Liron's Melody (15 page)

“And?” Nikki was practically bouncing in place.

Melody giggled. “He’s a musician too.”

Nikki snorted with a look that said,
no duh
. “Well, of
course.”

“We talked about music a lot, played some….” Shivers worked along
her spine at the recollection of the music his touch infused her with. She
glanced up at Nikki, who was looking at her with a knowing smirk and a sparkle
in her eyes.

“Are you going to see him again?”

Melody bit her bottom lip. “Yes, I would like to. As soon as
possible.”

Nikki raised both of her eyebrows in surprise. “Shoot, you
have it bad, girl! You need to tell me absolutely everything, pronto. Let’s go
grab some lunch.”

“Okay, lemme put on something a little more presentable,
huh?” She stood and headed to her bedroom. In truth, she really wanted to take
a hot shower. She still felt groady from the hog slop incident.

“Mel?”

She turned to look at Nikki over her shoulder.

Nikki gave her a look full of mischief. “He’s super hot,
isn’t he?”

Melody felt something melt inside of her, and she nodded
dreamily. “Oh yeah.”

Chapter Twelve

Melody returned home from lunch with Nikki feeling
lighthearted and happy. She had divulged as much as would make sense about
Liron, and Nikki’s positive personality had been contagious. True, she didn’t
know that Melody was considering going and living in an alternate universe, but
that aside, Nikki had given her the green light on the whole thing. Melody
figured her friend was probably just happy to see her doing something other
than moping around like a misplaced zombie.

Setting her purse and keys down, Melody went over to her
answering machine and checked for messages. There were about a hundred from
Nikki, frantically wondering where she had vanished to, and about a hundred
more from Rob. She rolled her eyes and deleted her way through those as quickly
as possible. She had no desire to deal with him at the moment. Now that she
thought about it, she had no idea why she had ever given him the time of day in
the first place. Just because he was a distraction, she guessed. He took her
mind off of her pain for half a second and filled it with annoyance instead.
Yeah, that was healthy.

She smirked and her heart did acrobatics at the recollection
of Liron’s musical touch and kisses. She much preferred his kind of
distraction. And after being inundated with music for the past
whoever-actually-knew-how-long, she didn’t understand how she could have ever
thought she could live without it in her life. What a coward she had been.

In harmony with her wandering thoughts, a message came from
the music director of the orchestra she had once been part of. He told her that
he was guest conducting a different orchestra at a large music festival nearby
and wanted to invite her.

Melody glanced at the calendar. The event was tonight. Her
first reaction was to avoid it at all costs, but then something inside of her
made her think twice. There would be no harm in going to watch an old friend,
and there was no reason for her to be afraid of music anymore. It lived and
breathed within her; she could not escape it, and she would be doing a
disservice to herself and her parents’ memory if she tried.

She looked at the clock, then headed back to her bedroom. She
had about three hours before the festival began. She’d find something
presentable to wear and make an appearance.

As she walked down the hall, she glanced at Liron’s music and
smiled to herself. She was anxious to get back to him, but it could wait until
after the festival. She also had some business to attend to before she headed
back to Liron’s world. Such as calling her job to ask when she could pick up
her last paycheck, since even if they let her, she would not be returning.
Whether she decided to stay in Liron’s world or not, she would not continue to
work at a dead-end job she abhorred when she could be doing something else she
loved.

She couldn’t hide from her passion anymore. Music found her
regardless of where she went or how she tried to avoid it. It found her and
called to her.

And she wanted to answer.

* * * *

She felt beautiful as she took her seat in the balcony at the
theatre. She had dressed to kill, knowing that, after she returned home from
the concert, she would be going back to Liron, and she wanted to knock his
socks off. She was dressed in a navy blue dress that came to her knees with a
V-neck that showed more than its fair share of cleavage. At her throat, she
wore a silver and sapphire necklace her mother had given her when she’d
graduated from Juilliard, and she had her blonde waves flowing free with only
the sides pinned back with silver clips. She knew Liron liked to bury his
fingers in it, so she figured she would make it easier for him to do just that.

She didn’t feel as apprehensive as she had imagined she would
as she sat through the first half of the show. The music was wonderful, and her
anxiety diminished to the point that she actually found herself wrapped up in
and enjoying the pieces as she once had, before the accident.

She settled in for the second half of the show as the lights
dimmed and the curtain raised again, delighting in how Liron’s influence had
taken so much of the pain out of her life that had been associated with music.
She had never really
wanted
to stop playing, to stop loving it. Just,
after the accident, she hadn’t been able to face it. Not when all of it held so
many memories of her once-happy family and life.

Her friends had given her the “if you fall off the horse”
speech so many different ways she couldn’t see straight, and she’d known the
truth of their words in her heart, but she just hadn’t been able to embrace
music the way she once had. It felt like it no longer had a place after her
parents were gone. Even though she knew all of that reasoning had been
illogical and only her grief talking, that’s how she’d felt all the same.

Liron had changed all of that. Liron
was
music. Every
elegant move of his body, every tender touch, everything that made him who he
was. All of it was made of music. And she hadn’t realized how much her soul
still craved it, how empty she was without it, until he’d taken her in his arms
and erased her pain with the gentleness of his song.

Melody sat back in her chair with a contented sigh as the
music began, but the contentment was replaced by horrendous panic. At the first
few notes, her heart dropped out of her chest and fell into an empty void, the
ache within her so strong and instant that it stole her breath.

The haunting opening of
Adagio in G Minor
weaved its
way through the theatre and, against her will, images of her parents filled her
mind on the last day she had seen them, followed by images of their
heart-wrenching funeral. She squeezed her eyes shut as the pain increased to
something almost tangible. It was like someone had ripped open a still-tender wound
and poured acid in it.

