Page 44

My fingers grip the edges of the textbook so hard that the paper wrinkles beneath my thumbs. I force my eyes down, attempting to read the same paragraph for the fifth time.

“Oh, he is definitely a bad boy.” Nancy winks, a slow, triumphant expression spreading across her face as she pulls her luxury lipstick from her bag and applies a generous coat of peachy pink to her lips. “With his hands. His tongue.” A theatrical pause as her group leans in closer, completely captivated. “Julian is so dirty behind closed doors. He doesn’t exactly believe in holding back.”

I stop reading entirely.

Julian.

The word lands somewhere deep, and I am left temporarily breathless.

Julian and Nancy.

A cold, clammy feeling spreads across my palms as a very specific image flashes in my mind.

Jealous? No. Absolutely not.

Who Julian Thorne chooses to spend his nights with is none of my business. Who he touches in the dark, who he turns that predatory attention towards, whoever benefits from whatever it is that he does with those long, calloused fingers—none of it is my concern. We are partners in the practice room. We are forced collaborators.

That is all that we are.

That is all we will ever be.

I pick my book back up, trying with everything I have to read the paragraph for the sixth time.

Bad boy with his hands.

I close my eyes, open them, and attempt the text again.

His tongue.

The sudden heat that takes over my body has nothing to do with the sun and everything to do with Nancy’s graphic commentary about a specific person whose hands I have been very carefully trying not to think about for the last few weeks.

Weeks? Months.

Those hands. The way they command the piano keys. The way the dark of his ink tattoos flexes against his tendons when he plays.

Stop it, Ellise. Stop it right now.

“There you are.”

His British accent hits my ear before I can even process that he is there, leaning over my shoulder from the step above. Julian is close. Too close. He smells effortlessly intoxicating. His cologne is heavy with a hint of something spicy, completely taking over my senses the way it does every single time he gets too close to me.

“How did the Doppio Movimento go after I left yesterday?” he asks. His tone is so casual that I can’t tell if he heard Nancy broadcasting the intimate details of their sex life for the last five minutes, or if he just doesn’t give a damn. “Still a total nightmare?”

I’d stayed behind again after our last-minute session yesterday, stubbornly practicing until my body told me that enough was enough.

We don’t practice daily anymore. We’re down to three times a week, a compromise that’s actually working. Being together every day wasn’t helping the music; it just meant we were tearing the piece and each other apart.

Giving ourselves space wasn’t only a strategy.

It was a necessity of survival.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Nancy’s posture change the second she hears his voice. She immediately turns around, her lips curving into a performative smile. She has identified her target.

“Julian.” Her manufactured voice shouts up the steps, cutting through the ambient noise of the courtyard.

Her voice is so whiny, it’s borderline pathetic. It’s actually quite embarrassing to watch, and a reminder to never let myself fawn over a guy like that.

“Where have you been? I messaged you earlier,” Nancy calls.