A chill goes down my spine, the same iron walls that Julian hasbeen lifting humming with the desire to lock up tight. It’s been eight years, but telling men about Eric always feels like handing them an instruction manual on exactly how to break me. I drift away from the painting and toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, watch the city spill out at my feet.
“I…” The words get caught, and my next breath comes in a gasp. “I don’t know where to start.” At the beginning, when I first met Eric in the econ library, bent in half over a textbook? Or at the end, bleeding out on my bedroom floor as my calls went to his voicemail over and over?
“Somewhere easy,” Julian offers. His voice is a rumble against my back, and I feel it as much as I hear it. “How you’re feeling right now? In this moment?”
I let his question hang in the air unanswered for a moment as I process.Warm, I think.But also terrified. Like I’m most of the way across a tightrope with no harness, and I’ve just made the mistake of looking down.
“You first,” I say.
Julian laughs. His reflection in the windows is translucent, ghostly, and when I look up at it, I can almost convince myself that he’s not actually here with me. That the man behind me is the one who appears in my dreams.
“Helpless, I think,” he says. “I don’t like seeing you cry. I’m a person who fixes things, and I can’t fix this.”
“Is that what you want?” I ask. “To fix me, I mean.”
“No,” Julian says. “I want toknowyou.”
Warmth rushes fast to my cheeks, and I swallow against the squeeze of my throat. It feels natural to lean back against him, and Julian accepts my embrace, resting a hand on my hip.
“God that’s romantic,” I mutter. “Like, I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“I don’t know,” he says, his hand dragging slowly up to the nip of my waist. “Maybe that you want me to know you too?”
I close my eyes, letting myself exist in this moment. I’m surrounded by him so fully that I feel like I’ve crawled under his ribs to breathe for him, to fuel his body with my hummingbird heart.
“It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it,” I confess. “I just…don’t know how. You have this idea of me as this tough woman who takes no shit, and…I guess I don’t want to disrupt that.”
People don’t like tough women, but they do respect them. They don’t fuck with them without a posse and a plan, and I like being un-fuck-with-able. It’s so much better than being the frightened, fragile thing I was before. That I fear I might still be.
I can almost hear the gears in Julian’s head shifting.
“I want to show you something,” he says abruptly.
I drop my head back to give him a quizzical look, but he’s already stepping back, taking my hand before guiding me down the darkened hallway that bisects his apartment. I wonder, for a second, if we’re heading to his bedroom, but then he stops at a set of double doors and swings them open.
This room looks considerably more lived-in than his artfully cluttered living room. Mounted records line the walls, and even more sit in stacks on the floor, in the bookshelf. Three guitars, two acoustic and one electric, hang from the wall above a worn denim couch. Two enormous amps double as side tables, and the walls are padded with what I realize is soundproofing material.
And in the center of the room, taking up most of the floor space, the prize: a sleek black baby grand piano. I can’t help it; I gape.
“Are you serious? A Bösendorfer?” I say, zipping to the bench. “I’ve never seen one of these in real life!”
Julian’s lips quirk in a smile.
“You’re an unusual woman,” he observes. “The quickest way to your heart seems to be through fancy pianos.”
I wrinkle my nose at him, almost annoyed by how rapidly he’s set me at ease. I lift the fallboard to run my fingers along the keys, and the sounds make me want to melt into the seat.
“Ugh, I’m so jealous. I have a console at home. Can’t fit a baby grand in my apartment.”
“As you can see, I can barely fit this one either,” Julian says, settling next to me. His piano bench is smaller than the first one we shared once, and so we’re wedged close, our arms welded together. “It takes up most of the space in here. Not exactly our room in Edison Mansion.”
“Ourroom, was it?” I tease.
Julian starts to play. I recognize the song within a few notes as “Gymnopédie No. 1.”
“I like to think of it that way,” he says. “Don’t you?”
I nod, biting back a smile.I like the sound of that too much, I think.