CHAPTER FOURTEEN

VIC SANK DOWN AGAINST THE wall, the glass cold against his back, and curled forward, hanging his head between his knees and dragging his hands against the back of his neck until his nails dug in and the burn of the pain made him snarl out a coughing, hoarse sound that wanted to be a sob but he just wouldn’t let it.

Fuck. Fuck. How had he fucked up everything this quickly?

He’d just…he’d been trying to keep the different parts of his life in order, trying to compartmentalize, trying to arrange everything the way it was supposed to be, and somehow supposed to turned into something all wrong. In trying to hold on to all the pieces, they’d instead been torn from his fingers, ripped away.

And in trying to control Amani…

Vic had driven him off.

He leaned back against the glass, closing his eyes and letting the cold soak in to numb him. Control was his entire problem, wasn’t it? All this time he’d been playing at giving up control, but he’d been lying to himself and lying to Amani, treating it almost like a game instead of something he needed on levels so deep they were engraved in whispered script upon his bones. He had to learn…learn…

He didn’t know.

He only wished he’d met Amani in some other way, for even the smallest chance to be something more to him than the client who treated him like trash.

His eyes burned; he felt like he’d been crying for hours although they were completely dry. He was completely dry, husked out and fragile and ready to crumble. He didn’t know what to do. If he went after Amani, he’d just be making it worse, treating him like he wasn’t even enough of a person for Vic to listen to no. If he called Ash, Ash would just yell at him to apologize, and Vic didn’t think an apology was enough. He’d thought he’d known helplessness in Amani’s hands, but it was nothing compared to knowing the man he loved was running away from him in this very moment, and there was nothing Vic could do to get him back.

He stared at the mess of broken glass, then dug into his pocket and glowered down at his phone. Amani’s contact was right there at the top, and Vic tapped it, looking down at their message history. Terse exchanges of information. Hardly any laughter, any warmth, no little check-ins just to say I’m thinking of you or I miss you or you won’t believe the shit I just found on Twitter. None of those idle little things that happened in a relationship, because they hadn’t been in a relationship and he’d been too damned caught up in himself to recognize the quiet thing growing day by day.

He swallowed back the knot of pain in his throat, then dialed past Amani’s contact to Julie’s and hit Call.

“Hey,” she said after a couple of rings, the call picking up on Siorse’s laughter in the background, and even if his heart was spiderwebbed fragments barely holding together, that sound never failed to make Vic smile. “Vic? What’s up?”

“I think,” he dragged out raggedly, “I really fucked up, Jules. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Language. I’m driving, and I’ve got you on speakerphone.”

“I know what the f-word means, Mom,” Siorse said primly.

“Do you know what grounded means, young lady?” Julie sighed. “Vic? What happened?”

“Remember that bloke I told you about?”

“Mmhm. The one you like that doesn’t like you? Or you think he doesn’t like you.”

“I know it, now. I…we…had this thing going, this kind of mutually beneficial thing, I guess…” It was hard enough picking words carefully without telling her he was letting Amani tie him down and drive him beyond reason with torment and pleasure; harder still to keep it vague and G-rated with Siorse listening. “I wanted it to be more. And instead of telling him that or showing him that, I treated him like he was disposable.”

“Well that’s a shit thing to do.”

“Language,” Siorse piped up.

“Grounded,” Julie retorted. “God, she gets more like you every day.”

Vic laughed humorlessly. “Your daughter needs better role models.”

“Ha. Ha.” Julie broke off, swearing under her breath in whispers as honking erupted around her. “…New York drivers…Vic, what do you want to do?”

“I want to take it back. Tell him I didn’t mean it. Tell him I love him.”

“So do that.”

“It’s not that simple—”

“It is that simple,” she said. “You fu—effed up by not being honest with him about what you wanted. If you want to fix that, well…”

He pinched the tight knot between his eyes. “He’ll just tell me to sod off.”

“So you’re a mind-reader now?”

“Predictions based on past experiences. Math major.”

“I always hated math.” Julie snorted. “What happens if you fail?”

“He hates me.”

“And what happens if you don’t even try?”

“…he hates me.”

“Exactly. There’s not exactly a new net loss here, but if you try and he’s willing to listen…”

“But I can’t know how he’ll react if I—”

“Of course you can’t know.” Julie cut him off with an exasperated sound. “Because you can’t control that. The only thing you can control is what you choose to do, and then everything else is out of your hands.”

