My breath hitched, needy and painful spikes of pleasure originating from where he touched me, singing through my body. These sensations were unwieldy, unmanageable, and I realized it was because I believed him. I believed he was passionate about me.

“Touching you right now is meaningful for me. Tasting you, taking you now, here, would be meaningful for me.” He removed his fingers and my thighs tightened. Ignoring my reflexive protest, he lifted his hands out of the water, and then pulled my bikini straps back up my shoulders. He covered me as he said, “But it’s not going to be meaningful for you…unless you’re passionate about me.”

CHAPTER 4

The Discovery of Atomic Structure

It was past midnight and I was lying in the middle of my giant bed, staring out the skylight to the stars above.

Neither Martin nor I spoke much after we left the hot tub. I couldn’t. I guessed he sensed that I couldn’t, so he let me be.

Sam was not currently with me in my super-huge king-sized bed tonight. I saw her briefly at dinner, but then she and Eric and a few of the other guys decided to go for a moonlight swim. I’d been mostly quiet during the meal and didn’t want to go to the beach. I felt…morose.

Therefore I excused myself, ignoring Martin’s watchful glare as I left, and hid away in my gigantic suite.

Martin was right. I was analytical—overly so—and I’d been using it as a way to suppress passion. Everything could be reasoned away or made to look silly with enough rational scrutiny. Faith, love, hope, lust, anger, sadness, compassion—everything.

And that’s what I’d been doing with every feeling and emotion that was confusing or difficult to control. Except, when Martin touched me I felt a little out of control…or rather, a lot out of control. I felt unsteady, I felt uncertain, I felt…

I felt.

I rolled to my left side; instead of staring out the skylight, I stared at the wall of windows overlooking the beach.

Passion and being passionate were not bad things. Just like arsenic isn’t bad, even though it can be used to murder a person. If passion wasn’t bad, then why was the very idea of being passionate so terrifying?

I sighed, rearranged myself in the bed—again—and punched my pillow. My pillow was seriously getting on my nerves. It wasn’t reading my mind and supporting my neck like I needed. I considered breaking up with my pillow, but then decided to give it one more chance. Settling back on the mattress, this time on my right side, I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to go to sleep.

I couldn’t.

My body was sore, yes. But it wasn’t why I couldn’t sleep. I felt restless, I felt irritated, I felt dissatisfied, I felt…

I felt.

Abruptly I sat up in bed and threw the pillow across the room. I felt like it was giving me inadequate neck support and I hated it. I hated that pillow with passion.

We were never ever, ever, ever getting back together.

I tossed the covers to one side and bolted out of the gargantuan suite. Its largeness was overwhelming and I needed small. I needed safe. I wandered around the house for a bit, intent at first on a visit to the kitchen because...cookies. But at the last minute I took a right instead of a left, went up the stairs instead of down, and found myself in the room with the piano and the guitars.

I hovered at the door and stared at the piano. It was a Steinway grand and it was gorgeous - black and sleek and curvy. Moonlight spilling in through the windows gave it a shadowy, secretive appearance. I wanted to touch it. For some reason, in that moment, it felt forbidden.

It made no sense.

You’re being silly, as it’s just a piano, I thought. But then I pushed that thought away because it felt too rational. Instead I embraced the sensation of feeling. This act, coming here in the middle of the night to touch and play the piano, excited me because it felt forbidden. So I let it be something dangerous, even if in reality it wasn’t, because it made my heart beat faster and my breath quicken.

I closed the door behind me and tiptoed to the instrument. I sat on the bench, wincing when it creaked just slightly under my weight. I set my fingers on the ivory keys and closed my eyes. Inexplicably—irrationally—they felt warm to the touch, soft and smooth.

Then I played the piano.

At first I played a few songs from memory—Chopin, Beethoven, Strauss—then I bluffed my way through a jazzy version of Piano Man, by Billy Joel. Then I bluffed my way through something new, slow and morose, a composition of my own making that had no beginning and no end. It was nonsense because it was the middle, and everyone knows songs have to have a beginning and end.

