RUSH (City Lights, #3)(2)

I reached for Keith again but he rolled onto his back and kissed my hand. “I’ve got class,” he said. “And you, my darling, have an audition tonight. The most important of your life.”

“So far,” I said, with a grin. “After I graduate, I’m going for the Phil. Or maybe Boston.” And make my big brother proud.

I kept that last part about my brother to myself. Most New York people, I’d come to find out, didn’t understand the closeness two kids growing up in Montana shared. Or maybe we just happened to be closer than most siblings. Tall and strong where I was short and shy, Chris watched out for me in school. My adolescent years weren’t a torture because I spent them in his protective shadow, and everyone loved him. No one more than me.

I thought of what Chris had told me the day I left. “First Juilliard, then the Phil!” I’d laughed and hugged my big brother. He didn’t realize both the school and the New York Philharmonic shared the same space in Lincoln Center, but I knew what he meant. He, like everyone else around me, believed my success to be a foregone conclusion. I was a natural. A prodigy. A virtuoso, they said. And to Chris, I was also his annoying little sister who was about to leave Montana and strike out for the big, bad world.

And now I was in my senior year at Juilliard, ready to add another notch on my resume—the Spring Strings—before graduating.

A thought dimmed my smile. I turned to Keith. “If I kill it tonight, won’t they think I got in because of us?”

Keith pulled on his jeans, his back to me, his blond hair glinting in the shaft of light spilling in from the tiny dorm room window. “Probably,” he said. He turned and leaned over the bed, kissing me softly before pulling away and smiling that winsome grin that still, after a month, had the ability to make my heart flutter in my chest like a caged bird. “So you’d better prove them wrong.”

*

My audition was at 6:00 p.m. At twenty minutes to, I walked up Broadway in my best clothes—a black A-line skirt, white blouse, black jacket. My violin case banged lightly against my thigh and my short, sensible heels tapped the pavement. My suit was a little heavy for the weather, but a light breeze took the edge off the day’s lingering heat. A stunning spring day if ever there was one. But New York City could have been caught in a hurricane and I would have felt invincible that night.

A printed sign was taped to the glass doors of the Alice Tully Hall. Spring Strings auditions here. The falling night and the lights of the city were caught and reflected around that sign, around the whole of the modern glass lobby. I caught my own reflection in the glow.

I’d bundled my thick brown hair into a neat bun, wisps falling to frame my face, revealing my broad smile. I’d won a spot on the Juilliard Orchestra last fall and now I was going to win the coveted violin seat on the Spring Strings Quartet. I knew this, not because I was filled with arrogance or ego. Since coming to Juilliard almost three years ago, the music that lived in my heart was thriving and blooming in a way I couldn’t have imagined. I didn’t just play the notes of the compositions before me, I created perfect harmonies out of skill and infused them with love. Love for the music. Love for life.

And now love for Keith. Of all the women who flocked around him like doves around a bronze statue, he’d chosen me. My heart was full to bursting, but I would win my spot honestly. I would give them everything.

The size and elegant, warm beauty of the Alice Tully didn’t intimidate me. Neither did the other violin hopefuls. Nor did Keith and the other directors of this student-run quartet. There were only three spots available: One cello, one bass, and one violin. Keith played the guitar himself.

I would play Mozart, of course. Mozart, whom I felt was my spirit guide; who called to me from across the centuries with his music that, in my estimation, was absolute perfection. I felt Mozart’s music in my very bones, in my heart and soul. I gave everything to the music. I always played with my heart in my hands, but with Mozart, I stripped myself raw.

The first three rows of the Tully were full of hopefuls, some muttering beneath their breaths, some giving me the obvious stink-eye. They all knew I was dating Keith. But it didn’t matter. The music was alive in me and I was about to unleash it.

I played the fiercely technical cadenza to Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 for Keith and the other two student directors—both seniors like Keith, both women, both eyeing me dubiously. I was too lost in the music to watch their scrunched-up faces loosen, morphing from surly doubt, to shock, to stunned joy. I was too immersed to see the other hopefuls’ faces lose their scorn as they listened. Until the end. Then the applause, small for the nearly empty Hall but thunderous to me, came and I awoke as if from a warm sleep.

They surrounded me on all sides, congratulating me even though half of them had yet to play. Some wiped tears from their eyes, some just shook their heads as they showered me with compliments.

“Amazing. I felt that in my gut.”

“I’m crazy-jealous, but in the good way, I swear.”

“And here I thought you were just Keith’s latest, but no…”

That one caught my attention. “His latest…?”

But then Keith was there, sweeping me into his arms and spinning me around. “Have we got a super star, or what?” He laughed and kissed me and then put his mouth near my ear. “I think I love you, Charlotte.”