At that moment, someone opened the door from the outside and I went stumbling backwards—right off the edge of the top step. Dragged down by the cello’s weight, I fell with a surprisingly loud scream, my head heading for the sidewalk—
I snapped to a halt, the cello case pressing hard into my back. I was lying in mid air, face up, feet skittering at the top step. Almost all of my weight was held by one shoulder strap, stretched out in front of me and anchored by….
I followed the strap with my eyes. A fist, grabbing the nylon. A strong wrist, skin almost as pale as mine. A cracked leather jacket. I got all the way to the shoulder and his tight, powerful frame before it clicked.
Oh no…..
I looked up into his face. Blue-gray eyes, like a lazy summer’s day that’s darkening into a storm. Hair cut short and messy, glossy black against his pale skin. And the lips—those soft, full lips that had been the downfall of so many Fenbrook girls in downtown rock clubs or at drug-fueled parties. Even now, they were twisting into a smirk.
Connor Locke.
“I seem to have you helpless,” he told me, and his broad Belfast accent made it sound at once both innocent and absolutely filthy. The actors who’d been coming to help reached the doorway and stopped there, smiling.
“Would you like me to lay you down on your back?” he asked, at least partially for their benefit. “Or should I pull you up against me?”
I closed my eyes, feeling myself flushing even more than before. When I opened them, he was still holding me up. It felt like he could have held me there all day, if he’d wanted to.
“Up,” I said quietly, and he hauled me slowly upwards. As promised, he didn’t step out of the way, so that when I had my footing again on the top step I was right up against him, our faces inches apart. He was wearing some scent that made me think of big, cold skies and icy rocks.
He raised his eyebrows at me mockingly and we just stood there for a moment, close as lovers, while I gasped with the aftershock of fear, my face burning with embarrassment. I couldn’t meet his eyes, so I stared fixedly at the blood red t-shirt he wore. Black serpents, twisting over the broad curves of his chest.
“Thank you.” The words a hot rush between gritted teeth. Then I pulled the door wide and stumbled inside before I could get caught again. His chuckles followed me up the stairs.
***
At Fenbrook academy, dancers, actors and musicians are all mixed together. Natasha, a dancer I know, is fond of the college analogy. The dancers are the jocks, the actors are the cool kids and the musicians are the geeks.
I prefer my Lord of the Rings analogy. The dancers are clearly the elves. Up on the third floor with its huge windows and natural light, they jump and glide like otherworldly beings, all sensual and untouchable.
Down on the first floor, close to the action of the city, the actors are obviously the humans. Hot-blooded. Unpredictable. They command the attention of everyone else—deep down, we all want to be movie stars.
And the musicians? Crammed between the other two in a floor that’s a rabbit warren of twisting corridors and tiny practice rooms, we’re the dwarves. We just want to be left alone with our craft.
Connor was the exception. He was a human living amongst the dwarves, causing chaos.
Fenbrook had only been taking non-classical music students for about five years and—like me—Connor was in his senior year, though he was a few years older. The idea was still scandalous when he started; I can almost hear the music faculty discussing it in shocked tones. “Amplified music, you say? An electric guitar? At Fenbrook?!”
His talent wasn’t in doubt—pretty much everything else was, but not that. I hadn’t really heard him play, because the handful of non-classical musicians didn’t really mix with the rest of us, but supposedly he was the next Hendrix. They’d given him an audition and a return plane ticket from Belfast to New York just on the strength of his CD, and once they heard him play it was apparently a no-brainer. Where I’d had to sweat and practice for months just to land an audition for my Boston college, then do it all again for Fenbrook, he’d just dropped a CD in the mail, strummed a few bars and he was in.
What made it especially galling was that, now that he was here, he treated the place as little more than a convenient supply of impressionable dancers and actresses to hook up with. He’d show up for lectures late or not at all. Once, I was pretty sure he was still drunk from the night before. There were rumblings about him being kicked out but, from what I could see, he was still behaving exactly as he had in his freshman year. For Connor, Fenbrook was one big party.
For me, it felt like life and death.