No Strings Attached (2 page)

“Me? What about you? I wasn't the only prodigy in school, you know. You promised to join me as their first violinist, remember?”

I reached for my mug of hot chocolate, grimacing when I realized it had gotten cold. I set it on the table and sat back. “Man, I'd almost forgotten—”

“Almost forgotten?” Thayre blurted out. “Christ, Moyra, what's happened to you? If memory serves me well, we couldn't pry your fingers off your violin long enough for you to eat lunch.”

We being Thayre and five of our friends who also played at the time.

“So, do you still play at least?” Thayre asked a moment later. “Or did you stop as soon as we got out of school like everyone else?”

“Not everyone,” I said, giving him a pointed look.

“Okay, but besides myself and Collin, everyone else either dropped out of the program altogether or picked some other field because it was
easier.
”

I bowed my head. “I did play.”

“But you don't anymore? What happened to your scholarships?”

I couldn't bring myself to meet his gaze. All through school, we were neck-and-neck when it came to music. If I got stuck on transitions or phases, I asked Thayre, and the same thing went for him. Hell, we'd even been in a youth group together and played a good part of the east coast during the summer.

I sighed. “I gave them up. The scholarships I mean.”

Thayre stared at me. “And your folks? There's no way they were happy about that.”

“After paying as much as they did for my lessons? I'd think not. As for when I last played, it's been  over three years.”

Bret, my ex-Dom, had always complained about the noise it made. At first, I played when he wasn’t around, but after I was told time and again not to do it, and with my passion pretty much gone, I just...stopped.

“That’s a shame,” Thayre said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Not for your folks but...Moyra, you used to keep me up with your music. Not literally of course, but we wrote the most catching melodies. Think you still have what it takes?” He cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Depends on the emotion you’re after.”

“Any, so long as it’s raw.”

“Anger would work then? Because I don't think I can do happy. Not yet at least.”

“Anger's a great inspiration sometimes.”

“I take it you're talking from experience?”

He scoffed and then smirked when I looked up at him again. “How else can I write music?” He made a flippant gesture with his hand. “Come here. I want to show you something.”

I took his hand and followed him to a door that, once opened, led into his basement. He went first, and I followed. I couldn't help wondering if I was already getting in too deep with a guy I barely knew.
You hung out all the time during high school.
Yeah, over twelve years ago.

Once college came into the picture, we went our separate ways, and when I met Bret, well...one can see how that ended up.

“Here it is,” Thayre said, nodding to the room.

I looked wide-eyed at what should’ve been his basement, but it was so much more than that. Sure, one side appeared to be used for storage along with a Ping-Pong table, but on the other side was what could only be described as a very large glass box. And inside the box?

“My sound studio,” Thayre said, walking toward it.

I studied the various stringed instruments behind the glass. “You weren't kidding about playing most of them, were you? This must've cost a fortune.”

“A small one, maybe. I suppose I could've rented them and taken lessons, but I'm more of a play by ear and at my own pace kind of a guy.”

It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did anyway. Thayre had an amazing ear for music. In fact, the few times I'd gotten stuck on my own melodies, he'd helped me figure out if a scale was wrong or if I was missing a few beats. I never expected it to carry on well into his adult life. In our mid-thirties and, looking at him now, it was almost as if nothing had changed at all.

“Want to go inside?”

“You...you’d let me?” My attention settled on the violin closest to us. And suddenly, all I wanted to do was play. To put bow to strings, close my eyes, and let whatever happened happen. I hadn’t realized how much I missed holding my old violin until Thayre had offered me the chance to play his own. “But, it’s your baby.”

It was the truth. For as long as I could remember, he was as protective of his violin as a mother was of her child. He didn’t even leave it at the lunch table with friends while he went to get something out of the café. The damn thing went everywhere with him, and now he was offering—no, asking me to play it?

He frowned and crossed his arms over his chest, and my God, if his arms were as toned as his shirt made me believe—

“Moyra?”

