Page 88 of Solo

She nods into my chest without looking up at me.

“Did he hurt you?”

I struggle to keep my voice even as I ask that question. She shakes her head no and snakes her arms around my waist to pull me closer. I rest my chin on top of her head.

“It’s okay, Katherine. It’s going to be okay.”

When she finally looks up, her eyes are glittering with the tears she’s fighting back.

“He ripped my new coat,” she says in a miserable whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

I smile and kiss her forehead.

“Not to worry. We’ll get you another one. And we’ll add Destruction of Property to the charges against the asshole.”

This makes her smile, too.

“I see you packed a bag this time. Does that mean you don’t want to sleep in my shirt?”

A hint of pink colors her cheeks.

“Funny,” she says, “I seem to have forgotten to pack my pajamas…”

…

The fire is warm, the pillow is soft, and the music of Bach is filling my dreams. But somewhere from deep inside my slumber is the nagging sense in the back of my mind that I need to get up and check on Katherine. My eyes flutter open and I’m peering into the familiar glow of my fireplace. I’m wide awake now, I’m certain of it. And yet, somehow, the Bach from my dreams has spilled over into my reality.

Because I’m not dreaming it, I realize suddenly. I get off the couch where I seem to recall being with Katherine before we both passed out from exhaustion. When I turn around, I see her. But she doesn’t seem to notice me as I move slowly in Bach’s direction until I’m standing behind Katherine as she plays the piano. I don’t let on that I’m there, I just stand in silence, in the shadows, where I can see her hands on the keyboard.

There’s a famous scene in the old movie, The Miracle Worker in which teacher Anne Sullivan tries, with unrelenting persistence, to reach into the dark, silent world of Helen Keller. In one iconic scene, Anne spells the word “water,” with her fingers, into Helen’s hand. As she does this, she puts Helen’s hand under the water, trying to get her to make the connection between it and the word being spelled into her hand over and over again. Those five letters cause an epiphany, an instant of understanding so explosive that it blows a hole through the previously-impenetrable wall of darkness and silence, bringing color to Helen’s blind eyes and music to Helen’s deaf ears.

As I stand here my mind recalls this image so clearly, with such potency, that it nearly knocks me off my feet. And I watch. Katherine is seated on the bench, eyes closed and head tilted back rapturously. The fingers of her left hand walk the easy distance between the bass notes while, on the right, they actually spell out a trill, a line, a slowly unraveling melody. Her wrists arch slightly, delicately as she lifts and relocates them again and again. The gentle motion across the octaves belies the strength and commitment of her fingers as they spell out the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations from memory.

In a single, earth-shattering beat, it’s as if my world explodes, suddenly filled with the richest of sounds and the most vibrant of colors. Katherine Brenner has broken through a wall I hadn’t even realized I’d erected. When her hands come to rest at the end of the Aria, she stops. As if sensing my gaze upon her, she opens her eyes to find me shocked and dazzled all at once.

I see the puzzlement in her eyes and she opens her mouth to speak, but I am sitting beside her on the bench before the words can slip free. Before I can stop myself from putting her face in my hands and drawing her lips to mine. She doesn’t fight me. Instead, her arms wrap under my arms and up my back to my shoulders, pulling my chest so close to hers that I can feel her heart beating underneath the white cotton shirt that she’s wearing. My shirt.

She tastes soft and sweet, her mouth opening hungrily to mine. I hear a soft whimper from her and I pull back just enough to get a good look at her face. Her eyes are half closed, her lips cherry red and glistening from our contact.

“Do you…do you want me to stop?” I ask in a whisper.

She shakes her head. “No. Please, don’t,” she says, leaning forward to find my lips again. I don’t make her lean too far, pressing myself down to her while I reach behind and pull her closer.

Before I know what I’m doing, I’m on my feet and taking her with me. We’re stuck together in a tangled, stumbling embrace as we somehow move from one end of the large room to the other. I grunt when my hip hits the sharp edge of an end table, and her wayward elbow knocks over a book that’s balancing on the edge of a shelf.

“Oh, to hell with this,” I mutter, suddenly bending down and scooping her up in my arms, the same way that I did when I carried her in from her car. But this time she’s not fighting me. This time, she throws her head back and kicks her feet in joy.

…

“This is SO not how I imagined this night would turn out,” I grumble while I search the closet for the comforter. I find it on the top shelf, all tucked away in its zip-up bag, where my mother put it on their visit last year.

“Hey, I love to be swept off my feet and carried up to bed as much as the next girl, but we’ve got to stick to the plan. See, not so much work,” she adds, as we each take a side of the blue-and-white striped cover and snap it up into the air so it wafts down into place on the bed.

“I know it wasn’t much work. I was just saying it would have been a lot less work if you’d sleep in my bed instead of in here,” I reply grumpily.

Katherine stops and puts her hands on her incredibly sexy hips.

“Hey,” she clucks at me. “What did I just say? You know the rules, Dr. Markham. No more hanky-panky till I’ve got that diploma in my hot little hand.”