My lack of adhering to common sense and established norms also felt forbidden and dangerous. It was dangerous because it was altering. Altering me. I felt myself change, shift in some fundamental way as I played entirely in the bass clef.

It was my song.

So what if it never started or ended?

So what if it was nonsense?

So what?

It was mine and its lack of rationality was seductive. I loved it. It was beautiful to me.

“Prudence,” I said to the empty room, my left hand moving unhurriedly over the keys. “Practicality, good judgment, reasonableness, rationality, realism…” Each word was punctuated with a chord in the key of B minor.

Schubert was said to regard B minor as a key expressing a quiet acceptance of fate, but I was using it now as a battle cry. My right hand joined my left to marry treble and bass, the sweet descant like cries and sighs of melancholy.

But then I realized the cries weren’t coming from the piano. They were coming from me. I was crying. I for real cried, loud and messy and angry. I gave myself over to it, and the piece became incalzando—louder, faster—and it felt good to lose control. Like a release. Like unearthing something essential, but up to this point buried.

I didn’t angry-cry for very long; my tears reached their crescendo and so did the song…and then I just couldn’t play anymore. I stopped mid stanza, folded my arms on the music rest, then buried my head and cried.

They weren’t my normal sedate tears, however. They were still messy and raw. Uncontrolled and unsteady. Restless and irritated. Dissatisfied. They were tears of passion.

Someplace, closer to the surface than I would like, a version of Kaitlyn Parker was rolling her eyes at my dramatics, wanting to point out all the ways I was being epicurean and childish.

I was able to keep her at bay because I wasn’t being childish. In fact, I was finally not being childish. I was waking up from a deep slumber, where the only two things that mattered were being smart and being safe. I was taking the first step toward leaving that behind for something infinitely frightening, for a kaleidoscope of feelings.

The hand on my shoulder made me jump and scared the bejebus out of me. I sucked in a shocked breath, but then immediately released it in a whoosh of relief when I found Martin was the owner of the hand. He was idling behind me.

I huffed another breath, my heart still beating staccato as I calmed myself. I glanced up at him and pointed out the obvious, “You scared me.”

He didn’t respond. I couldn’t see his face very well, but from what I could discern he appeared to be staring at me with something like violent absorption. It was…unnerving. I wiped tears from my cheeks and laughed a little, giving an inch into the instinct to feel silly.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” I said, shaking my head.

“Parker, you said you could play the piano.”

I nodded. “Yeah. I mean, yes. I dabble mostly.”

“Dabble?”

I pressed my lips together, liquid feelings still leaking out of my eyes. “Yes. Dabble.”

“That’s not dabbling. That’s mastery.”

I flinched at his compliment, then immediately shrugged it off. I began to rise, turn away from him. He caught me by the shoulders and turned me to face him, my bottom hitting the piano keys and making a clumsy chord.

“You are an artist.” He shook me a little as he said this, his eyes darting between mine like this—what he was saying—was of vital importance. “Why aren’t you a music major?”

I automatically scoffed and he pushed the bench to the side with a swift nudge from his knee, then stepped into my space, annihilating the distance between us. The hollow, awkward notes from where my backside still pressed against the keys created an eerie, off-tune soundtrack to what was quickly feeling like another confrontation.

“I’m pretty good, but I’m not amazing.”

His gaze searched mine again and his features twisted until they communicated that he thought I was crazy.

“Why are you lying to yourself? What kind of bullshit is this? What I just heard, that wasn’t pretty good. That was…that was spectacular. That was once in a lifetime.”

My chin wobbled, and Martin was growing blurry as new tears filled my eyes. I shook my head in denial but I couldn’t speak. I felt too raw. I felt too vulnerable.

I felt.

Martin’s eyes were devouring my face, like he was seeing me for the first time, or he was seeing a new me, and he was afraid that this vision was fleeting.

“You,” he breathed on a harsh sigh, like the word was torn from deep inside him. I watched him swallow and he appeared to be struggling, fighting against some invisible monster or tide, rising above him and preparing to wash his world away.