‘You’re a trip hazard, Sullivan,’ he observes, removing my hand from his face.
Not ‘Sully’.Sullivan.A grownup, elegant, proper version of my surname that thrills me as it seems to shift us one tiny step closer.
‘Maybe you need to take more risks?’ I reply.
The dare leaves my mouth and seems to spark in his eyes, closing the space between us, nerve endings alight where our hands are still touching. I have visions of him taking my instruction literally. Pushing me back on the couch and kissing me just as the tsunami crashes into the city on the screen, skyscrapers crumbling while he picks me up and grants me access to the last off-limits room in his house.
‘What’s stopping you?’ he says, pulling me from the fantasy with serious eyes.Am I supposed to make the first move?
‘Stopping me what?’ I ask, the weighted words falling into a half whisper.
‘Why aren’t you chasing music the way you want to?’
Oh!
He’s reversed us out of the flirtation zone and turned career coach. I remove my hand from underneath his.
‘Probably fear,’ I hear myself say before I can properly editorialise a response. ‘Everything else is just an excuse.’
I don’t know what it is about Fraser—what magic hold he has over me—but for once I haven’t dished up my default answer. I always blame ‘the situation’ or the way I was wronged, rarely taking any responsibility myself.
‘Someone stole my music,’ I divulge, slipping back into familiar territory. ‘The major composition I’d been working on for my PhD.’
He reaches for the remote, shuts off the television, then turns on the table lamp beside him and looks at me the way Rach does when I’m about to spill the tea. Except she acts like she’s Parker’sage on Christmas morning. Fraser is patient and distinguished, as if we’re about to apply academic rigour to my past.
‘I was so young. So ill-equipped …’ Shame catches in my throat as I falter through this. Failure. Rage. The poisonous cocktail that I force myself to swallow every time my memory dishes this up. ‘And here I am, further from my dream career than ever. I associate classical piano with my piece, and that piece with ditching my PhD, and pulling out of the doctorate with running away, and running away with failure. Whenever I hear it, and the way he claimed it and mangled it and—’
Fraser’s chestnut eyes darken, muscles tensing in his jaw. ‘What exactly did he do?’
My heart rails against the déjà vu. An almost identical conversation on a different couch more than a decade ago. Youthful vulnerability rushing through my veins, seeping through flushed skin on my face as I dared make the accusation.
Sully, I’ll keep your secret safe …
If I’m trembling now it’s in quiet rage. My secret was never safe once I exposed it to Josh. It was ablaze in his hands. I’d assumed the buckets he promised were filled with water. I thought he’d extinguish it, not accelerate it …
‘What’s scaring you?’ Fraser asks, reading the agony on my face.
I’m terrified my secret will wedge itself here, between us.
I’m afraid of how messy this is. That his brother’s blistering betrayal will make me bolt from this room in coltish fear that this conversation will go as badly as the other one.
And then I will lose this. I will losehim. An outcome I’m increasingly certain would devastate me, not just professionally this time, and that’s the part that scares me most …
‘I’m afraid history will repeat itself,’ I say, blinking back tears, rising to my feet. ‘And that I won’t survive it twice.’
12
FRASER
It’s two in the morning and I’ve been staring at my bedroom ceiling for hours.
Did my brother steal her music?
It’s unconscionable. Illegal. A criminal offence, according to the internet search I’ve just completed, attracting hundreds of thousands in fines and imprisonment, depending on the severity. And I am fucking infuriated.
I know how this process works in the sciences. Is it similar in the arts? Harder to prove, perhaps. I’ll need to look into it properly—
Except she hasn’t asked for my help. She’s barely told me anything about it. Clammed up almost the moment she raised it, only to come out all emotionally brittle, the way she dissolved that night in Joshua’s audience.Like he’d broken her heart?Presumably protecting him despite his crime …