“I don’t know how to start.”

The frustrated tone in Julie’s voice warmed. “Do right by him,” she said. “Not because you want something in return. Not because you want to atone. Not out of some sense of cosmic guilt or morality or anything else. Do right by him because you want him to be happy, even if it’s not with you.”  Gentle words, yet they cut to the quick. “Can you live with that? Can you live with giving everything for him, and he still walks away from you?”

“Yes,” he answered without hesitation, his lips and his heart speaking before his mind could catch up, could over-analyze, could pick his feelings to pieces small enough for him to sweep out of sight. “If he’s happy…if he’s happy, if he’s safe, then yes. Yes, I can.”

“Then do that,” she urged. “And just…see what happens.”

He smiled faintly. “Thanks. I’ll try. I just…thanks. I needed that perspective.”

“It’s not an unfamiliar scenario with you,” she said tentatively. “You’ve been trying to atone for something you didn’t do to me for your whole life. Sometimes I wonder if Siorse and I are even people to you, or just your personal crusade to compensate for Oliver.”

It was like she’d picked him up only to knock him back down again with a hook right to the face. He stared blankly at the floor between his knees. “I…of course I see you as a person, Julie, I…”

“Then you have to treat me like it.” She didn’t even sound upset; if anything there was an odd kindness to her words. “I’ve wanted to say this to you for a long time, but right now…it seems like you’re finally in a place to hear it. I can’t be a golden bird in a golden cage, Vic. I appreciate everything you and your family have done for me, for us, but it feels like I’m living in this box where my only identity is your brother’s victim. I want more than that. I want to just be me without his ghost always haunting me. I want…I want a happy ending. My own, not one bought and gift-wrapped for me.”

Fuck. He couldn’t even do this relationship right. If he couldn’t treat Julie right, how could he ever hope to do right by Amani? But he tried to shove his own feelings down, tried to bind up all the bitterness and the loss and the pain and the emptiness into one tight fist inside himself. “What would be your happy ending, then?” he asked raggedly. “Is there anything I an give you that would help you on your way?”

“A job,” she answered. “That’s all I want. I sit in this house all day doing nothing and filling my life with useless hours in between waiting for Siorse to need me again. I just want to do something I love.” She laughed, but it came with a choked edge of repressed tears that said she was hurting as much as Vic, and somehow it softened the sting of the wound, connected them again with rougher edges where they’d be messy for a while, but maybe they’d be okay. “Your parents paid for that agricultural tech degree and it’s been sitting in a box ever since. I just want to be able to prove myself without someone else holding me up.”

“Then I can’t just give you a job,” he teased softly. “But I can put a good word in with the hiring manager.”

“That’s all I want. A foot in the door. The rest, I want to be able to do myself. You know throwing money at problems doesn’t fix them, right?”

“You were never a problem,” Vic swore. “And I never wanted to fix you. But I can accept if you want me to let go.”

“You don’t have to let go. Just loosen the chokehold a bit.” When he said nothing, her voice turned gruff. “Hey. Don’t you get all fucking maudlin and disappear on me completely. We are family, you know.”

Siorse broke her the-adults-are-talking silence with a gasp. “You said the f-word!”

“I’m grounded too, then.”

“Vic?” Siorse asked plaintively.

“Yeah, peanut?”

“Are you going away?”

“No, peanut. No. I’m not going anywhere.” He smiled, and his mouth tasted not like sour things, but like fear that wasn’t fear but just the metallic sharpness of a risk, of the unknown, of standing on the edge and knowing if he fell, he wouldn’t see the ground coming. He stood, staring helplessly around the apartment—before his gaze fell on the wash of moonlit silver hanging from the bathroom divider, that gown of starrise and magic. “I just need to do something important, right now.”

l

AMANI CRASHED HIS BOW AGAINST his cello’s strings until it sobbed, until it screamed, until it boomed, until it howled. It was better than sobbing himself, better than screaming, better than breaking something, better than tearing into his own heart until he tore Vic’s name out of himself the same way he’d torn up that contract and tossed it in the trash, then gone on a wild fucking internet spree throwing all of Vic’s shitty aggravating overbearing prick money at any charity he could find with an open donation form.

