Fall From Grace(33)

We stood on the corner waiting for the light to change, hands in pockets.  “So, do you like him?”

“What?  Why are you asking me these questions?”  I asked.  No.  He disgusted me and broke my favorite pair of jeans.  We walked across the street.

“I was just wondering.  That’s all.  You just didn’t look too happy with him sitting at the bar last night.  I was surprised when you left with him.”

I stopped walking and looked up at him.  “What do you mean?”

“It was the way you responded to him,” he replied.

“Shane, what the hell are you talking about?  How did I respond to him?”

He looked up at the cloudy sky and squinted down at me.  “He put his hand on the small of your back and you squirmed away from him every time he did.  It looked like you were going to drink the whole bottle of Jack when he started rubbing his thumb on your back.  The worst was when he touched your face and you cringed. Yet you left with him.”  He sighed and looked down, “I just didn’t understand it at all.”

“Strikes me as strange that you would notice all those things that you say I did.  But, really, who I go home with isn’t any of your business.  I don’t ask you about all the girls you take home.”

“You can.  I don’t hide anything.”

“Shane, I would probably get pregnant from you just telling me the things you do,” I laughed.

His smile tightened.

We continued walking and at the end of the block, entered a narrow three-story apartment building.  He guided me along the first floor and down a back stairwell into an enormous basement that had been turned into a fully equipped music studio.  Whoa.

Ethan was sitting behind his drum kit.  He gave me a huge smile and jumped up to kiss me hello.  “Hey, Grace.  Here to listen to us?”

I nodded smiling.

Ethan’s smile got wider, “That’s great.  Shane never lets chicks come down here.”

I glanced over at Shane, who was holding an acoustic guitar, and lowering himself onto the floor.  “Girls shouldn’t be allowed down here.  I can’t find my muse if some chick is trying to suck on my neck,” he laughed.  “Besides, it’s Grace.  She’s just one of the guys.”  He never looked up at me when he said the words.  Nevertheless, I felt there was something more to him asking me to come here.  A single butterfly fluttered somewhere deep in me, in a place I thought was long dead.

A soft sad melody whispered through his guitar, slow and addictive.

Behind him, Ethan sat motionless, listening.

Shane’s eyes closed and his voice drifted through the guitar notes; rising and reaching through my ears to the tips of my toes.  It ached with a longing and a need. The words were pain and desire.

I watched as his whole body changed.  His face twisted in agony and desolation, yet his body swayed gently to his music.  It took every fiber of my being to not reach out my hand and touch his perfect face, to wipe away his sorrow.

I lowered myself to my knees where I stood.  I couldn’t trust my legs to hold me upright any longer.

He gazed up at me through impossibly long lashes, his eyes a scorching icy blue locked on mine.  I couldn’t tear myself away from looking at him.

Then at all once the music stopped, his voice holding a note for a single beat more; then silence.  His torn expression stirred a fire in me. I felt warmth thunder through my veins under his intense glare.