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It is loud, raw, and completely unstoppable.
It isn’t perfect. Not technically, anyway. I stopped chasing the rigid myth of perfection back around Christmas when I realised perfection was a trap. This Nocturne needed more than that. It needed heart. It needed two people who had argued, laughed, and fell head over heels for each other to pull the emotion out of the sheet music. Together.
“Fuck yes,” Julian gasps as the last note rings out into the room.
“Yes.” I laugh, a brilliant smile breaking across my face. “That’s it. That’s the one.”
I look at my score, its frayed edges covered in pencil marks. My neat notations are buried under Julian’s impatient black scrawls from the early weeks when he couldn’t say what he wanted out loud without either having to leave the room for a cigarette or ripping my playing to shreds.
This room. The space where I’d ridden his lap fully clothed, testing the absolute limits of my restraint.
This piece. The soundtrack to our chaos, and now, our triumph.
“Are you nervous?” Julian asks, turning slightly on the bench to face me, stretching out his legs.
I consider the question, waiting for the suffocating, panic-induced anxiety to paralyse me. It doesn’t come. The Ellise who stood in the lecture hall last October and had her composure dismantled in front of everyone—she would have been hyperventilating. The Ellise who walked into this room for the first time in her oversized sweats, while Julian Thorne looked her up and down—she’s been replaced by someone who knows exactly what she’s worth.
“Not even a little bit,” I say, taking a step toward him. “Three months ago, I was terrified every single time I played with you. I couldn't focus on the music because I couldn’t stop looking at your tattoos. Your hands. Your mouth.”
I reach out, my fingers tracing a deliberate path over his thigh, as I feel the solid heat beneath his jeans, while keeping my eyes locked on him.
Julian looks at me, his expression shifting with a darkened intensity. The muscle in his jaw flexes as my hand moves higher.
“Is that right?”
“It is.” I grin.
Without breaking eye contact, I lower myself, sitting effortlessly on his lap. The piano bench groans slightly beneath our weight, but neither of us cares. My fingers link around his neck, tangling into the soft hair at his collar, pulling him close enough that I can feel the steady, hot rhythm of his breath against my lips.
“What about you, Thorne?” I tease, leaning in until our noses brush. “Is the legendary Julian Thorne sweating?”
“No.” His dark eyes drop to my mouth before rising back to meet mine, gleaming with a fierce certainty. “I’m ready. I want to play it on that stage in front of them all, and I want them to hear what it actually sounds like when it’s not a performance. When it’s real. When it’s us.”
He leans in and kisses me tenderly.
I understand this completely.
“Julian,” I whisper against his lips.
He draws back, waiting for whatever I have to say.
“Whatever happens on that stage tomorrow, whatever those judges or critics write…. we built something real in here. They can’t touch us.”
His smile softens.
“No, Bow-Peep,” he says, stroking the line of my jaw. “They fucking can’t.”
This is us. One last time.
Before everything changes and we step out from behind these walls and show the world what we are. “Let’s give them something to talk about tomorrow, Vance.” A slow, dangerous grin gradually takes over his face. “Together.”
“Together,” I whisper, leaning my forehead against his, a quiet chuckle escaping me as his arms wrap tightly around my waist, pulling me flush against him in the dim light of Practice Room C.
40
Ellise
Normally, at this exact point in a major recital, my anxiety would be systematically dismantling me from the inside out. My stomach would be twisted into knots, my breathing shallow, and my hands would be shaking so violently I’d struggle to hide the frantic movements. I’d have visited the backstage restroom more times than I would ever care to admit, plagued by the compulsory nervous sweats that usually accompanied my biggest performances.
