A Little Night Music (8 page)

Jon stood, pleasantly surprised he had a good four inches on the prick. He thrust his face forwards, silk shirt jumped back as if the floor had got too hot. Jon looked him up and down dismissively. “Your lucky I value my hands more than your face.”

Break over, Jon wove his way back to his trumpet and lifted it like a King who had won a battle but lost his treasure in the process.

The rest of the night passed without a vision. Jon had come to expect them—even mourned when they didn’t come. The flashes were gritty and important, something his other life never delivered. The
Seems Like Old Times
ensemble had just tiptoed into the night’s final song,
I’m A Fool To Want You
, a sensual number meant to couple-off the remaining lonely souls. A few drifted on to the tiny dance floor and drunk clung to each other. Jon closed his eyes and thought of Elli.

Another vision snaked into his awareness. The tingle up his arms was hardly noticeable anymore. He eased into it. Muscle memory in his fingers allowed him to drift. At the far end of a modest room, a glass case came into view, ornate wooden claw feet, soft yellow focus light, old photos and sheet music mounted around a trumpet—
his
trumpet.

A sound - weeping.

The release was primal, intimate. Jon focused on the instrument. He wanted the happiness the visions delivered. Never had there been pain.

“Mama, please.”

“Never again child. No one plays it.
Ever
.”

The woman’s final word rocked the glass.

A brass skeleton key tumbled the cabinet’s locks. Slow, authoritative shoe soles clumped away. Cries pierced the room. Jon’s chest heaved too, the beginnings of a sob he extinguished with a hard swallow and an unwavering stare at the trumpet. If he were to look around and see the origin of the tears he would lose himself, like Artie Page.

He pulled out of it, more from self-preservation than anything. Mongo nodded in quiet approval, as if the raw exposure of grief was what he was trying to get Jon to channel all along. They ended the song together. A quiet smattering of applause punctuated the night. Jon couldn’t see how many people remained. His vision was awash in liquid stage bulbs. Gabe extinguished the table candles and clicked off the house lamps. The only light came from a utility bulb over the bar for cleaning and the neon lotus still buzzing in the window.

The quiet was a welcome sigh against Jon’s eardrum. Someone in the kitchen turned on an old jazz station.
As Time Goes By
whispered around the subtle clacking of instruments being locked in their cases and goodbye mumbles. Charlie shuffled by on his bad legs pushing a broom. Jon locked his trumpet in its case and climbed off the stage.

And froze.

Elli stood before him, the faint glow from the white lotus the only light reaching her bare skin and her oh-so-plain, oh-so-perfect dress. In red, she had been stunning. As herself, she was a thief, stealing his breath.

Every bone in Jon’s body ached. His throat tightened, threatening the earlier sob he had wrestled away. He pushed it down. He couldn’t do this. Not with her. Not now after he had felt her pain.

“Where did you go? Just then?” she asked, her fingertips casually twined before her, knees pressed primly side-by-side, red toenails hidden beneath a pair of worn cowboy boots.

She was achingly beautiful. And, he had vowed, not his. Never his.

He shook his head, afraid to speak for fear his voice would betray him. The street beyond the neon lotus drew his stare, but he saw none of it.

Her boots clomped closer. He repositioned his grip on his case for something, anything to do to appear unaffected. Like a guy who could take or leave any woman who stood before him with those eyes -
God
, those eyes.

She took his free hand, her touch as smooth and warm as the valves of the trumpet and he considered, not for the first time, how they would feel against his bare flesh.

“Tell me,” she urged.

“Your mother was…”
Christ, he couldn’t do this.

Elli squeezed his hand, an unspoken telegraph of support.

Jon cleared his throat to bring his voice back. “She locked away the trumpet. And you were…”

He couldn’t finish; he didn’t have to. Elli knew.

“Screaming,” she whispered.

Jon nodded.

The radio’s song died. Count Basie began
Body and Soul
. Elli lifted the case from Jon’s hand and set it gently on the floor beside her. She wound her arms around his neck and touched every part of her swaying body to his.

“Elli,” Jon said, no strength behind his pleas. “Go home.”

But he moved with her, his eyelids unable to stay open. He had seen too much, a red dress walking away, the yellows of a man’s eyes who insisted she belonged to him, her hem lifting on a breeze—the first real breeze he had felt in so long. He had seen too much, he needed to feel.

And feel he did. From the graze of her breasts absent a bra, nothing but two thin cotton shirts between them, to the brush of her hips against his arousal. She had her hair pinned up. Lips that had found a home in a brass mouthpiece found a sweeter resting place against the delicate line of her neck. He found her earlobe and whispered against it, “Are you sure?”

She answered with a trail of feather-light kisses along his cheek to his mouth. This time when their lips connected, the primal pull was gone, replaced by an exploration of time and space and a music all their own. Lost as Jon was in the texture and pillow of her lips, he barely heard Charlie’s not so subtle, “Ahem,” to get the hell out.

Elli smiled against Jon’s lips and severed the kiss, only to place her forehead to his, that same reluctance to let go as he had at the park. Jon picked up the trumpet that had brought Elli’s parents together, now very much responsible again, and led Elli out the door and through the sticky dense night.

Six

                      Elli had four minutes of few words, stolen kisses and a gentleness of which she would have thought Jon incapable after their first encounter, from The Lotus to his apartment to change her mind. She didn’t. She told herself she didn’t care which Jon he was, but that wasn’t true. She reminded herself that he had one suitcase and another life, but that wasn’t true either. He had music and New Orleans. And a chance to start somewhere fresh.