She tried to sit there and breathe it out, but the piece was
long, and she was being constantly flooded by images of her happy-go-lucky,
laughing father, her gentle mother, the three of them all playing their
instruments together in a joyous kind of ruckus, then of the somber, tormenting
melancholy of their caskets surrounded by flowers while the orchestra played
this song in memoriam. And she stood all alone. Because regardless of the
continued caring words and embraces, that was exactly what she had been. And
that’s what she still was. In this world anyway.

She had to get out of there. If she stayed one more minute,
she was going to suffocate.

Propelling herself out of the chair with not as much dignity
as she would have liked, she fled from the theatre. Her chest felt like someone
was squeezing it in a vise, and she couldn’t take a decent breath. She ran down
the stairs and out the front door, finally managing to wheeze in a painful gasp
of air when she got into her car and slammed the door. It was only then that
she realized she had tears streaming down her face.

She touched them, stunned, because she had not been able to
release tears since her parents had died. She had felt them sting, but they had
never spilled over. They felt like they were burning as they fell.

Turning her car on and pulling out of the parking lot, she
let them run without bothering to wipe them away. There was something morbidly
therapeutic about the feel of them trailing down her cheeks.

When she reached her house, she pulled into the driveway,
turned off the engine, and just sat there, crying softly. She finally wiped her
eyes, but more tears replaced them as memories of her parents barraged her
until her already broken heart felt like it was shattering all over again.

A sudden knock on her window made her scream and she jumped,
looking up to see Rob peering curiously in at her. She rolled the window down
and scowled at him. “You scared the freaking crap out of me!” she all but
shouted.

“Sorry. What are you just sitting in the car for?” His gaze
roamed over her face for a second before he frowned. “Have you been crying?”

She rolled her eyes and shoved her door open.
Brilliant
assessment.

“What happened?” he prodded as she climbed out.

“Nothing,” she muttered. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well, where were you? More importantly, where have you
been
?
I thought you were avoiding me or something.”

Gee, what would give you that impression?
“I was
away,” she answered vaguely.

He made a rude noise in his throat. “Nice. Thanks for telling
me.”

“I wasn’t aware that I needed a permission slip.”

He heaved a sigh, but didn’t acknowledge her sarcasm. “Well,
now that you’re back, maybe we could set up a date,” he said as he followed her
up to her front door. “You still owe me a dinner.”

I don’t owe you anything, you insensitive jackass.
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I’m not really thinking straight right now. I’ll
get back to you.”

He grabbed her elbow as she unlocked her door and tried to
make her escape. “Mel, what in the world happened? Whatever it is, it can’t be
that bad.”

Her spine went rigid at both his touch and his flip attitude.
She fixed him with a dark look. “Not that bad?”

“Yeah,” he said with a shrug and a snort. “Not worth all the
female drama anyway.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and dared to smile.

The douche bag actually smiled.

Like it was all just a freaking joke.

Anger surged over the top of her sorrow, and she planted her
palm on his chest, pushing him back down the porch steps. “Well, I’m sorry that
the death of my parents is so insignificant to you, but I’m pretty sure you
can’t even relate to something of that magnitude since the only thing you’ve
ever lost that was remotely important to you was your favorite pair of
sunglasses when they fell off of your empty head while you were in your fishing
boat. By all means, remove yourself from my ‘female drama.’ I’m more than okay
with that since every time I see you lately, I imagine ripping off various
parts of your body and beating you senseless with them. Get off my property and
get away from me. I can’t even begin to deal with you right now. All I want to
do is play my piano, and all you’re succeeding in doing is pissing me off!”

She left him standing there and all but took the door off the
hinges trying to seek refuge within her home. She slammed it behind her, and
the tears started again as soon as she knew she was alone. Only, this time, it
was less quiet grief and more hysterical sobs.

She felt lost and out of control. The pain was all-consuming,
choking her and making rational thought impossible.

She went to her piano and sat down, not bothering with
anything in her house. She didn’t want to be there. She wanted to be in Liron’s
arms. It was the only place she felt contentment. And he was the only person
who could offer her solace and sanity.

It was difficult to play the notes with the tears gushing out
of her eyes and obscuring her vision, and it was hard to concentrate when her
mind was nothing but a muddled mess, but somehow, she managed to blunder
through Liron’s score. And maybe because her loneliness was so great, the
emotion that seemed to be the driving force of the piece of music, it didn’t
take as long for the gateway to open.

She felt the shift in the room temperature and the way the
sounds resonated around her, and she stopped playing abruptly. She looked over
her shoulder to see Liron’s living room beckoning her. The fire was smoldering
in the fireplace with only enough light coming from the embers to make
everything look eerie. Was it really only later in the same night that she had
left? When it had been a whole day in her world?

Who cared? It didn’t matter. Time, the laws of physics, the
universe, nature—none of it meant jack squat to her at the moment. All that
mattered was that she could escape this hellhole her life in the human world
had become.

Crossing over into Liron’s room, she didn’t bother to call
out, didn’t bother to say anything. She merely went over to the fireplace, sat
down in front of it, pulled her knees to her chest and sobbed like a lost
little girl. She felt colder, darker, and more alone than she had since the day
she’d watched her parents’ caskets lowered into the ground.

“Melody?”

His voice made shudders course through her body, and she
looked up into his blue eyes, full of concern and sincere compassion. It was
the final straw. She collapsed into his arms, burying her face in his chest and
crying dry, wracking sobs that robbed her of breath.

His arms enveloped her, held her close, and his fingers
buried in her hair as he pressed soft kisses to the top of her head. “Lovely,
what happened?” he whispered.