But I hadn’t thought I was at Naoki levels just yet.
What makes you think you don’t deserve this, too?My father had asked.
I could think of a lot of reasons. But that wasn’t productive.What would be the point, anyway? Make myself feel worse? Kneecap my own confidence?
It doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s not like I plan to email Ruoxi Zhang, the artistic director at the Phil, and decline the invitation with a list of my failures appended as an attachment.
What I want is to be good enough that I really, trulydodeserveit.
My foot is starting to fall asleep again. I wiggle my toes in my favorite fuzzy sock, trying to focus on the feeling of the warm fabric against my skin. Who knows how long I’ll get to feel that? How long I have until I lose sensation there entirely? Not before Stockholm, I know that much. But the neurologist said that the progression of multiple sclerosis could be variable. That we’ll figure out if my MS is progressive or more of the relapsing-remitting type over time. I basically have to wait to discover exactly what flavor of disability I’ll have for the rest of my life.
Fuck this. I can’t lie around feeling sorry for myself; I have a competition to prepare for. And—as someone wrote on the Reddit multiple sclerosis sub—worrying about the future won’t make the future suck any less when it happens. It just means you’ll have spent that much more time being miserable.
I stop by Jamie’s room on the way. His door is open, but I still knock twice on the frame, getting his attention.
“Hey,” I say. “I was going to go practice. I was wondering if you might be willing to listen and give me some feedback?”
He lets the book in his lap fall shut, not even bothering to mark the page. “Is there food?”
I snort. “What are you, fourteen years old? I mean, sure, you can help yourself in the kitchen. You don’t need me for that.”
“Great. I’m in.”
He assembles himself a bowl of cereal—I wrinkle my nose just because it’s such a stereotypicalguysnack—and then joins me inthe living room, where I’ve already settled on the piano bench, flipping through my sheet music.
A part of me—a pretty large part of me—knows that I need to tell him about the Phil thing. The longer I put it off, the worse it’s going to get.
And yet I can’t open my mouth and have those words fall out. Jamie seems so…happy right now. I can’t bring myself to yank the rug out from under his feet.
So instead, I play.
As usual, Jamie is fabulous at giving criticism. A little too fabulous sometimes—it’s like he has no bluntness filter that tells himHey, okay, maybe this one is a little too harsh.At this point, I’m about…90 percent certain he doesn’t mean to be insulting? Hard not to block out that part of me that didn’t know that before, though. The version of me that took everything he said and invented all kinds of cruel motives behind his words, and despised him for it.
But eventually, even I break.
“Ugh,” I moan, dropping my head over the keyboard. “It’s hopeless. I’m only going to humiliate myself at Stockholm. Maybe I should drop out now and save us all the drama.”
“Don’t even joke like that,” he says.
“Make me.”
“I wouldn’t challenge me if I were you. I would most definitely make you.”
I am suddenly filled with images of Jamie pushing me down on that bench and straddling me, keeping me firmly in place as he silences my mouth with his own.
Good thing my head is already down so he can’t see the look on my face.
“Let’s do something a little more low-key,” he says. “Like…just play something for fun. Not a Stockholm piece, not some stupid étude series. Just basic no-strings-attached fun.”
I arch a brow at him and play the first few crashing chords of thePhantom of the Operaoverture.
A grin spreads across his beautiful face. “Oh, okay, I see what you’re putting down. But can you mash upPhantomwith some good old Johann Sebastian Bach?”
“You intrigue me.”
“Think about it,” he says. “The staccato Bach. The ‘Angel of Music.’ It would be kind of perfect.”
I turn toward the piano, trying to pick out a melody that fits. A little easier said than done, composing a mashup on the fly—I glance over at Jamie again. “I have a better idea. Get over here and do it with me. You take the Bach.”
