Ah, What A Trap It Was

RECOMMENDED TRACK: Renee Olstead – Someone to Watch Over Me

I took a deep breath as the final note dissipated into the air, then let it go. I play the piano hard—I play everything hard—but playing so raw and so sweet for an audience? It felt different, like I had poured out something I had been holding back.

Emma didn’t speak.

“Did it yearn enough?” I asked, finally daring to turn my head towards her, only to freeze in place.

Her hands were covering her face, her shoulders hunched up. She was shaking, and I had been too distracted trying to give her something as lovely as she was to see it.

I yanked my hands back from the keys like they were on fire. “Are you okay?” I sputtered, hovering them awkwardly in her direction because I had no idea what to do with them, what to do with this.

She kept her hands on her face and shook her head, then nodded, which was not helpful. “I just need a second,” she whispered. I might not have even heard it through her hands if I had not been listening desperately.

I sat still and gave her that second, then another, then another. After enough seconds I was about to ask again, but she sat up slightly, spread her fingers so I could see one of her eyes peeking out between them. It was red and wet.

She’d cried.

Over what I’d played.

I was confused and uneasy but also elated and—and something else warm and sweet. I would not give it a name just then, all at once.

“That—” She interrupted my muddled thoughts with an attempt to speak. “That, it…I…Misha,” she stressed the name with a helpless tone. Helpless, this little queen who did not bat an eye at calling a big Russian stranger razboynik to his face or telling the richest man on campus he was being reductive. She was a mess but in that moment, I thought she was the prettiest mess I would ever see.

She took a shuddering breath and tried once more, the hands cupped over her face giving the words a strange sound. “I thought…I thought maybe it would be Danse Russe. Maybe the first concerto, if I was really lucky.” She sniffled, lowering her hands, wiping one eye with the back of her hand. “That…that felt like a whole symphony just for me. I don’t know what to say,” she added, almost frustrated. “I always know what to say. But not now.”

I relaxed once I was sure she wasn’t upset. Or at least not the kind of upset that meant abandoning me in a moldy basement and never speaking to me again.

After a moment, I turned back to the keys, flexing my fingers and laying them on the starting chords of Gymnopédies. “Sometimes, no words is better,” I murmured, giving her time to breathe and giving me something to do that wasn’t pulling her into my arms and not letting go for a long time. “Those times, they are what music is for.”

After maybe another minute, she breathed normally, or close to it. I knew because all my attention was on her, since I could play Gymnopédies in my sleep. When she spoke again, she was quiet, but steady.

“I brought you a song,” she said quietly, nudging her backpack on the floor with one toe. “A record. At the time, I thought it might be overkill. I don’t even know if you have a record player. But now it doesn’t feel like enough.”

I watched her hand come up to her ear, the one opposite me, fidgeting. “You gave me your time,” I said. “Emma. You gave me tears. That’s more than enough,” I said. I meant it to sound light. I don’t think it did. I tried again. “So, what song did the queen bring for me? Another Russian hymn? Will you sing it for me?”

She chuckled and shook her head, hugging herself. “Ha, no, not a hymn. And it’s definitely outside my vocal range,” she said as I kept playing quietly. “I could sing something else,” she offered after a moment. My fingers stilled on the keys. “I’m very out of practice,” she added hastily. “But I could try.”

As if she thought I might tell her no, thank you, I do not want to hear the woman who has barely left my thoughts in three days sing for me.

But all I said was, “Yes, please.” I paused, ducking down to grab my water bottle from its spot under the piano bench, which I presented to her. “Hydration first. Then, tell me what to play for the songbird.”

She accepted the bottle and took a long pull from the spout before handing it back. “I guess I shouldn’t ask for something complex after the performance you just gave,” she mused, sounding less rough now. She tugged at her ear for a second, then squared her shoulders decisively. “Do you know Someone To Watch Over Me?”

