finally creeping into my tone.

“Ask what?”

“What you’re dying to know.”

I’ve barely got the words out before she says, “Why did you sleep with her?”

“With Ali?” Unease prickles along my spine. I’m so used to having my back up about Red, avoiding questions from the media, from fans. Torn between wanting to protect her and wanting to prove to the world that for a time, even just a small amount, she belonged to me too.

“Oui.”

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t care.”

I tilt my head to see her face. “Then why did you ask?’

She sighs and attempts to sit up, but I splay my hand across her chest and push her down. She glares at me and then down at my hand with her brow raised. I consider removing it, but I’m copping a feel and I really don’t want her to leave. She forcibly removes it herself and lets it fall to the floor between us, but she doesn’t attempt to get up, so I decide to make a concession this time.

“I slept with her because I wanted her. She’s hot. Not all refined elegance like you. She’s hot in a commoner kind of way.”

She chuckles. “Commoner?”

“She doesn’t have a stick up her arse.”

“I do not have a stick up my arse.”

“Oh yes, you do.” I laugh, and then my smile fades as I stare up at the ceiling again. “Ali was like a breath of fresh air, until we fucked, and her, Coop, and I fucked. Then she was like breathing carbon monoxide pumped from the exhaust straight into a closed car. She was toxic. The three of us were toxic.”

“Then why did you let it continue?”

“I don’t know. At first I just liked fucking her. I liked fucking with Coop. He was always given anything and everything he wanted, and I liked that I’d been there first with Ali. I knew it ate him up inside, but then the longer that shit when on, the more the joke was on me because I fell in love with who she really was.”

“And she didn’t love you back?’

“Bingo,” I whisper. “I liked to kid myself into believing she did, but I could see it in her eyes. She liked me a whole lot, but she didn’t love me, or she wasn’t in love with me.”

“I find it hard to believe you would take that lying down.”

“Well, I know I’m charming, but last time I checked, you can’t force someone to fall in love with you any more than you can help who you fall in love with.”

“Oui, exactement.” I chuckle at how French that was, and how fucking adorable, but Brie pouts. “What?”

“Nothing, Frenchie. So, who’s the fucker that broke your heart?”

“His name is Bastien, and he was my conductor.”

“Bastien?” I roll my eyes. “What kind of pussy-arse name is that?”

She smiles coyly. “Says the man who is named after a pair of jeans.”

“At least it’s not cheese,” I murmur. “Though you do look all kinds of tasty.”

“I am not named after cheese,” she says impatiently. “My name is Brielle. It means ‘Of God’.”

I humph. “Figures.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” I say too quickly. “So how did Bastien break your heart?”

“He was my lover, but he failed to mention he was already married with three children. I showed up at his house in nothing but lingerie and a trench coat. His wife tried to murder me with a vegetable peeler.”

I can’t help it, I laugh. Deep, fucking insane sounding guffaws.

“It is not funny. She could have done some serious damage,” Brie says, but even she can see the humour in it, and she laughs too. “I always wondered why Bastien was obsessed with my hands. I thought it was because of how I played, but when I met his wife, it all became clear. She had these huge masculine mitts, all dry and calloused, probably from cleaning up after him and his three horrible kids.”

“So, what happened after she tried to murder you with a vegetable peeler?” I can’t even say it with a straight face.

She sighs. “I confronted him, and he demanded I be removed from the orchestra. Said it was a conflict of interest. Conductors hold a lot of sway, but it was more than that. He knows everyone in Paris, and I could not find work anywhere in my whole damn city. I have my students, but I even lost some of them, because everyone loves to hate the other woman, even when she has no clue that that is what she is.”

“That’s fucked up, but why don’t you just move? You’re easily good enough to play with the Berlin Philharmonic, or Vienna, London, or even Chicago. Fuck, anyone would be lucky to have you. Brie, you should be playing your own stadiums. I can’t understand why you aren’t.”

“It is not that simple. My father is ill.”

“The arsehole who beat you as a kid for not playing well enough?”

“He is not an arsehole. He was making me strong, and now he is weak. I cannot leave him or my mother.”

“Yeah, well in my country, we call that child abuse.”

“I do not expect you to understand.”

I frown and turn my head to glare at her. “Why wouldn’t I understand?”

“Because you are a rock star. You’re a man. It is always different for men. Your ability to play is not judged on whether your face is starting to wrinkle too early, or if your dress is the suitable length, or if you open your legs for the wrong lover.” She laughs, but it’s without humour. “You take off your shirt and play on stage, you drink and do drugs, and make sex tapes, and sell replicas of your penis, and the industry—the world—applauds you for it. I choose the wrong lover, and I not only get my heart broken, but I lose any chance of following my dreams because no one will hire me in France.”

“Then work for me. Play for me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Play with me.”

She cocks a brow. “Is this a sex thing?”

“It can be a sex thing if you want.” I grin, but continue speaking when I see she’s not falling for it. “Stay for the month. Help me write again.”

“I can’t do that. There is my mother to think of. She has no reprieve. No one there to help her take care of him.”

“I’ll make it seventy-five.”

“You gave me fifty for the week. Fifty times four is not seventy-five.”

“You want two hundred thousand euro? Fine. Done.”

Brie rolls to her side and rests her head on her palm. “Are you crazy?

“What?”

“You would seriously pay me two hundred thousand euro to stay with you? That is insane.”

“No, I’d pay you two hundred thousand to play with me.”

She gives me a wry grin. “Again, I cannot help but feel this is a sex thing.”

“Oh, AFG,” I say, bopping her on the nose. “For all your talk of sex, I can’t help but think you want it ... bad.”

She shakes her head and gets to her feet, her hips swaying rhythmically as she walks to the door, but she doesn’t deny it, and she doesn’t say she won’t stay.

I have to convince her to stay.