No One Knows Us Here(27)

The next morning I was still restless. I cleaned my whole apartment. When there was nothing left to do, I went back to my room and sat on my bed, my back against the wall. I could hear him playing. I closed my eyes to listen, to make out the melody. It was something familiar, something I had heard before, though I didn’t know where. A haunting melody that made me think of impending winter, of early nights, of raindrops on windowpanes. Or maybe I’d taken the landscape around me and superimposed this music over it, assigned it as the soundtrack to the life I was living, right now.

I sat there and listened, my eyes closed, until he finished. The music stopped. The walls were so thin that I could hear him set his instrument back in its case, his footsteps padding around his room.

When I was sure he was finished practicing, not just taking a little break between pieces, I stood up. I didn’t check to see if my hair and clothes looked all right. I didn’t even put on shoes. I simply walked over to his place, and I knocked.

No one came to the door, and after waiting for what seemed like five minutes, I knocked again, louder this time. Footsteps thudded across the floor.

He opened the door. He didn’t look surprised to see me. He didn’t look especially happy to see me, either.

“We had an agreement.” I pointed an accusing finger in Sam’s face. “I tell you my deal, you tell me yours.”

“I know.”

“So tell me your deal.”

“Maybe I don’t have a deal.” His face had no expression at all. His voice no inflection.

“I said a lot of things last night. Outlandish things. I was drunk.”

“Okay.” He was just standing there. Now he looked—just slightly—amused. I barely could detect the shift in his expression, but it was there. A minuscule glint in his eye, a perceptible lift of the corners of his mouth. This infuriated me.

“I meant it, everything I said.” My voice was too loud, the words coming out too fast. “I wish I’d killed him. If I had to do it over again—if anyone tried to hurt me again, tried to hurt my sister, I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d kill him so fast he wouldn’t know what hit him. If you have a problem with that—” I stopped myself short, listening to myself. I was breathing hard, in and out of my nose.

“I don’t have a problem with it,” he said, completely poker-faced. For a few seconds, we just stood there, staring at each other. A standoff. Then he hooked his fingers through the belt loops of my jeans and drew me inside, shutting the door with his foot.

He pulled me closer to him, until our bodies were almost but not quite pressed against each other, and smiled his sad little smile, and before I knew what I was doing, my hands were reaching for his face, and then I was pouncing, lurching forward, smashing my mouth onto his.

He didn’t kiss me back, and I stopped myself, pulling away from him, mortified. I’d been up almost all last night, unable to sleep, my head spinning, thinking about him, running over and over the conversation. I’d told him my deal, I’d confessed to murder—to attempted murder, anyway—and he . . . well, he had probably gone home, straight to bed. While I lay awake, thinking about our bodies lying there, not one foot apart, separated by our apartment walls, by wooden beams and plaster and wires, he wasn’t thinking about me at all.

My hands were still cupping the back of his head. I was breathing loudly, like I’d just run a mile. I could hear him breathing, too. He looked me straight in the eyes and smiled with just one side of his face. “You are crazy, you know that?” His tone was affectionate, as if he had just realized this about me, as if I hadn’t been warning him all along. He leaned down and kissed me, and I kissed him back, and our arms circled around each other, and I felt like I was in a movie, the end of a movie. Swelling orchestra, cheering crowd, curtains swishing closed over the screen.

We made out in a ridiculous way, our hands all over each other. When we finally broke apart, we were both out of breath. Sam ran his hands through my hair. I put my hand to his cheek. Our faces collided together again, and we stumbled back, into his bedroom, onto his bed. We pulled each other’s clothes off, and his fingers felt rough and calloused on my soft skin. Within moments he was on top of me and I was wrapping my legs around him, holding on to him, tightly, like I was afraid to let him go. He liked it, my desperation. I could tell. He felt the same way, like he couldn’t get enough of me, like he was already afraid of losing me.

Only after our breathing quieted down did I notice the rain. Not a gentle pitter-patter but pounding rain, thrashing against the windows.

It was the middle of the day, but the room was so dark I could barely make out the contours of Sam’s face. “I know what your deal is.” My voice came out hoarse, as if unused to speaking.

“Oh yeah?”

I was nestled in the crook of his arm, so I couldn’t see his face. “There are articles about you. Videos.”

Sam propped himself up to look at me. “You were spying on me?” He didn’t sound upset.

“I was up half the night. I needed something to pass the time.”

“And what did you learn?”

“You were in a band,” I said, and Sam’s head rested back on his pillow. He closed his eyes, listening, like I was telling him a bedtime story. “You had a brother.”

Before he joined the symphony, he was in a band with his twin brother and two other musicians, Imogene Wu and Timothy Karr. I’d never heard of them, but they had quite a following. Ferguson, they were called, an alt-rock ensemble of classically trained string players.