Crimson Death (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter #25)(33)

Crista was totally solemn. “Crista.”

“Isn’t that a pretty name? I’m Will. Crista, is it okay if I clean off your leg? It looks like it must hurt a lot.”

Crista also managed a faint nod.

Will glanced up at me. “If you wanted to go and grab Dylan, I can hold the fort here for a sec.”

Wait, did he know Dylan? Did he know me? Had we always known each other? Suddenly, I remembered how many times I’d screamed Dylan’s name across the shore. Right. That made sense.

“Yeah,” I choked out. “Thank you.”

Then we really looked at each other, and it was like being locked into place. Like I couldn’t have blinked if someone was offering me a winning lottery ticket to. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt like this looking at a guy. But it was maybe the first time a guy had stared at me in the same sort of way.

“Anytime,” he said. And smiled.



“I still don’t get what the difference between major and minor is supposed to be.”

I kept my eyes on my bass without pausing in the plucking. “I’m not listening to you.”

Will made a point of turning his textbook upside down, and tipped his head at a 90-degree angle. He was sitting backward on one of the metal chairs, crossing his legs at the ankle in front of him. His hair was a little too long, hanging in his face in dark, wavy tendrils.

“Seriously, Ollie. How do you decide one note is sad and another is happy?”

I paused in disbelief. “You don’t have minor notes. You have minor scales and chords.”

“But aren’t the minor notes the black ones?”

Now I felt as baffled as he looked. “Black notes? Do you have synesthesia or something?”

“Huh?”

“Like hearing and tasting color?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Will said, jumping to his feet and striding over to the piano. He played several notes in ascending order. “Black note. Black note. Black note.”

Suddenly, it clicked. He was talking about piano keys. He was even more screwed than I’d thought. I burst out laughing and dropped my bass to join him at the piano. “No, hold on. Okay, these, all of these, are keys. Piano keys.”

Will threw his hands up, frustrated. “Well, I don’t know!”

“Clearly not.” I smirked. “Multiple notes make up chords. You can play a chord in one hit, or rolling, like this …” I played a C, E, and G with a quick wrist movement, “and it’s the notes in the chords that make it major or minor. So this is a major chord. You can hear it, see? It sounds happy?”

“Are you sure you aren’t the synthetic one?” Will asked.

“Synesthesia.”

“Po-tay-to po-tah-to. I don’t see how that sounds happy. It just sounds … I don’t know. Blah.”

Will hadn’t exactly made a habit of joining me in the music room at lunch—that probably wouldn’t go unnoticed by the basketball guys—but he’d followed after me occasionally over the last few weeks. Today being one of those occasions. He always told the others it was to get one-on-one tutoring from me, and no one seemed too suspicious.

In our defense, it wasn’t exactly the scene of a depraved porno when we shut the music room door. Or, unfortunately, even a regular, nondepraved porno. He never made any attempt to touch me, or sit too close, or throw me a loaded compliment. We just hung out, chatting about music, or life, or nothing at all. Even though I couldn’t forget the fact that he wouldn’t admit he liked spending time with me to his friends, I gave in and let him join me every time he flashed that smile. Aunt Linda would be proud.

Between these lunchtime visits, Music Appreciation, and the occasional conversation after English—always ostensibly so he could ask a question about an assignment or something until his friends left the classroom—it was getting easier to adjust to the idea of going at his pace. I didn’t have the energy to resist his endless olive branches. Even if they resembled olive twigs more than branches, sometimes. Plus, it felt so much better to let him melt me than to fight to stay frozen.

Despite our fragile truce, though, a part of me wanted to at least clarify if we were supposed to be totally platonic now, to address the elephant—and ringmaster—and whole freaking circus—in the room, but I was too self-conscious to bring it up without an opening. Like, what if he said I imagined everything at the lake, and I had to deal with the inescapable knowledge that I was going slowly mad? Call me dramatic, but it was starting to feel like I had imagined the whole thing.

Maybe Will found this normal, but for me it was super weird. Like, how do you handle being just friends with someone when you have in-depth knowledge of what their tongue tastes like? Among other things.

Also, I didn’t want to freak him out. Clearly, as far as he was concerned, everything that happened at the lake was in the past. Including his entire sexual orientation, apparently. At least we had a rhythm going in our new little friends-without-benefits pantomime. He hadn’t pushed me into a single mop bucket since we started this dance.

Will dragged his finger across the piano keys, from high to low. Stunning. This guy was such a natural talent. “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” he asked.

“My house. We’re having Aunt Linda and the kids over. Probably gonna be kind of quiet, but as long as I get to eat my body weight in Brussels sprouts, I’m happy.”