I blinked. I do not know what I expected. Not Gershwin. But it was a standard, I knew I could get through it. I nodded again and played a few notes experimentally before landing the first chord and prompting her with a nod.

She took a breath, the quick, deep breath of someone who knows what she’s doing, and began to sing.

“There’s a somebody I’m longing to see…”

Her voice was sweet, breathy. The sort of breathy that’s on purpose, though. The kind that sets the words on a soft pillow.

Ah, that softness. What a trap it was.

I did not catch on until deeper into the song, the “little lamb who’s lost in the woods,” the way that clever tongue of hers curled luxuriously around the Ls. The song she picked, it is yearning too. A very specific yearning. By the end of that line, I wasn’t hearing only her pretty singing. I was hearing the words from Saturday again. Praise. Spoiling. Devotion.

Bozhe moy. It’s a good thing it’s not a difficult song to play.

Soon, but not soon enough, she sang the last lines— “oh, how I need,” she stressed— “someone to watch…over me.”

When she finished the final note, I released the pedal and slowly closed the piano lid, resting my hands on it.

“You do not sing like a lost lamb. You sing like a woman who knows what she wants,” I said, not letting myself look at her yet.

“What if I know what I want, and I’m lost?” she asked, pressing her leg against mine as we sat side by side on that tiny piano bench. “Everyone told me what you’re like. That you’re trouble. I—I struggle with overthinking sometimes,” she explained, and then I looked at her. She was staring down at her knees, tucking her hair behind her ear. “It’s like I have a bunch of little versions of me telling me what to do all the time, but they don’t agree on anything.”

“And what are all these little Emmas telling you?” I asked. The mental image might have been cute if I hadn’t been desperate for her answer.

“Mostly that this is a bad idea. That…that you’re you, and I’m me, and the two of us don’t fit together. That I’m not enough to…” She trailed off and I wanted to interrupt, but decided not to as she finally looked up, not at me but all the way up. “But, Misha…” She said my name on a sigh that I felt more than heard, staring at the stained ceiling of the basement like it might give her an answer. “You practically bled out on this piano to make something beautiful just for me.”

Trouble, she had said. I courted the title for years, even before coming to America. Wore it with pride. The muscle memory was there, the instinct to get closer. To invade her space and whisper that trouble is fun, maybe you could use some trouble. But with her, the moves didn’t feel right, didn’t fit. Like discordant notes.

“Your ‘everyone’ is right,” I said, without any cheekiness. “I am trouble. Enjoy trouble. But you…” It felt like I was discovering the words even as I spoke them. “You are enough to make me want to be something different.” I leaned in, not to loom and impose, but just to breathe in that difference. “It feels dangerous.”

She did not lean away from me, and her eyes dipped to my mouth. I nearly lost it then, felt myself closing the gap. But then she asked: “Dangerous how?”

I paused, forced myself back, losing a precious inch of space between us. “I do not make what I might miss,” I said. I heard my father’s voice in the words and hated them, almost as much as I hated him. “You might not be lost. But you are sitting in front of trouble and asking it to be kind.” I lifted one hand, itching to place it against her cheek. “If I kiss you now, Emma, I think…this will be different. Will not be for one night. But I do not know how different, or how many nights it will be.”

There. That was the right note. The honest one.

This time she was the one who leaned closer, pressing her forehead to mine gently. “I believe you. But I don’t think you’re as much trouble as you act,” she said. “Trouble doesn’t yearn. Not like that.”

“…Ty menya pogubish,” I muttered, feeling her breath on me. You’ll ruin me.

I doubt she knew what the words meant and I stopped thinking them, and almost everything else, immediately because she looked up at me with soft brown eyes—this was the first time I had gotten to really look at them properly, close-up, in the light, big and warm. And she said: “Misha, will you please kiss me?”

She asked me like I could have said no.

