This week, I'd started playing music.
The apartment complex was quiet at this hour. Not silent, it was never truly silent anywhere, and I'd stopped wanting it to be. I liked the way the building breathed around me. Pipes ticking, the couple two floors up moving through their predictable evening rhythm, sounds of traffic below. A city has its own score if you bother to learn it, and this one was writing itself into me, measure by measure.
I sat on the bench and let my hands rest on the keys without pressing.
The bruises were gone. Milo told me the last yellow-green shadows had absorbed back into my skin a week ago, but I still caught myself pressing my fingers to my jaw in the dark and half-expecting to find the pain and swelling. it was muscle memory. The body learns everything.
The body forgets nothing.
Like the particular resistance of cold concrete against a cheekbone. And the way a fist sounds different when it's landing than any other percussion in the world.
You don't unlearn those things.
You build music over them instead.
I started with my right hand only, picking out a melody I'd been assembling here and there. Small fragments gathered at odd moments and pressed together until they made a shape. It wasn't finished. It might never be finished. But it had a center now. It had a little weight. It sounded like a structure built over cracks, where the breaks were load-bearing, where removing them would bring the whole thing down.
I let my left hand join and found the harmony almost by accident. The notes that don't try to be the loudest thing in the room but makes everything else make sense.
I played it through once.
Then again.
He came home during the fifth repetition.
I sensed him before the key hit the lock. I knew the specific rhythm of him the way I knew these keys. By heart. Without thinking.
He stopped in the doorway.
He didn't speak. He never interrupted when I was playing. It was one of the things I appreciated about him.
I kept playing.
The melody moved through its second phrase, lifting and not quite resolving, hanging in the air a beat longer than expected before settling. I was working on the resolution, but I hadn't found it yet. The piece kept ending in that suspended place, that held breath, and I didn't know yet whether it was unfinished or whether that was the point.
"Welcome home," I said.
"Hey." His voice came from three feet behind my right shoulder. Closer than I'd expected. He'd moved without me hearing, which meant he was tired. When his exhaustion hit a certain threshold, his precision slipped. He forgot to make the small navigational sounds he'd started making in the first weeks after he noticed they helped me track him without having to ask.
The wordhomesat between us, another note that hadn't resolved.
I let the music taper off without lifting my hands.
"That's new," he said.
"It's just something I've been working on."
A pause. Then, "It's beautiful."
I felt the word land somewhere it wasn't supposed to.
I'd been building to this for three weeks. Since the safe house, maybe. Since the moment I'd woken in the dark with the taste of blood in my mouth and his voice sayingyou're okay, and I'd felt the relief of surviving running alongside the pain of what he'd done to me. I'd been carrying it so long the shape of it had become part of my posture. Part of the way I slept. Part of the reason the music kept ending in that unresolved place.
"Milo, sit down," I said, and moved over.
The bench shifted as he settled beside me. Not touching, but close enough that I felt the warmth of him.
My hands went back to the keys.
