In Harmony (Fenbrook Academy #2)(46)
Author: Helena Newbury

“What was she doing, anyway?” Connor asked. “She said she was working, but she’s dressed for a date.”

“Long story,” I told him. “And one I’m not going to tell you.” Jasmine’s brief career as an escort would stay between her and me.

“Can I take a shower, before we do anything else?” he asked. “I’m covered in oil.”

“I’m covered in oil too.” I looked at the bed. “So it doesn’t much matter.”

Connor considered. “Or…we could take a shower together.”

The bed sounded good, but that sounded even better.

Jasmine must have been able to hear us. The lounge was just down the hall from the bathroom, and even though we started out quiet, with Connor soaping my back and sliding his hands down my flanks, it soon got a lot noisier. Kneeling in front of me, the water thundering down onto his head like a warm waterfall, he had me groaning and thumping on the wall with my fist. When he f**ked me, my back braced against the wet tiles and my legs wrapped around his waist, my cries must have reached the next apartment, never mind the lounge. But when we emerged, wrapped in towels, and crept back to my room, all we could hear from the lounge was gentle snoring.

Of course, she was a very good actress.

Chapter 33

The next morning, I took Connor with me to Fenbrook to collect a few things and say my goodbyes. Technically, I could have kept going to lectures right up until the recital, but I knew I couldn’t perform without Connor, and Connor had flunked out—so what was the point?

The place was quiet, everyone either in classes or huddled in practice rooms working away at their recital pieces. Exactly where we would have been, if Ruth hadn’t screwed Connor over on the essay. I trailed my hand along the wall as we trudged down the corridor. The place had been my home for almost four years, and now—

I realized Connor wasn’t with me. He’d stopped a few paces back, staring at something on the wall. I backed up to see what it was.

It was the poster I’d pretended to read when I’d been stressing about being a virgin the day of our first real date, what seemed like a lifetime ago. The Fenbrook Improvisation Challenge! A Timed Composition for Extra Credit. “What?” I asked Connor.

He looked at me, and then looked at the poster.

Extra credit.

“Connor, they just run that for snob value. It’s for the super-elite. No one actually enters it. Certainly no one manages to do well in it!”

“Technically,” he said slowly, “we don’t have to do well in it. We just have to enter.”

I blinked. The improv challenge was held after the recitals. If Connor and I entered it, theoretically he still had a shot—however unlikely—at getting the grades he needed to graduate. And therefore they’d have to let him do the recital. And if we aced the recital, I could still graduate. Connor had come up with a sneaky, backdoor way to give me my dream back.

“We don’t even have to show up for the challenge,” he told me excitedly. “Entering just gets us back into the recital.”

I thought about it. We’d have to rehearse like hell for the recital, with Connor knowing that however well we did in it, he still wouldn’t graduate. It melted my heart that he was willing to go through all that just to give me a chance, but it would break my heart to do it.

I shook my head. “No,” I said firmly. “It’s not enough.”

“You could graduate!”

“I’m not putting you through all that if you don’t have a chance too. If we do this, we do it for real. We get you back into Fenbrook, we ace the recital and I graduate, then we ace the improv and you graduate, too.”

Connor gaped at me. “You just said it was for the ‘super-elite’. You said before it was hardcore, remember?”

I squared my shoulders. “Then we’ll just have to be hardcore. We’re in this together, or not at all.”

He stared at me for a long time. “You can be a stubborn bloody mare at times, you know.” He pulled me into a hug, my head against his chest. “Thank you.”

We went to see Harman.

***

“No,” said Harman. “Definitely not. You shouldn’t even be on Fenbrook property, Connor.”

“If he enters the improvisation challenge, he could still get the grades he needs to graduate,” I told Harman.

“Barely!” said Harman. “And he can’t enter. He’s already been kicked out.”

“Technically,” I told him, a warning note in my voice, “you shouldn’t have kicked him out. It was still possible for him to graduate—how did you know he wasn’t going to enter?”

That threw him, and he gave me a long look before finally sighing in defeat. I’d trapped him in his own rules again. “Okay,” he admitted. “We missed that one.”

“So if we sign up for the improv challenge, Connor’s back in?” I asked. “He can do the recital with me? He could still graduate?”

“If you were to ace the recital, you could still graduate,” Harman said tiredly. “I suppose in theory, if you scored top marks on the improvisation…yes, Connor could too. But—no offense—that’s a big ‘if’. No-one’s ever scored that highly in the improvisation. Certainly not with your…unusual choice of instruments. With all due respect, Karen, I admire your determination, but I’d advise you—”

I leaned over his desk, all five foot four inches of me. “With all due respect, Professor Harman…I think it’s time I started making my own decisions.”

