What He Never Knew (What He Doesn't Know, #3)(25)

It was my turn to look at him, though he kept his eyes cast toward the skyline. He was quiet for a long moment before he spoke again, as if he wasn’t certain what to say now that he had my attention.

“As beautiful as this view is,” he finally said. “This is a painful place for me to be.”

He swallowed, the motion visible in the constriction of his throat.

“If I were a pragmatic, normal human being, I wouldn’t ever come here. Ever. Because every time I do, it hurts. I mean, there is this physical pain in the center of my chest standing up here,” he said, hand splaying over his chest to illustrate. “Like someone has their fist inside my rib cage, fingers wrapped around my heart in a vise grip.”

I frowned. “Why would you come here, then?”

“Because,” he answered, his hand slowly falling back to the railing. I thought that was the only explanation he was going to give, but after a long pause, he continued. “I’m not a normal, pragmatic human being. And neither are you.” He glanced at me briefly before gazing at the city again. “We’re artists. We’re musicians. We’re…” He sighed, shaking his head. “We’re not destined to run from our misery, we’re destined to bathe in it — and to somehow find a way to make it beautiful.”

I leaned a hip on the railing, shifting until my entire body faced him, but I didn’t know what to say. That heavy presence I’d felt when we first made it up to the incline radiated tenfold, and my heart kicked up a notch, as if it were preparing to fight or fly.

But I didn’t know who or what I’d be flying from.

“I brought you here because you need to understand,” he said, and he shifted until he faced me, too.

When his dark eyes locked on mine, my heart stopped altogether before thumping back to life in a quick gallop to catch up on the beats it had missed.

“In order to play the way you want to play,” he said. “In order to make the dreams you speak of a reality, you’re going to have to go to painful places — to the places you never want to go again.” Reese swallowed. “You’re going to have to look in the mirror at the worst parts of yourself, and at your past, and you’re going to have to get comfortable with the scars you see. No, more than that,” he clarified with a shake of his head. “You’re going to have to get to know each scar like it’s a permanent piece of every song you will ever play. Do you understand?”

For the first time since the night I left Bramlock, tears welled in my eyes — but I didn’t know why. It was as if that pain that radiated off Reese had penetrated me, and that vise grip he felt had transferred to my own heart.

My wolf’s eyes flashed in my mind like a bolt of white hot lightning.

“I… I don’t have any of that,” I whispered, mentally shaking him away. “My life has been pretty boring, I don’t really have scars to—”

“I don’t believe that,” Reese interrupted, voice firm. “And you don’t either.”

My mouth zipped shut at that, and I tried to stand taller, but somehow felt rooted so deep I couldn’t even gain an inch of height.

“Watching you play this week, I already know some areas we are going to have to target to help you overcome this injury and get to where you want to be.” Reese leaned one elbow on the railing, holding out his fingers and counting them off with his other hand. “Tension. Technique. Inflection.” He paused. “You know all those things, too. Those are the easy lessons, the ones you can go home and practice and see a gradual improvement in each week.”

Reese faced me, the warmth of his breath mixing with the night air that brushed my nose. There was a bright moon above us, and it cast his face in a haunting mix of glow and shadows, light and dark.

“But, do you know what you need to overcome more than anything?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Vulnerability.”

That word hit me like an anvil, so much so that my shoulders sagged and my knees buckled from the pressure. Every part of my body reacted to the possibility that I might feel what Reese was saying, that I might open up that box that hid everything painful in my life, the one I’d worked so hard to put a lid on and shove away in a figurative attic. Those monsters stirred from inside that box, their growls rumbling through me, and I felt myself gearing up to fight them back into that box should they even think about escaping.

Reese must have sensed my unease, because he stepped a little closer, lowering his voice and his gaze to meet mine. “You sit at that piano, and I don’t know who you are or what you’ve been through.” He held up his hands. “And I don’t care to know, because you don’t make me curious enough to want to know. You play it like an instrument instead of like an extension of yourself,” he explained. “And that’s what is holding you back from where you need to be. From where you want to be.”

I swallowed, finally garnering enough strength to straighten my spine. “But, I’ve played my entire life. I was the top of my class. I have the technique, I play with emotion,” I argued. “I once made my entire class cry with an original piece. I—”

“You were. You once did. Both past tense,” Reese said. “I don’t doubt that you moved your classmates with the way you played, because you don’t play like the twenty-one year old girl you are.” He rolled his lips together, debating his next words. “You play like a woman twice my age, Sarah, but like a woman trying to hide instead of trying to share her experiences with the audience. And that’s what they want from you — they want to feel your pain so they know their own is valid. Just like any kind of art, any kind of expression…” He shrugged. “We are all just humans who want to feel like we’re not alone, even when we are.”