Page 54 of These Secret Years

“It’s pretty hard to hurt my feelings,” I tell him.

“Why’s that?”

I want to say because I don’t have any. It feels like that most of the time. But they’re in there somewhere, buried under a stack of the other issues I deal with. They tend to come out more around Knight, though I’m trying hard not to show them. “It’s not like I live or die based on whether I can get someone off.”

“What do you live or die by, then?”

“I mean—if someone I respected told me I was trash at a violin solo, I’d probably need to be medicated for a few days so I didn’t do anything crazy.”

“You’ve never fucked up a solo?”

“Never,” I say evenly.

“Really?”

“Literally every single one of my fingers would have to be broken before I allowed myself to miss a single note or have a piece sound anything less than perfect. It’s like the one thing I can always control.”

“Wow.”

“What?” I ask. Is that so crazy? “Like you’d let yourself screw up a play?”

“I’ve got no control over most of what happens on the field. I can call whatever I want, but what happens after the ball gets hiked is in a lot more hands than mine.”

“Do you get yelled at if something goes wrong?”

“Depends. Sometimes. Sometimes I even deserve it because I didn’t think fast enough or see something I should’ve seen. I’m still learning. Still improving. I hope.”

Not that I ever thought I was cut out for team sports, but now I know I’m not. “Anyway, don’t beat yourself up too much about that girl. If you do see her again, just pull her aside, say you were drunk, and you’re sorry. It’ll go a long way.”

“Or she’ll think I wanna do sex stuff with her again.”

I laugh out loud. “Sex stuff. You’re fucking adorable.”

“Why don’t you go attempt an algebra problem and let me cook.”

“I have a better idea. I’ll teach you some Rachmaninoff.”

I play violin while Knight does something with the chicken in a skillet. Sitting at the head of the table, facing him as he works, I improvise a soundtrack to what he’s doing. It takes him a while to realize this, at one point asking, “Is this an actual song?”

To which, I answer with my usual, “Does it sound like an actual song?”

He shakes his head at me dismissively while looking back down at his pan with a tiny smile curling the edge of his mouth. Then, a few minutes later while he’s been staring at the pan, poking it with a wooden spoon for three minutes and I’ve been bouncing back and forth over the same three low notes, he huffs and says, “Okay, I get it. That’s annoying.”

I respond with some very severe Beethoven. That gives him an erection, and I like that a lot.

When he’s done cooking, he insists I make my own plate, so I put my violin back in its case and join him in the kitchen. I’m hungry but not starving. I give myself a large helping of the salad and look at the chicken more than once, wanting meat for the first time in a while. Then, I make each of us another screwdriver since he finally finished his second one. We sit across from each other at the table while I eat and try to figure out if he’s nervous or not.

I probably would be more nervous if I didn’t have such a good buzz. “Are you the baby of the family?” I ask.

“Yeah. Two older sisters.”

“Then how’d you manage to become such a perfectionist? I thought that was supposed to be an eldest child thing.”

“My whole family is like this. It’s not just me.”

“Do you have a fear of failure?”

“Fear? I don’t know. Maybe. It’s more like an undercurrent of push, push, push.” He punctuates this with small hand gestures, pushing the air toward me in three beats. “Failure isn’t really an option. Pivoting is, but I don’t want to pivot. So, no, I don’t think I’d call it fear.”