What had he really thought would happen? He knew better. Even if he’d never had a serious relationship with a submissive, he knew better than to think he could get tangled up with someone—someone like Vic, someone who saw the world through an entirely different lens—on such an intimate level and ever think it would end in anything but disaster. He’d set himself up for it, because he’d been listening to his own desperation too much to hear the tiny timid voice of his fucking common sense.

His fingers burned as hotly as his eyes. Still he dragged and plucked and ripped notes from the cello, curled on the edge of his bed and clutching it to him and holding it fast because it was the one good thing he had left from this.

He could play again.

He could play again, his heart steeped into the wood of his father’s cello, and the joy of quivering strings under his fingers softened the sharpest edges of the little hurts that had cut him open again and again.

When a light rap came at his door, though, he let his aching arm fall, the strings’ throbbing slowly quivering down to silence, as he looked up at his mother, tossing his hair out of his face. She looked in at him with the same pinched, worried look she’d had all week, haunting him like a ghost but letting him have his space. Now, though, she stepped into the room, reaching out to catch his wrist and turning his hand over with a cluck of her tongue.

“Amani.”

He stared down at his palm. At his fingers, an abraded red wound scraped across the tip of his index finger. He hadn’t even noticed the burn, too caught in playing until the strings turned hot.

“Oh,” he said listlessly. “I guess I overdid it.”

“You know better than to do that to your hands if you want to play.” She settled on the bed next to him; he set his cello aside, and she squeezed his hand. “I think you need to talk to me.”

He searched her eyes, and wondered why he’d been lying to her when she’d never condemned him for his choices, for his existence, letting him find his own way with a few gentle nudges here and there just to keep him from banging himself up too hard when he occasionally planted face first.

“You’re right,” he said, looking down at their hands. “I…I’ve been lying to you, and I need to be honest.”

“Of course, habibi. What is it?”

“That client I’ve been giving cello lessons to…” He licked dry lips. “I was giving him lessons, but we were also…we were together.”

She tsked and flicked her free hand. “I knew that. A man doesn’t come to pick up his cello instructor in a limousine.”

“I…yeah.” He laughed dryly. “And it’s complicated and weird, and there are things you don’t need to know, but…I think I love him, Mama.” His mouth forced itself down at the corners in that awful way that happened when he wanted to cry, but refused to let himself, his pride keeping his spine always straight. “I think I love him, but we’re just too different and somehow everything went wrong.”

“Oh, baby,” she murmured sympathetically, almost crooning as she stroked his hand, her skin fine and thin and weathered against his. “Does he love you?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “He said something that…that really hurt me, and I don’t know how you can say something like that if you love someone, if you’re not just…using them.”

“Because no one is perfect. You can love someone with all your heart and still say terrible things because you had a bad day, or out of ignorance, or because of a misunderstanding. And sometimes love? It hurts as much as it heals.” She shifted closer to him, wrapping her arm around his shoulders and pulling him into her softness, her familiarity and the warmth that would always mean family, to him. “The reason someone you love can hurt you so much is because loving them opens all those places inside you where you’re fragile. A tap won’t dent steel…but it can shatter glass.”

“Mmph.” He mumbled and buried his face against her shoulder. “I don’t like feeling like glass.”

“But it happens, when you feel so much for someone. And it means trusting them to try not to shatter you, even if they don’t always succeed. And you won’t always succeed, either.” She rubbed his arm, squeezing him tighter. “When two imperfect people love each other, you’re going to fight, you’re going to hurt each other, and at the end of the day you have to decide if you want to forgive or walk away, because there’s no such thing as a perfect relationship. There’s only a right one. If it’s a right one, you stay. If it’s a wrong one, you go.”

“But…you and Dad were always so happy…”

“Oh, of course we were—but we also fought sometimes.” She chuckled, voice warm, fond with sweet, soft memory. “We’d wake the neighbors shouting over the silliest things. He had a temper, I had a temper, and sometimes that fire kept us warm, but sometimes it just scorched our fingers when we tried to reach for each other.”

“Wasn’t that bad? Fighting all the time?”

“No. Because it wasn’t all the time. It was just the little things here and there, but we always met in the end as equals. And if we were wrong, we apologized.” She leaned in close, her soft voice falling over him like the most soothing rain, easing away the worst of that jagged, shattered feeling inside him. “What did you fight about with this man?”