       
              But that was the worst lie of all.

       
              Jon was an escape artist. When he was finished playing out whatever fantasy he crafted long ago, he would leave. Elli knew this before she snuck into the club and dissolved into his notes. Elli knew before the night was out she would restore him back to a whole man.

       
              Even if it meant losing him.

       
              Once in his apartment, he suggested the quiet, which wasn’t really quiet at all— the city noise of traffic and tenants drifted in. Elli suggested music.

       
              “Play me. Like you play your instrument.”

       
              A bold declaration from far away. But her words hit their mark. The corners of his mouth tugged up, ever so slightly, and his eyelids lowered, ever so slightly, as they did when he played the hard-to-reach places of his low register.

       
              Jon pulled up recordings he had played into his phone and docked them into speakers that filled the high ceilings and porous brick with every bit of his magical talent she had come to know. He clicked on a yellow paper lantern strung in one corner she hadn’t remembered before. Along with the moon glow from three roofline windows it pushed aside into darkness things that no longer mattered—his suitcase, the instrument, his jacket she remembered, not from the day they had spent together, but from the moment she watched him drive away. And when he had taken to every distraction she was sure he could think of and, at last, stood hesitant—sophisticated yet disheveled from a night of music—Elli removed her boots and the clip holding her hair and covered the distance between them.

       
              She didn’t recognize the tune, but he played it with the same reverence with which he took her in his arms. His lips—the lips of a man whose soul lived through the notes they crafted—those smooth strong lips at her ear sent hot tingles down her spine.

       
              “First, I warm my lips.” He brushed her hair aside and planted gentle kisses along her neck, alternating them with hot, slow exhales, his lips never once leaving her body.

       
              His breathing turned measured, working out a rhythm in his mind for which she wasn’t privy to, but one she could feel with every new territory he covered.

       
              “Then I stretch my hands…” he spoke against her shoulder, her collarbone. Her nipples ached, he had come so close, but the high neckline of her dress prevented it. Strong hands kneaded her back until they found a zipper and began a slow but effective tug. “…and they seek out their natural place.”

       
              Along her vertebrae, in perfect concert with the song’s unhurried chord change, his fingers tapped out each note. Moisture welled in her eyes from the adoration seeping through her bare skin. Her feet no longer supported her. She found the answering pressure of his thigh between her legs twisted them into a clef note from which she never wanted escape.

       
              The tune changed to a quicker tempo. His fingers responded—no longer a painstakingly slow journey, but a building urgency that tugged at the straps of her dress and sent it skimming her breasts to the floor. He was lost in the number, but not so far gone he couldn’t remember his way back to her lips.

“To a trumpeter,” he whispered, “the most sacred of places.”

Jon entered her mouth with a slant of his tongue, as dynamic and natural as if he had played her forever. They marked out their own movement, their own pitch of sighs from exploring hands, and once, just once, his tongue fell into a magic only previously enjoyed by the ear.

“What is that called?” Elli’s words wrapped messily around her labored exhales.

“Double tonguing.”

“Is that reserved only for the mouth?”

The taut concentration of his kisses relaxed into a slight chuckle. “I can play that wherever you want Sweetheart.”

To which Elli unleashed a passionate drive to the bed, rendering him mute but for a groan trapped deep in his throat. She pinned him to the bed.

“I wanted to do this the first time I saw you onstage…” Elli unbuttoned his shirt and teased the hair sprinkling his well-defined chest, unrelenting until she turned the tables and played his taut oblique muscles like an instrument of her own choosing. The muscular tone he had onstage was nothing against the landscape of his body.

“And this?” In one flick of the wrist, she unbuckled his belt. “On the fire escape.”

His brows shot up. “The fire escape?”

“All. Over. The fire escape.” She unzipped his pants. Her middle finger skimmed his hard ridge and shaft straining against his underwear with an agony inducing precision that had the sound of his heart thundering in his ears as he took in a fortifying breath. “And this?”

“Yeah?” he said, an accidental note cracking his voice.

“The moment you couldn’t tell me the vision because you knew it would hurt me.”

“I never want to—”

Elli pressed a finger to his lips to silence him against things he couldn’t promise, beyond anything right here, right now. “I know.”

Her hands skated his long limbs—toned arms, firm thighs—and removed the remainder of his clothes. He did the same for her only remaining stitch—panties. And when they had used the entirety of Jon’s version of
Like Someone in Love
to survey every inch of each other, in every space within and outside the music, his fingertips every so often mimicking his hands on the trumpet valves, Jon used his next three numbers to pleasure parts of Elli’s body that remained unseen, until her body crested, one sustained note of ecstasy to an electrified overture.

When at last, nothing remained but the urgency of two, each filling a void for the other, Jon rolled a condom in place and slipped inside her—no improvisation, no hesitation, nothing supernatural but the magic they created together.

Jon awoke late morning, skin clinging to the sheets from the late summer heat, from a dawn spent tangled again in Elli’s glorious body. He had never known such happiness, yet a dull ache wormed its way past his navel and festered. Happiness, he knew, was fleeting.  As much as Jon had begun to entertain a forever with Elli, he had once done the same with another woman he loved deeply. Would Elli too become someone else? How could he possibly know someone else—
really
know them—when he had only scratched the surface of his true self?

Not only had he broken his vow to steer clear of women, he ended up with the one woman on Earth who had the capacity to blast his heart out through his trumpet.