***

We had one week to not only nail the recital, but learn how to improvise together. We needed more than just rehearsals; we were going to war.

We chose Connor’s apartment as our bunker. Ruth had packed her bags and left, destination unknown. With Jasmine crashing at my place, it made more sense to work at Connor’s—besides, his neighbors were more forgiving than mine and we weren’t going to have time to be considerate about when we practiced.

When we arrived, I eyed the space. I’d forgotten just how small it was. Rehearsing there as we had in the past was one thing, but with two of us living there we were going to be crawling over each other. And yet somehow, because it was Connor…that didn’t sound so bad.

I drew up a planner. I couldn’t find a piece of paper big enough, so I drew straight on the wall, constructing a massive grid eight feet wide and as tall as I could reach, and then filling it in. “Rehearsals are light green through dark green,” I told him. “Lightest green for the first piece, darkest green for the final piece. Improv practice is yellow.”

“You think this’ll get us there in time?” he asked.

I gave him a look. “This is what I do.”

“What’s red?”

“Mealtimes.”

“What’s blue?”

“Showers.”

“What’s pink—Oh. Really?! You even scheduled—”

“I could take it off the grid if you want,” I deadpanned. “More time for rehearsing.”

He put his hands together in prayer. “Please don’t.”

***

In the improvisation challenge, we’d be given a basic melody and would have to compose around it—in thirty minutes—and then perform what we’d composed. There’d be no time for back-and-forth and second-guessing each other. We had to function as one, despite our very different instruments.

The first time we tried it, we’d barely strung together ten bars when we ran out of time and the cello and guitar never blended. Connor was better at it than I was—he’d had years of jamming in bars. I’d spent my entire life with organization and structure.

“I can’t do it,” I told him. “I can’t not know in advance what I’m going to do. I can’t walk in there without any idea of what the music’s going to be.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and made me look at him. “If there’s one thing you’ve taught me, it’s that we can change,” he said.

And so we practiced. We found an old kitchen timer and set it at random, behind our backs. When it went off, we had to stop whatever we were doing, turn on an old, thrift-store radio and listen to the music that was playing—whether it was rap or classical or a commercial for toothpaste. And then we had thirty minutes to come up with something based on that melody that didn’t suck.

We clashed at first, wasting time by arguing. Even after all our time rehearsing together, it was difficult to get past that, to stop thinking on our own and start trusting each other to do our parts. But we ran the exercise five or six times a day and, gradually, we got slicker. After a few days, we could use every second of the thirty minutes productively, him focusing on the flowing parts that could be winged and me focusing on the ones with heavy structure that needed precision. I was the tent poles; he was the canvas.

Meanwhile, we had to get the recital nailed. Playing through it again and again was like reliving the course of our relationship: the first pair of sections, written when we hardly knew each other, both of us separate and aloof. The second pair, when I’d written him into the music and he’d written me. And then the final pair, the ones written after we’d had sex. Mine a delicate blending of our two styles, intimate but romantic; his urgent and powerful, the guitar parts hard and almost brutal as the cello wrapped itself around them—

We were usually tearing each other’s clothes off within seconds of finishing that part.

We rehearsed on the roof whenever the weather allowed it, the music floating out across the neighborhood. We’d refuel on coffee and work late into the night, and then be too wired to sleep, talking or f**king until the early hours.

Fucking. I remembered the days when I would have thought of it as him taking me. A lot of things about me had changed.

***

Midway through the week, Clarissa and Neil stopped by. I didn’t even have to ask how it was going—I could see by the way Neil stood next to her in the corridor. There was a new ease about them, a new level of intimacy beyond the sexual.

“We figured you could use these,” said Clarissa, handing me a stack of Tupperware containers. “Home cooked food. No doubt you’ve been living on pizza while you’ve been hunkered down in there.”

“Of course not,” I told her, pushing the stack of pizza boxes behind the door with my foot. I opened the top box and the lemon chicken inside didn’t just look edible—it looked amazing. “I didn’t know you cooked.”

Clarissa glanced over her shoulder at Neil. “I don’t,” she said. She leaned in and hugged me. “I don’t know what you did,” she whispered, “But thank you.”

“Are you two…okay?” I asked.

She smiled. “Early days. But I think we’re going to be.”

***

Lying in bed one night, we got to talking about our dreams. A million miles from the money of Boston and the lofty academia of Fenbrook, I finally had room to ask myself what I wanted.