Liron's Melody (7 page)

Melody laughed softly. “As tempting as that sounds, no thank
you.”

He sat down across from her, gazed into the fire for a
moment, then sighed and leaned back in his chair. “My marriage to Elizabeth was
an arranged marriage,” he declared. “That is very common for muses. As a muse,
our purpose is to connect with and inspire humans to create, to help make your
world more beautiful. We can contact a human on a telepathic connection, usually
in dreams. Our parents match us with a muse who will be a good complement. In
my case, I was a musical muse, and Elizabeth was a lyrical muse. The idea is to
match two muses of similar talents so that they will continue to inspire one
another, thus being able to continue inspiring humans.”

Melody listened intently, her mind spinning with this
extraordinary new world she had never imagined could exist. She watched the firelight
play across Liron’s face, and noticed the sadness return as he spoke.

“I loved her instantly,” he continued after a brief pause.
His voice was raspy with emotion, whimsical, and tinged with disappointment.
“The second I saw her, with her midnight hair and bottomless dark eyes, I was
lost.” He shook his head with a sigh. “She never shared the sentiment.”

Melody frowned. “She didn’t love you? I mean, she didn’t grow
to love you? After you got to know one another?”

He shifted his attention to meet her gaze for a moment, and
Melody clamped her mouth shut. What was the matter with her? That was none of
her business and definitely not her place to ask. She was curious and
intrigued, but that didn’t give her the right to pry into the man’s personal
life. She should be happy he was explaining anything to her at all. “I’m sorry,
Liron. That was rude of me. You don’t have to answer that.” She looked down at
her lap and toyed with the hem of the shirt.

His baleful blue eyes stared at her for several moments
before he reached a hand out to her. She scooted forward and slipped her
fingers into his, relishing the way the gentle music filled her mind and soul.

“Melody, understand something. For whatever reason, my music
provided a way for you to travel to this dimension. I didn’t know that was
possible. For it to have occurred even in a smaller measurement, we would have
had to share a very strong connection. And not only that, but when the gateway
opened for you, you had to have the courage to go through it, to reach out to
me.” He caressed the back of her hand with his thumb. “I have been isolated in
this house for longer than I can remember. I don’t know what made you step
through that portal, but you did. You can ask me anything you desire.”

He let go of her hand with a lingering touch and turned his
attention back to the fire. “No, she never grew to love me. I did everything in
my power to make her happy, but she never warmed toward me. She accepted me on
our wedding night with a sort of grudging duty, I suppose, and after that, she
slept in a different room. She would not come to me. Maybe I repulsed her. I
don’t know.”

Melody snorted and he looked back over at her. She rolled her
eyes. “Any woman who could find you repulsive is off her noggin,” she grumbled.

Her comment made his beautiful smile chase away the shadows
again, and he chuckled. “You are good for my self esteem,” he said. He paused
for a second before he added in a low voice, “You’d better be careful. I might
decide I want to keep you.”

Heat flooded her body, and her heart skipped a beat. She
didn’t know which was more unnerving…his bold statement, or the fact that she
didn’t find it to be that unappealing of an option.

“Anyway,” he continued. “To make a very long, boring, and
painful story short, our marriage was a sad excuse for a relationship. It was
six years of me aching for someone I could not have, who lived with me, ate
with me, tormented me with her beauty every time she walked into a room. We
both continued to inspire humans the way my kind have always done, the way we
were taught. We existed together, but separately. And one day, she came to me
and told me she was leaving. That she had fallen in love with the human man she
was inspiring, a classical composer.”

“Nice,” Melody muttered. “I guess they were going to make
beautiful music together.” Her words were so sarcastic she could almost see
them dripping acid. But she was rewarded with another chuckle from Liron, and
it warmed her heart.

“You have a way with words, Melody, and a way of taking the
dark stain out of this miserable part of my history. I thank you for that.”