My lips fell to hers like a magnet. My hand, the one left hovering nearby, flew to the back of her neck while the other found her thigh and clung to it like a lifeline. I was not careful or tentative. I was starving. I felt her press a hand to my chest and danced the tip of my tongue along her bottom lip, begging for an invitation. She offered it eagerly, parting her lips on a hitch of her breath that I took shameless advantage of, sliding my tongue against hers with gentle insistence. She responded in kind and tangled hers with mine.

More. I wanted more contact. I growled and moved my hand from her neck to her hip, tugging her towards me. She followed my lead and turned to slide onto my lap, where she fit perfectly, one knee on each side of my hips. I tangled one hand in her hair, catching that sweet-spicy scent of hers again while my other hand moved to her waist, my thumb inching up the hem of her tank top, seeking out the feel of her skin.

She pulled away to take a breath, but I wasn’t ready for a break, attacking her shoulder with open-mouthed kisses and working my way up to nip at that ear she tugged when she was nervous. I was rewarded with a whimper and a squeeze of her thighs straddling mine that made my hips rock upward involuntarily.

I leaned her back against the piano—thank god I’d closed the fallboard—and dragged my lips down her jaw, her throat, her ear. She wrapped her arms tight around my shoulders, counting on me to keep her balanced, and the trust did things to my heart that were even more intense than the hard-on I was pressing into her thigh. I began to plot the moves instinctively: lift her up, slam the lid, lay her down on it and—

Stop.

The thought hit me like a right hook.

Fucking on the back of a Steinway had a sacrilegious appeal, to be sure. But it was not conducive to praise, spoiling, devotion.

I pulled back, breathing heavily as I held her in place. She blinked up at me with a disconcerted frown and I shook my head like maybe I could shake off enough of this heat between us to regain some semblance of control.

“Not here,” I rasped, leaning in to press another kiss to her jaw, trying to reassure without working myself back up to a frenzy. “This—you—basement is no good.” Blyat, I was so gone my broken English wasn’t even a put-on.

I watched the words sink in and her expression cleared as I loosened my hold, allowing her to slide her feet to the floor. “Right,” she said breathlessly. I had not even thought of this part. The where had never mattered before. I was trying to remember the closest hotel when she said the most perfect words. “My apartment’s not far.” My eyes snapped to hers. “I don’t have roommates.”

Slava bogu, I thought. Thank fucking god.

“It’s—it’s tiny,” she said, rubbing the earlobe I had just had my lips on. “Just a studio. And the walls are thin.”

I laughed, a brittle chuckle. “You say this like it’s a consolation prize instead of an invitation,” I said, taking a reluctant step back to free her, to try and cool down enough to survive what I hoped was a very, very short walk. “I would be eager to see your castle under any circumstance. And no,” I added, responding to her inevitable side-eye with a grin that I could not have suppressed to save my life. “That’s not a euphemism. Or not only a euphemism.”

“Uh-huh.” She leaned down to grab her bag and slung it over one shoulder, turning to reach a hand back to me. “Let’s go, maestro,” she said, a bashful smile paired with hungry eyes.

I grabbed her hand and felt my heart do a backflip.

“Lead on, little queen.”

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Bonus Content:
Brotherly Spirit

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Author’s Note

B-Side Track: Ely Eira – Time is Running Out

It took me a bit to decide what Emma would sing back, everything I came up with at first was a bit too overwrought. Don’t get me wrong, I love “On My Own,” but when I heard Renée Olstead’s version of “Someone To Watch Over Me” I knew that was the one. And no, I know the recording I linked isn’t pure piano solo like last chapter’s tracks, sorry.

FUN FACT:

George and Ira Gershwin originally intended “Someone To Watch Over Me” to be a jauntier tune, but it slowed and mellowed as it became a standard. You find recordings of Gertrude Lawrence, who sang the song on Broadway originally (it’s from the musical Oh, Kay!), singing it as written if you’re interested.

Alright, midnightingales, are you ready for what comes in chapter 8?…