Page 44 of Dark Verse

“After listening to you play like that, I hear their point.”

“It’s not that simple, Knox.”

“I mean, maybe I’m an idiot, but it doesn’t seem that hard. You are one of the best piano players I’ve ever heard. No, scratch that, you are the best I’ve ever heard.”

Raven rolls her eyes, pushing her smile down into a line. “Trying to kiss your boss’s ass?”

Yes. Among other things.

“No, just wondering why someone with your talent is basically working backstage.”

“The pressure is totally different backstage and as a manager. My self-worth can’t take a hit every time I miss a note if I’m not playing.”

A long silence stretches between us, but I’m not going to break it. Ven sits back down on the bench. Her posture shows she’s ready to play once more, but her eyes are distant in memory.

“I had this professor in college. He’s a brilliant pianist and composer. He only takes on one new student a year, and I could not believe I was chosen my freshman year. He was the most exacting piano teacher I had ever had up to that point. You think I’m intense, but I have nothing on this man. I can’t tell you how much my piano playing improved over that first semester alone. But he was also a good listener, asking questions about my personal life, my family, my freshman romances, my classes, anything and everything. It all seemed pretty innocent, just a professor getting to know his student.”

I already feel uncomfortable, sensing where this story is going.

“The too-long-didn’t-read version is he is a selfish, controlling asshole. But I was distracted by all the things he gave me. By all the things he promised to give me. In hindsight, I should have seen him for the cliché that he is. An aging married professor always sniffing around co-eds. I mean, there is an entire genre of books about men like that. Those all seem to end happily, but not so much for me.”

I want to say I’m sorry. I want to hold her in comfort. But I feel like saying or doing anything will break this talkative spell she seems to be under. So I nod.

“Instead of a happily ever after, I got a stress ulcer at 20 and nearly failed out of college. I completely crashed out just a few days before an important recital. It was more like an audition, actually. It was the final hurdle to enter my senior year. I just couldn’t take it anymore. The insane practice and rehearsal schedules, the endless criticisms, the pressure to perform at a certain level across different styles.

“It was like this beautiful world I had dreamed of and worked for was suddenly a cage. A little prison I happily built for myself without realizing it. There was no getting out. Not with all the pressure I felt at the time. There was only sitting and enduring. So I did. Years of relentless verbal abuse from a man I trusted, all culminating in the worse performance of my lifetime.

“God above, the railing I took from that four-person committee…” shaking her head, she says, “it almost made me quit. I absolutely did cry the moment I got off the stage. I made it through my senior year, just barely, but after graduation, I stopped performing.” She sighs. “I know I disappointed a lot of people with that decision, but I needed a break from playing music for a while. And like I told my parents, it’s not like I gave up on music entirely. It’s still my passion. It’s still how I feed myself. I’m just not the object of ridicule anymore.”

Everything she is saying is making me seriously pissed at a list of people whose names I don’t even know. Her shit professor. The school administrators who likely knew the stress that man was putting her under but did nothing to support her. That committee is filled with four assholes and no brain cells. Anyone who has ever made her feel like she wasn’t the most incredible musician on Earth.

Fuck. Them. All.

“Sorry, you don’t care about any of this.”

“I do,” I insist. “I really do want to know why the most talented piano player I have ever heard isn’t playing international concert halls.”

She presses her lips together once more, and I know she is suppressing a smile.

“Because no one is looking for a pianist slash percussionist with late-developing but nonetheless crippling stage fright.”

“I’d hire you.”

That smile she was suppressing comes out in full force. Damn. It hits me like a sudden illness. I feel lightheaded, giddy, and unsettled all at once. I think that’s the first time she has smiled at me specifically like that since she hired us. I’m immediately consumed with ideas on how to get her to do it again.

“How sweet of you. But I know what you’d pay and you, sir, cannot afford me.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

KNOX

“SONGBIRD”

VERSE 1

Perched on a branch in the bright sunrise,

Black feathers catching fire in the waking sky.