I felt the downward rush of grief, still so fresh, still so raw. I was starting to expect it now. But what I didn't expect was the rush of warmth that came with it. "You stepped in?" I asked, and my voice sounded thick and unfamiliar in my ears.
She nodded, her dark eyes bright.
The seven billion children onstage watching us were the only reason I didn't close the space between us and kiss her with all I had. How had I missed who she was all these years? How had she slipped past me?
Because you weren't here, a voice in my head reminded me.
I cleared my throat. "Thank you," I told her. And I meant it.
She blinked and then smiled slowly. "Thank you for coming to help," she said in return. And it sounded like she meant it too.
"So what am I doing?"
She turned and addressed the kids. "Mr. King just needs to practice a little bit before he starts helping. So let's all put on our listening ears and be very quiet while he plays the piano for us." She spread out the handwritten sheet music and gestured for me to sit down at the piano.
I looked at it, and then looked again. "Did...?" I started to say before my words got choked with emotion. "Did Gid write this?"
She nodded.
Taking a deep breath, I sat down at the bench.
Gid and I had played together since I was old enough to hold a guitar. I'd heard his music all my life, but I'd never played it until this moment. My fingers felt clumsy and thick. I could feel Ruby's eyes on me, watching and waiting for me to do what I supposedly did best.
I took a breath and summoned all the years of stuffing down nervousness, fighting back the stage fright.
And I played.
Gid's music flowed from my fingertips and the more I played the more I wanted to play. Each note was a connection with his memory, each phrase a part of him that still existed in my world. The closer I got to the end, the slower I played, not wanting it to be over, but then it was over, way too fast and something was tickling my cheek and I looked up to see that Ruby was quietly brushing the tear away from my face before she brushed them off her own. "I've heard it already," she murmured, low so the kids couldn't hear. "But I didn't cry until now." She dabbed at her eyes and laughed. "That's insane right?"
I took a deep breath. "Sounds totally sane to me, but then I've never been a good judge of sanity," I told her, making her laugh again. I looked back at the music I had just played. "Wow, this piece is incredible. Nice hook, too." I looked back at Ruby. "He really wrote this for kids to sing?"
"Gid was never one for censoring his genius," Ruby said with an eyeroll.
I burst out laughing and it felt fucking good. She grinned back at me and turned to her kids, lining them up in rows to do warm-ups. At her direction, I played the scales, then the first bars of the opening number before turning them loose a cappella.
And all around me was Gid's music. Coming from the instruments, coming from the kids' mouths.
Ruby had stepped in to make sure that this music was heard. That thought was like a bubble, filling my chest, squeezing my heart and making it difficult to breath.
When the first parents showed up to collect their kids, I couldn't take it anymore. "Come here," I told Ruby, reaching out and grabbing her arm.
She looked down at where we were connected. I brushed the pad of my thumb over the delicate bone of her wrist and she pinkened. "Come where?" she asked.
"With me."
"Where are we going?" she asked as I led her away from the piano.
"Right here," I said once we were in the shadows backstage. I pulled her flush against me.
"Jonah...what - ?"
"You're amazing," I interrupted her.
Her eyes somehow got even bigger. "What?"
"What you're doing? What you've done?" I cupped her face in my hands, tilting her so I could look her in the eyes when I said. "You're amazing and I don't know why it took me so long to realize it, but I know it for certain now." And then just so she was certain too, just in case my words didn't mean what I meant them to mean, I kissed her.
This time there was no testing. This time I went in, meaning to mark her. To sear her mouth with mine and make her feel all the awe and wonder she'd made me feel from the moment I'd returned to this town. To make her understand that I'd been thinking about her non-stop and now I was done thinking and ready to start doing.
I meant to brand her as mine because that was how I saw her now. Mine.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ruby
I'd come loose. The last bonds that kept me tethered to the ground - keeping him at arm's length, staying angry at him for my own protection - had come undone and I was suddenly soaring upward. I felt weightless, and then heavy, soaring and then falling as he kissed me there in the dark of the wings, just out of sight of the arriving parents.
"We should - "
"Sssh," he hushed me, dragging his thumb over my bottom lip. Somehow, even in the gloomy shadows, his eyes hadn't lost their magic. I could still see the green in the hazel, faint like the haze over newly budded willow trees in spring time.
This was so new, so unexpected that I didn't know what I was feeling at the same time I was feeling everything. He slid his hands back from my cheeks to cup them at the nape of my neck, and his fingers moved, stroking and soothing, skillful, just like I'd imagined. I tilted my head, and my hands slid up his chest to twine around his neck, and the whole time my brain was circling around and around the fact that this was Jonah, Jonah King, I was kissing right now.
"I can't believe I didn't know," he sighed, letting his lips fall to my neck, and I knew what he meant because I was feeling it too. This felt like jumping into a swimming hole just after Crown Creek thawed. The shock was almost painful and made your skin feel like it was on fire and you whooped and yelled, feeling brand new and alive.
That's what this felt like and I couldn't believe I didn't know that it would feel this way. I'd spent so much time hating him, resenting him along with his family, letting what I'd heard crowd out what I now knew.
"Ah!" I hissed as his lips found my earlobe. I was falling, spinning, spiraling, but a kind of heavy need was pulling me back down, back here with him. By the time his hand slid up from my waist, I was practically panting, and he covered my mouth with his again and kissed me a second time. I got the feeling that the first tender kiss had been for me but this punishing kiss was for him.
His fingers were at my blouse buttons now, two quick flicks had the tops of my breasts exposed. He hissed in triumph before dragging his lips across them while his fingers delved and kneaded. "Ruby," he growled then groaned into my mouth, walking me backwards until my back was up against the cinderblock wall. When his hard thigh pressed between my legs, wedging them open, I made a sound I'd never heard before, and I could feel his wicked smile curve against my lips. "Fuck," he whispered, rough and guttural, and his hand slid up my leg, testing and testing, seeing if I would stop him and when I didn't he groaned again and cupped it over that place between my legs. "So warm," he murmured against my ear as he slid his finger over the seam of my slacks.