I didn’t want to lose this momentum, but he’d also be pissed if I’d accidentally left him locked in one of the mansion’s many rooms all day.
“Mr.Tumnus,” I called quietly, as I stood up. I didn’t want to interrupt Isaac’s flow.
As I padded around the first floor, checking behind every closed door, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on Isaac’s progress. He played the same cheerful melody with a gloomy undertone over and over again, sometimes pausing for a few minutes at a time.
I made my way back to the front of the house and peered through the cracked door of the formal living room. Isaac sat at the piano with a pile of letters scattered across the floor and several laid out in front of him above the piano keys.
A fire was going and I could feel the warmth of it even from here. The flames crackled, casting a bright glow on the blond crown of his head. He was perfect. Too perfect. The kind of perfect that made my heart feel unsettled because how could you capture something so perfect and keep it forever? How could you ever deserve that?
For the briefest of moments I let myself imagine what it might feel like for this to be nothing more than our routine. Mine and Isaac’s. The two of us sequestered off as we let inspiration take hold and then wandering across the mansion every so often to check in. For him to trace patterns on my neck as I stared at my screen, searching for the right words. To kiss his shoulder as his hands danced across the keys. Working alongside someone but not with them, each of us having our own passions and desires and loving each other for it.
Loving. The word nearly made me hiccup before an anxious dread settled in the pit of my stomach.
Lovewas just a pretty word for the part that came before the heartbreak. Before everyone’s eyes cleared and they realized they’d built an altar for a regular mortal after all.
I took a step back from the seductively warm room, but not before noticing a swirl of black fur curled at Isaac’s feet. Mr.Tumnus didn’t even lift his head to acknowledge me. Traitor.
But I couldn’t blame him too much. A cozy fire and Isaac Kelly? Well, that was nearly impossible to resist.
Chapter Twelve
Isaac
“Well, isn’t this a TikTok-able moment,” declared the sharp voice of someone who definitely wasn’t my dark-eyed, temptingly hipped roommate.
I looked up to see the trench coat and signature pearls of Steph D’Arezzo and hung my head over the piano keys.
“How did you getinside?” I asked sadly. “I didn’t even hear the doorbell.”
“I decided to bypass that whole Edith Wharton state of affairs and text Sunny. She let me in.”
Ah! Perfidy! Stabbed in the back by my own roommate with benefits!
“It sounds like you’ve got something there,” Steph said as she took a seat in the high-backed armchair near the piano. It was late in the afternoon, and the light coming in through the tall, drawing room windows wasn’t much brighter than the small fire going behind the old brass grate. I’d had real wiring run through the mansion, so Icouldturn on the lights. But seeing was for people who had real lives. People like me, who were little morethan phantoms, who were already part of the gloom, only alive when the fire flickered just right, we didn’t deserve—
“Is that a Capri-Sun?” Steph asked conversationally. “In fact, are those five empty Capri-Sun packets next to it?”
I glowered at her. “These are my creative gloom Capri-Suns.”
To her credit, my Enneagram Type 4 talk never seemed to faze Steph. “Okay, Heathcliff. If gloom Capri-Suns are doing it for you, I won’t complain, because whatever you were playing when I walked in sounds incredible.”
I stopped glowering and looked down. Mr.Tumnus was asleep by my feet, curled contentedly around a Capri-Sun packet that he’d bravely killed all on his own. “You really think so?” I asked. I felt uncharacteristically shy—I hadn’t played this new thing for anyone yet.
In the old days, the INK and solo album days, the minute I had some lyrics or a melody, the song was pulled out of my hands, spread out onto a slab, and Frankensteined into something the studio thought was marketable for the key demographics. And maybe I was a contra-contrarian, but Ilikedcommercial music, Ilikedtidy songs with catchy beats. I just never loved the part where the song became the studio’s instead of my own.
“It does. It’s cheerful but there’s something poignant in it. It’s a fragile cheer.”
“I’ve been reading these letters to Santa,” I said. “They remind me of how simple Christmas used to feel, the straightforward magic of it all. But I can’t remember how that felt without being simultaneously aware of having lost that feeling. You can never go back to seeing Christmas the way a child sees it, you know? You can only catch little glimpses here and there. Moments of what it used to be like. It’s like catching snow—nearly impossible, and then you can never hold on to it. It’s nothing more than a cold memory of itself, in the end.”
I sighed and looked over at Steph, who looked... delighted?
“Please say all that stuff when you’re interviewed about the album,” she said. “That isgold.”
“I don’t want to be interviewed,” I said, trying not to argue, butreally. What part ofI want to decay in peacewas so hard for everyone to understand?
She held up a hand. “I’m not here on business, I promise. Well, not onmybusiness. Have you checked your email at all?”
“Like . . . historically? Or . . . ?”
