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When breakfast was over, we all walked out, back to our rooms. For the second time in a week, we left Jeffery on the floor there. One thing was true. Elise had been right. I didn’t see any way Jeffery would come back from that.
After thirty minutes back in my quarters, my cuff sent me to the music room. I breathed a sigh of relief. It would be a nice change of pace. I’d been wanting to go back there and try out the piano again.
I was happy to see no one else was in the room when I got there. The last thing I wanted was to have my time in the room spoiled by listening to Bri or Elise. Taking a seat at the piano, I opened the little book I’d been using the last time to figure out how to play. Drake slid into the room an instant before the door swung closed and locked. He strode over and sat beside me as though nothing was wrong.
The only time I’d ever seen him almost be late was when he was helping me get somewhere. I was curious what had caused his delay today, but was too nervous to ask. Maybe he’d been trying to process what he’d done to Jeffery. Maybe he hated music.
“Do you play?” he asked.
I sighed and smiled. “Nope. I’m trying to learn a little though. It’s what I worked on the last time I was here.”
He was right beside me on the bench, his arm brushing mine. The heat radiated off of him. He’d ended a man in front of me, and all I could think about now was when he’d finger fucked me the other day. A warm blush spread across my cheeks as I remembered, and how his cock had throbbed between my fingers. Memories flooded me of the way he’d made me feel, with his warmth and heat pressed into my body. When I was around him, he made me feel safe. I had to blink away my thoughts. What was happening to me?
He made me feel safe, cared about, even though he’d just killed a man I knew, was what. The first person who ever had. Nothing else was important to me in this moment.
Drake raised his hands, fingers hovering over the keys for a second, then he played. He didn’t just play, he fucking destroyed the piano. His fingers flew across the white and black keys like he’d been born to play. He alternated between beautiful sweet classical music to snippets of more pop songs that I recognized. Piano Man, Hey Jude, and finishing off with Bennie and the Jets. After ten minutes, he stopped and then folded his hands in his lap.
I continue to stare at the keys in mesmerized fascination. “Holy shit,” I whispered then looked into his eyes. “Are you a pianist?”
He gave me a grin, but his eyes were sad. “No. Remember, I’m in health care. Psychiatric care to be specific, but I grew up taking a lot of lessons. I enjoyed it. You want me to teach you a little?”
“Hell yes,” I said.
Over the next few minutes, Drake walked me through the basics, showing me how to make certain notes with different sets of keys, how to use the little foot pedals below the keyboard, and also how to start reading the music.
“These lines are the staffs, this symbol is a clef, and these are the notes,” he explained as he pointed out each one on the piece of paper we were working on.
We went slowly. Twinkle Twinkle, Row Row Your Boat, and other very basic kids’ songs. At first one hand, but then working on using a second at the same time.
After successfully doing an entire first two pages of Claire de Lune by myself, Drake laughed and clapped his hands
“Wow. You’re a natural.”
A warm, satisfying glow swelled within me. I could count on one hand the number of times I remembered getting true praise for something I’d done in my life. It was nice, and the fact that it came from Drake made me feel even better. I couldn’t stop myself from blushing again.
“Thanks. It’s really fun. There’s…” I trailed off, thinking before going on, “umm, there’s something about the music. It’s calming.”
Drake’s smile softened as he looked at me. Our eyes locked. For a few seconds, it was like we were somewhere else. Free of this house of horrors—and safe. Before I even knew what was happening, I leaned into him, pressing my lips to his. There was a glorious moment when his tongue slipped into my mouth, hot, slippery, and wet. I sucked in a breath, and my nipples ached as they hardened, but the cuff buzzed. I jerked in surprise, pulling away and breaking the kiss before I wanted to.
Drake looked at his own device with a mixture of irritation and sorrow. “Damned things,” he muttered.
A few seconds later, we were told to go back to our rooms. I did but wished I could’ve stayed with Drake. He was the only person in the entire place I really cared about. The only person I wanted to be around.
The rest of the day was blessedly quiet and drama free. Lunch was chicken pot pie, and my afternoon activity was spent making dinner with Liam, who wasn’t a good conversationalist. We made some kind of flatbread pizzas and a pasta salad in virtual silence. It was good, though. I didn’t care for Liam, and it was nice to work in silence and let my brain decompress a little.
At both lunch and dinner, Jeffery’s seat remained empty. We’d received no new arrivals, or dolls, as Sam called them. I wondered if we even would. Was the guy going to slowly weed us out? Maybe we were boring him and this was the final part of his game. Or maybe we could figure out a way to get out of here. As I went to sleep that night, I had to force myself to stop thinking about what might be and deal with what was. That seemed to be the only way to survive short term.
I awoke the next morning to the sound of the alarm, groggy and still tired as I rolled over. I didn’t feel like I’d had enough sleep, even though I’d dozed off not long after turning in. A look at the clock on the wall showed I was right. We’d been woken up a full two hours earlier than usual.
“What the fuck?” I asked the empty room.
One of the few good things about this place was that I had finally been able to get plenty of sleep and food. Now I was being roused at the crack of dawn or the crack of whenever. With no windows or doors, my sense of time could be totally off. I might have been going to bed at ten in the morning and getting woken up at six at night for all I knew. I continued to grumble to myself as I got up and dressed.
As I walked down the hall, the others were looking equally perplexed as to why we’d been woken up so early. Drake looked more confused than the rest of us. Did that mean this was the first time this had ever happened? I moved over so that I was close to him as we made our way to breakfast.
We filed into the dining room, but each of us slowed as we saw what was waiting for us there. We had a new guest. A man sat in Jeffery’s old chair. That wouldn’t have been surprising by itself. Jeffery was dead, and Sam would probably want a replacement for him. What brought us all up short was how he looked. Instead of the generic gray sweats or tee-shirts, he wore an expensive looking suit.
The strangest thing about him was how he held himself. There was none of the panicked movement of the eyes, no sheen of sweat as he tried to find an escape, and a sense of complete calm. It looked almost like he expected to be there.