I shook myself aware.
You’re here as a guest, remember?
Not that I needed another man in my life anyway, but the thought was tempting. “Hmm?”

“I was asking if you wanted to gawk at it all night, or if you’d like to go inside?”

I managed a nod and stepped closer to the glass.

Thayre opened the door and gestured for me to go inside. I'd been in a sound studio once before, but it was never like this. Along the far wall was a set of monitors, keyboards, and two soundboards.

I glanced at him, confused. “Okay, I get the keyboards and everything else, but what's with the major sound system?”

“You really have been out of the loop, haven't you?” He released an exaggerated sigh. “Long story short, I decided to cut out the middleman and produce the albums myself. It's helped pay for most of this, so I must be doing something right.”

I ran my hand over the neck of a cello, stopping mid-sweep from his most recent statement. “You're probably right. Problem is, music hasn't been in my life very much since I got out of school.”

“But you do remember how to play.” It wasn't a question.

“Just like riding a bike, right?”

“We can hope so.” He pointed at the stool in the middle of the room. “Why not have a seat so we can get you set up.”

Doing my best to ignore the nerves coiled in the pit of my stomach, I took a seat. Having Thayre so close to me made it hard to concentrate on the notes in front of me instead of his near-silent breath. The dark ink on white paper blurred, and I worked on removing the bit of dirt from under my fingernail.

Surrounded by instruments and walls of glass, I was, in all intents and purposes, at the very center of Thayre's world. I didn't have to look at him to see if he was watching me. He'd been extremely attentive when I played so many years ago, I could imagine his vision drifting from my face to my hands and back again.

Come on, Moyra, concentrate. You've played the violin thousands of times before. This should be cake.
Yeah. Tell that to my hands or the hairs standing along the nape of my neck.

Thayre reached in front of me to grab the violin from its case, attached it to a cord, then handed the instrument to me before stepping to the back of the room. Out of site, but certainly not out of mind.
Far from it.

For a moment, all I could do was breathe, feel the strings and soft wood under my fingertips and try not to freak out under Thayre's gaze.
He's watching.
And even if he wasn't, he was
listening.
I swallowed hard as my vision traced the strings on the violin, the curve of its neck, and finally, the bow which I held in my hand. It had been so long since I'd held my own violin that it took me some time to get comfortable with the weight of it.

I knew I was incapable of playing one of my own pieces, so I glanced at the music sheets in front of me. I dragged the bow across the middle of the strings and froze as the sound reverberated off the surrounding walls.

“Jesus, that’s loud.”

Thayre came around to face me, and his grin from earlier widened. “It’s a sound system, what did you expect?” He pointed at the wire connected to the base of the violin.

“Won’t your neighbors hear?”
Do they mind?

It was probably close to, if not past, eleven by now. Surely they wouldn't appreciate getting woken up by someone else’s music, no matter how beautiful the string of notes looked on the page.

He knocked on the glass. “Soundproof. Come on, Moyra, give me some credit. As many nights as I lie awake with something stuck in my head, I had to make it soundproof.”

“So, you come in here a lot?”

“All the time—not just to play, either. The table over there?” He pointed to it, and I couldn’t help noticing the lights hanging above it. “I write most of my music in here, and most times, it’s in the middle of the night. I can’t get to sleep until I get the notes out.”

“Sounds like what I go through with writing.”

His eyebrows jumped. “You write?”

I dropped my gaze and caressed the scroll of the violin, smiling at how smooth it was beneath my fingertips. “A little. I haven’t shown anyone, though. Poetry mostly.”

“I’ll be damned. Any chance they could get turned into lyrics?”

I looked at him and laughed. “Can they be turned into lyrics? Seriously, you’re going with that?”

He held up his hands. “Okay, okay. I get your point. Dumb question. So, are you going to play, or what?”

I licked my lips and looked at the violin I had coveted for so long. It was in my hands, and I was inside Thayre’s soundproofed room. No one who didn’t want to hear the music would, which meant there was no chance of my sour, out-of-practice notes getting back to Bret.

