“I’m glad it showed,” she replied dryly. “Because I was trying very hard to look normal.”
Her humor was quiet and sharp in the gentlest way. It landed easily.
I smiled, then let it fade into something calm. “I don’t perform.”
The words weren’t sharp, but they were firm. They landed like a line drawn cleanly across the conversation, and I watched her reaction carefully out of habit.
“Oh,” she said, surprised by the immediate certainty. “At all?”
I shook my head once. “Not publicly.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay.”
She didn’t push. She didn’t ask why. She didn’t soften my answer with excuses for me. That mattered more than it should have.
“I just thought maybe I should learn something myself if I’m going to ask other people to sign up,” she explained.
I watched her for a beat, then nodded once. “You’re cutting it a little close to compete.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, I wasn’t intending to be a part of the talent show this year. I was thinking maybe next year. I like music, I just never really learned it.”
I let myself smile again, because the idea of her thinking a year ahead felt both practical and unexpectedly hopeful. “Then we have plenty of time to see if you have talent.”
“That’s something I’m not really sure about,” she murmured, and there was something honest in the way she said it, like she had lived with that doubt for a while.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She shrugged, small and contained. “Some people seem to excel at certain things. I’m not sure that anyone would say I’m really good at something.”
The sentence didn’t sound like fishing for reassurance. It sounded like a belief she carried around quietly. I didn’t like that. “Maybe you just need to keep exploring new things until you find out what you’re good at. Or maybe it’s not about being perfect at something. Maybe it’s about finding something you love to do.”
As I spoke, I reached for my notebook behind the counter and flipped it open, because I needed my hands to be doing something steady while I said something that could accidentally matter to her.
“How often were you thinking for lessons?” I asked.
She blinked. “Is there a correct answer?”
“There are answers,” I said. “Correct depends on how much you want your fingers to hate you.”
“That sounds alarming.”
“They will eventually toughen up,” I replied, keeping my tone light. “Twice a week is good for beginners if they have time. Once a week is fine too. Any less than that and we spend most of the lesson remembering what we did last time.”
She considered her week, and I could see the calculation happening behind her eyes. “Once a week, maybe twice if I’m feeling brave.”
I nodded as if bravery was a reasonable scheduling factor, because it was. “Tuesdays and Thursdays are my lesson days. Short sessions or longer?”
“Short,” she said immediately. “If I stay too long, I’ll start apologizing for wasting your time.”
I looked up. Something in my chest tightened, not from attraction, but from recognition. I had heard that sentence in different forms from different people. It was the language ofsomeone who had been told, directly or indirectly, that they were too much when they weren’t useful.
“You’re not wasting my time,” I told her.
“I suppose,” she murmured, and the way she said it made me think she didn’t fully believe me yet.
“Learning is useful,” I added.
“That sounds like something a teacher would say.”