She smiled and continued to toy with the hem of his shirt,
wondering why it was she could go out with Rob over a dozen times and have him
fawn over her, but only feel annoyed, yet have Liron say one line of praise and
feel flushed and bashful. Rob…he seemed like he existed a thousand miles away,
like he was only a small part of a distant memory. At this point, her entire
life seemed like a distant memory.

“Was the classical composer she was hot for named Aaron
Channing?” Melody queried.

Liron raised an eyebrow and looked at her. “Yes.”

She nodded. “When I went searching for who had written that
music score, I did some research on Elizabeth and found out about him too.” She
frowned. “But when I was looking up the information, everything said that
Elizabeth had written that piece of music, that it had been the only score
she’d ever composed.”

A different kind of shadow darkened his face. This one was
not sadness, but anger. “When she told me she was leaving to go live in the
human world, I begged her like a sad excuse for a man not to go. Living with
her frigidness was better than not having her at all. She ignored me, as was
her way. So, I wrote that piece of music. For her, so she would know how much
sorrow and pain I felt, how much I still loved her. It was a gift and my last
plea, the last amount of creative strength I had.” He scowled fiercely and his
voice took on a bitter bite. “She actually had the audacity to kiss me
afterwards, the first amount of affection she had shown me since our wedding
night. Told me it was the most amazing thing she had ever heard. Hope surged
within me like a living thing, and I went to sleep that night feeling like
maybe there was a chance for us after all.

“The next morning, she was gone, and so was my music. Her
connection with her human was strong enough to enable her to travel to the
human world. So, she’d vanished in the night like a petty thief, and had stolen
the music I had written for her.”

Melody gasped in outrage. “You mean she slapped her name on
your music to make herself famous in my world?”

He snorted in disdain. “Apparently.”

“What a bitch!” she spat. Liron looked at her with a
surprised expression and she stood, stabbing her finger at him in agitation at
the turn of events the story had taken. “She friggin’ plagiarized you! If this
had happened in my world, she could have been sued nine ways from Tuesday!”

Liron stood also and held his hands up. He smirked. “Melody,
calm down.”

“I will not calm down! That is absolute crap, Liron. What an
awful woman. I’m glad I never knew about her and her stupid husband in all my
studies. If I found out that I had once played one of his stupid scores, I
would have wanted to vomit.” She crossed her arms and tapped her foot in
annoyance, angered that someone would intentionally hurt another person in such
a calculated fashion.

“It happened a long time ago,” he said.

“Yeah, and you haven’t written anything since! She ripped
your heart and your creativity out! She stole your music and your life!”
Suddenly, his words hit her with a rush of realization.
It happened a long
time ago.
That girl at the yard sale had said the music had belonged to her
great-grandmother. Melody blinked rapidly. “Whoa, wait a second; how old are
you anyway?”

He raised an eyebrow at her sudden change of topic.

“This Elizabeth cow has been dead for decades! Like, a whole
lot of them!” She wasn’t going to take the time to try and figure out exactly
how many. That wasn’t the point, and she didn’t have enough fingers and toes
anyway.

He smiled. “Time moves differently in the human world,
faster. It was the one bit of satisfaction I was granted. To know that her time
with the human was short, as opposed to how long of a life she could have had
if she’d chosen me.”

“So, are you immortal?”

He shook his head. “No, not by any means. But a year to a
muse would probably be more like five for a human.”

She stared at him. “Dang. That means you guys were actually
married for…thirty-five human years?”

He dipped his head in a nod and stuck his hands in the
pockets of his black slacks. “By estimate, yes.”

“And she ditched you after all that time?” Her voice went up
in pitch again. “What a whore!” His rich chuckle warmed her blood from head to
toe in a way that was different from the anger surging through her veins. He
stepped close to her and ran his hands gently down her shoulders, causing a
thousand tingles to surge beneath her skin.

“Your vehement defense of me is very flattering,” he said.

She snorted. “Well, I don’t care which way you look at it,
that situation is just jacked.”