Taking a breath, I positioned the fingers of my left hand on the strings and started to play. One thing I had always loved about Thayre’s music was how easy it was to follow. That isn’t to say it was simple. In fact, it was the exact opposite, but I guess after playing for more than twenty years, the notes came easier for me.

The melody was soft. At one point, I was even tempted to close my eyes, but doing so would’ve left me blind to the notes I had yet to read, so I kept them open. And I'm not sure when it happened, but I'd been swaying to the music I was playing, almost as if I was in a trance.
Typical Thayre.
He may have helped me with my own music at one time, but even on those long nights of banging our heads on a wall, there were times we took a break to play something of his own.

And no matter how late it was, or how much caffeine we'd had to drink, playing his music was instinctual, as though it took no effort on my part at all.
Muscle memory.
It had gotten me far back then, and here I was, allowing it to happen again.

Once my nerves had settled, the music carried me—reminded me—how to play.
I never should've stopped playing.
I may have been in love with Bret at one time, but he could never compare to my passion for music. A passion I almost snuffed out, just because he'd asked me to.

I hit a sour note and cringed, pulling the bow away from the strings.

“Don't stop now,” Thayre said. “You're almost back. Keep playing?”

I threw a glance over my shoulder, but the smile on his face wasn't there to mock me. “Back? Back from where?”

He shrugged. “You started out tense, and even though you say you haven't played in a while, your shoulders are relaxed. One bad note shouldn't change that.”

I drew in a deep breath and exhaled through my nose. “It's kind of embarrassing, though. Completely threw me out of the zone.”

Thayre moved in front of me and leaned against the glass wall. “So get back in. I'm not going to let you leave until you've finished.”

I cocked my head. “Holding me captive now?”

“Oh, come on! It isn't like you wouldn't do the same to me if I was working my way out of a funk.”

“A funk?”
Is that what this is?

Hell, these days I couldn't be sure. I'd always had a violin. As soon as I had a strong hold on my gross motor skills, I started to play. And while it had nearly killed me when I stopped because Bret had asked me to, what I felt now...I wasn't in a rut, was I?

“Stop over thinking things,” Thayre's voice forced its way into my subconscious. “You're getting tense again. You need to relax.”

He strode behind me again and set one hand on my shoulder and the other at the middle of my spine, correcting my bad posture in the process. I started to arch my back in search of the warmth from his hands but corrected myself before he could notice.

Crossing his arms over his chest, he leaned against the glass wall again. “And please, for the love of Angie, don't think. Do.”

I smirked at him. “Angie?”

“You're holding her.” Then, with more laughter in his voice, he added, “What? I had to name her. It didn't feel right calling her a violin.”

I shook my head. “No, I mean, did you replace your old one?”

His smile softened. “Old gal couldn't keep up with my demands.”

“So, Angie is your second?”

“Third.”

It may have seemed odd to someone who didn't play as much as Thayre did, but the naming of his violin didn't surprise me. As often as he played, and given what he'd said earlier about coming down to compose new music in the middle of the night, Angie was his pet dog—a faithful companion.
Not to mention an outlet for every emotion imaginable.

I winced at the thought of the sour note I played earlier. Not all emotions were created equal, especially when it came to music.

Thayre didn't say anything after that. He was still somewhere off to my left, but he kept outside my peripheral vision.

Closing my eyes, I set the bow on the strings again, took a breath, then studied the sheet music. Thayre's melody was as easy to play the second time around, and soon, I found myself in the same trance as before. Only this time, my thoughts didn't wander. Aside from the beauty of his music, I didn't think of anything else.

There were no nerves. No tension, and as the notes danced around the room, whatever crap was left from the last two months simply melted off my shoulders. I hit the last note, but I didn't pull the bow away from the strings. I sat there until the sound stopped completely.

Thayre clapped and came around to face me. “Sometime, I’d like to hear you play for me.”