But then she needed something else. We both needed something else. It felt almost like an instinct, both of our chins tilting up at the same time and our mouths falling together. We kissed until my lips felt numb and our shirts were on the floor, until clouds blew over the moon and Eva’s arms wrapped around my bare waist, her face buried in the slope of my neck as she drifted off to sleep.
“Hey,” Luca says now, holding open the café door for me.
“Hello.”
“Hello? What’s this hello shit?”
“Huh?”
“You usually greet me with a shoulder shove or an inarticulate grunt.”
I relax a little. “Sorry. Things on my mind.”
He tilts his head at me. “Audition things?”
I blink at him. “Oh.”
“You’re still doing it, right?”
“Um—?”
“Grace.”
“Luca.”
“You can’t not do it. You know that, right? Please tell me you know that.”
“Of course I’m still doing the audition. Damn. I just spent three and a half hours practicing at a freaking bookstore. Why do you care so much about my piano playing all of a sudden?”
“It’s not all of a sudden. It’s been years.”
I look down and bite my lip, thinking about the thousand dollars he shelled out for my pre-screening video. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m just nervous about it.”
“Why? You’re amazing.”
I shrug. “I don’t know . . . all the other students at the Boston workshop? They’re not like me. They don’t have my baggage.”
“No one’s like you, Gray. Not on the piano. And I mean that in a good way.”
I nod, knotting my aching fingers together.
“Is the New York trip with Maggie still happening?” Luca asks when I don’t say anything else. “You haven’t talked about it much lately.”
“We,” I say, waving my hands between us, “haven’t talked about much of anything lately.”
He scuffs his ratty gray Chuck Taylors against the tabby sidewalk. “Listen, Mom’s making lobster bisque for dinner tonight. Why don’t you come? Kimber’ll be there. Maybe you guys can chat a little more.”
I squint at him, but I can tell he’s trying. He wants me to fit in with her, or her with me, or him with all of us. Something.
“Eva will be there too,” he says when I don’t answer right away. “Maybe you can talk to her, too.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Of course I would talk to Eva.”
“I mean talk to her talk to her.”
He gets my best what the hell look for that one.
“You still haven’t told her everything about you and your mom, have you?”