“If he was using me. If he just…saw me as an object.”

“Was he? Does he?”

“I don’t know. I was angry and hurt, and I couldn’t listen to anything else he had to say, so I just…I left.”

“Well.” She patted his shoulder, then the side of his head matter-of-factly. “You don’t have to listen to him if you don’t want to. You don’t owe anyone that. But if you want to know how he feels…”

With a frustrated groan, Amani thudded his head against his mother’s shoulder. “What if I can’t forgive him, even if he apologizes?”

“Then he’s not the right one.” She kissed his brow. “The only way you can know is to talk to him.”

“I’ll try, Mama. I’ll try.”

But if he did, he had no idea what he would say.

l

SHE LEFT HIM ALONE, THEN, to clean up the abrasion on his fingertip and then sprawl out on his bed to let his nerves calm down and just drift. He should…do homework, something. Life didn’t want to wait for him to pull an Ophelia and pine himself to bits. Rolling over onto his stomach with a groan, he shoved his hand into his messenger bag—and brushed up against the slick plastic jacketing of library book binding.

He pulled out the copy of Mossflower Vic had lent him. He’d never gotten around to reading it, too caught up in Vic himself, but he should probably give it back. Maybe when he did, he’d take the chance to hear Vic out and at least lay things to rest more cleanly. He wouldn’t get his hopes up. Vic belonged in his ivory tower.

Amani didn’t.

But he fingered the cover of the book, worrying at his lower lip, then settled to curl up against the headboard with the book propped on his thighs, and opened to page one. Opened to a story at once grim and bright, bloody and beautiful, whimsical and arrestingly poignant, caught in turning page after page, caught in reading these words and knowing inside Vic was the boy who’d grown up loving these stories because they were simple. Because they were something better, something warmer, than the complications and gray areas and unwanted choices of real life.

He felt like in these pages he saw the Vic he’d thought he’d known.

The Vic he missed, if he would just stop lying to himself.

He read until the direction of the light crossed from one side of the room to the other, slanting toward sunset; until a rap at his bedroom door pulled him from his reverie. He blinked as the room resolved around him, colors shifting as his eyes adjusted from black text on white paper. His mother leaned in the doorway again, carrying a flat rectangular box bound closed with twine, a folded note card slipped under the string…and, its stem knotted and braided with the cord, a white vanilla orchid resting atop the box, the fresh wet-dewed twin to the browned, withered one resting on the top tier of his desk.

His heart was a captured flame, as he stared at the box. “…what is that?”

“Delivery boy just dropped it off for you.” She pursed her lips, turning the box and peering over it. “No return address.”

It didn’t need one. It didn’t need one, when that orchid might as well have screamed Vic’s name. Amani tumbled to his feet and fumbled the box from his mother’s hands, tugging out the notecard and flipping it open on Vic’s elegant handwriting.

 

I hope you’ll still come. No one should have to miss the beautiful music you make just because I’ve been an ass. I’ll stay away, so you don’t have to see me.

Please come.

Please don’t ever stop playing, Amani.

-V

 

He always wrote the way he spoke, in warm tones laced with silent laughter and threaded with something deeper, more melancholy, until Amani heard his voice with every word.

Heard his voice, and ached.

Below the note was an address, a time—and taped to the bottom of the note was a bookmark-style printed program, advertising the Newcomb Textiles charity concert.

The concert, and the headline performer, cellist Amani Idrissi.

Fear, elation, confusion, yearning—they wrapped around him in a dizzying spiral. Vic…still wanted him to play the concert. Still wanted him to do this for himself, to find his love again, and Vic would exile himself from his own event just so Amani would feel safe?

But I want you there, he realized, as he set the box down on the bed and plucked the twine free. I need you there.

The box top lifted away to reveal ivory organza, silver embroidery. His takchita. The gown he’d left at Vic’s; the gown that had made him feel more beautiful than he ever had in his life. He gathered it up in his arms, hugging it to his chest, and closed his eyes.

He’d play the concert. He’d play the concert, and remember who he’d wanted to be before fear had chased him off course. And then…

He’d find Vic. He’d talk to him.

And hope to hell that he was the right one.