He didn’t move away from her and exhaled a soft breath. “It’s
strange,” he said. “But I have carried such bitterness within me from all of
that. For all these years, I have festered alone with it, along with my sorrow,
my loneliness. But look what happened. Because she stole my music, it found its
way to you. And you, in turn, found your way to me. I know it has been
harrowing, but do you regret the experience? Because I certainly do not regret
meeting you this night.”

Melody looked up into his eyes and found herself moving
closer to him before she even realized she was doing it. “It’s definitely a
once in a lifetime kind of adventure,” she said with a smile. Her heart started
to thunder as he continued to gaze down at her, and she reached out to place
her palms tentatively against his chest. He felt solid and strong, like the
tower of refuge he had been for her during this entire bizarre event.

“It was your sorrow that called to me,” she admitted quietly.
“The loneliness you speak of living with for all this time. I heard it when I
played that piece of music. I felt your pain because it was so similar to my
own. That music called to me, lived within me. I could feel you….” She ran her
hands down his torso slowly and shook her head. “Does that make sense?” She
looked back up into his eyes, acutely aware of how close he was to her. She felt
the warmth from his body, and she ached to be enfolded in that comforting
musical embrace once again.

“None of this, in all reality, makes any kind of sense,” he
replied, his voice deep and hushed. “But what you speak of I, too, feel in a
smaller measurement every time I look into your eyes.”

Her gaze traveled to his mouth and her heartbeat accelerated.
She wondered, if the man’s lightest touch was full of the most amazing music,
what would a kiss feel like? Was it bad to kiss a muse? A creature that, until
several hours ago, she had not known to exist? Was it bad to be so forward with
a stranger regardless of how incredibly sexy he was?

As if in answer to her, Liron’s arms slipped around her
waist, pulling her closer against his chest. Lovely sounds filled her mind.
They chased away all doubt, all sadness, all pain. There was nothing but music,
and the sound of her pounding heart as it reacted to his nearness.

And then a blaring, obnoxious siren of sound that jarred her
brain and broke the moment with a vengeance. Liron winced and shook his head.
Melody blinked rapidly and stepped out of his embrace.

“What is that awful noise?” Liron muttered.

Melody gasped as she looked over his shoulder. “Oh my gosh!”
she whispered. Half of his room had, once again, morphed back into the modern
décor of her house.

Liron turned to see what she was looking at, but didn’t react
with as much surprise as she would have. “Is this your home?” he queried.

“Yes,” she said, stepping forward. “This is what happened
when I came here. Only I was there, and I was peering in on you.” She pointed
to where she could see her piano. She frowned as she noticed rays of light
filtering in from the kitchen window. “Holy crap, what time is it? How long
have I been here? That noise is my alarm clock.” She turned to Liron. “What
happened? How did the gateway open again?”

He stared into her living room for a moment before his
shoulders slumped in an almost indiscernible measurement. But she noticed all
the same. “Apparently, all you needed was something from your world, a
reminder, to bring you back home.”

Relief rushed over her in waves, knowing that she was not
permanently stuck in some strange dimension, but hard on the heels of that
relief was disappointment. If she went back through the gateway, would she ever
be able to see Liron again? Or would that be the end of it? Like a strange and
beautiful dream?

She turned to face him and saw the same disappointment reflected
in his eyes. He smiled, but not for the first time tonight, it looked forced.
He stuffed his hands back in his pockets. “Well, Melody, I must say, it has
been an honor and a privilege.”

She managed a smile that she imagined looked as pained as his
did. “Liron, this entire night has been…extraordinary. Terrifying, but
extraordinary.”

He took her hand and traced along the lines of her palm the
way he had done to calm her earlier. “For whatever reason this happened, I will
always be grateful. You chased away the loneliness, even if for a night, and
made me remember what it is like to hear music, what kind of power it can have.
I think I had forgotten that in my misery.” He met her gaze and shrugged one
shoulder. “My only regret is that I did not have enough time to learn more
about you.”