Chapter 4
1494 Words
The note was folded in half, and on the outside was her stage name written in handwriting she didn't recognize.
Rosie.
The stagehand gave it to her as she walked towards the dressing room, acting as though it was no big deal. She took it the same way. She placed it on the dressing table, put on her costume, fastened her mask, went out to do her first set, came back, sat down in front of the mirror, and then opened it.
You move like you were taught that the stage was the only safe place in the world.
It feels like watching someone finally breathe. — F
She read it twice and put it face down.
She did her second set and thought about it the entire time.
She had known about Flynn Ashby for months before she even realized he was a real person.
He played piano on the small stage off the main floor four nights a week, and the way he played made you stop whatever you were doing, without even thinking about it.
Just like real music used to be honest, it spoke the truth and let you stay with it. She had noticed it the way you noticed the weather, without particularly thinking about the thing making it happen.
One night, after she finished her performance, she was walking off stage when he was standing in the back corridor. He said, "That was remarkable," and she replied, "Thank you" and continued walking.
He said it the next time she performed. And the time after that.
Not more than that. Not an introduction, not a question, not an attempt at anything. Just the brief honest thing and then he stepped aside to let her through. She kept walking every time.
She slowed down somewhere around the third week without making the decision to.
The night she stopped completely, she wasn't planning to. She had come off a difficult set, her left knee giving her trouble, a slight favouring she couldn't entirely correct, and she stopped in the corridor because she needed a moment and not because she wanted company.
Flynn was leaning against the wall, with his hands tucked into his pockets.
He said, "You were compensating in the last sequence," he said. "Left side."
She turned and looked at him.
"Not badly," he said quickly. "If you didn't know what to look for you wouldn't have seen it. But I was watching the footwork and…" He stopped. "Sorry. I'll let you go."
"How do you know what to look for?"
He considered this. "Rhythm is rhythm. Whether it's keys or feet, I can tell when someone's working around something instead of through it." He looked at her evenly. "Are you hurt?"
“No”
"Okay."
She finally looked at him properly for the first time. Tall, loose-limbed, brown skin, warm eyes. Ink on his fingers, just like musicians always seemed to have. He was staring at her the way people stare at things they are really interested in.
"I'm Flynn," he said.
"I know." Everyone who had worked at The Red Curtain knew Flynn. The man moved smoothly through all the corridors without causing any friction, which was a rare quality in a place where unspoken politics typically dictated interactions.
"You're Rosie."
"I know that too."
He almost smiled. "I'll let you go," he said again, and stepped aside.
She walked past him.
She moved more slowly than her normal pace.
The note made sense after that. The content was exactly what she would have expected from him; genuine, thoughtful, and not asking for anything at all. She picked it up after her second set and read it again.
It feels like watching someone finally breathe.
She folded it and put it in the inside pocket of her street coat and told herself she wasn't going to think about what that meant.
The night was cold and clear, and the streets between The Red Curtain and her apartment were quiet in a way that felt real, just calm and still. She knew this walk. She knew which lamp was out on the corner of Vell Street and which alley to avoid near the river, and where the cobblestones were loose enough to catch a heel in the dark.
She was four blocks away from her house when she turned into Maren Road and came to a stop.
Two wolves.
Not ones she recognised. They were standing on opposite sides of the road in a way that wasn't really standing. They had their weight forward, and the space between them was measured and meant to be that way. They were not looking at each other. They were looking in the same direction, at something that hadn't arrived yet, and the quality of their attention was the kind that preceded violence the way specific pressure preceded rain.
She was right in between them and whatever they were waiting for.
She did not move.
She knew, from years of living in Velmoor, that stepping into this specific situation would be the worst choice available. Moving backward quietly was its second-worst. She didn't leave any good options by stepping onto this road without checking it first.
She stood still, breathed and thought.
"Don't move."
The voice came from directly behind her. Low and even. Not touching her.
She absorbed it into the body first and the brain after.
She knew the voice.
"I wasn't planning to," she said, at the same volume.
Damien Voss stepped up to her left shoulder.. Not touching, but she felt the warmth of him in the cold air the way you felt a wall blocking wind.
The two wolves on the road both looked up.
They were looking at him now.
Something stirred in them; not exactly fear, but something very similar. Two people who were figuring out the same chances suddenly find themselves having to adjust their calculations because the odds changed unexpectedly. "Walk with me," Damien said softly to her. "At the same pace you were walking." Straight ahead."
She walked.
He walked beside her just a little behind her left shoulder, close enough that someone watching could easily see the position without needing an explanation. She could hear him breathing. She didn't look back at the wolves.
She didn't need to. She felt the road behind her change as it was left behind. The particular loosening of the air that signaled the thing that was about to happen had been put off.
They walked in silence for two blocks. Then three.
The streets widened, the lamps became more frequent, and the noise of the city started to return, creeping back in from the sides. She got to the corner of Vell Street — the lamp was still not working as she had expected and she stopped.
She turned around.
Damien stopped when she stopped. Hands in his coat pockets. His face doing the neutral thing it usually did, but there was something at the back of those amber eyes she didn't have a word for yet.
"How long have you been following me?" she asked.
"Long enough."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he agreed.
She looked at him in the dark. This man had been sitting in her section, knew about Rosie and had used it like a coin he wasn't spending yet. Who had just walked her through two wolves on a dark road, like it was something he did all the time.
"Why?" she said.
He looked at her for a moment. The street was quiet.
"Go home, Lena," he said.
He turned around and walked back the way they had come, his hands still in his pockets, his coat dark against the lamplight, and he disappeared around the corner before she had even decided what she wanted to say to him.
She stood on the corner of Vell Street in the dark for longer than made sense.
Then she went home.
She made tea she didn't drink and sat down. She took Flynn's note out of her coat pocket and set it on the table, then looked at it.
It feels like watching someone finally breathe.
She thought about Damien Voss at her left shoulder on a dark road, saying walk with me in a voice that assumed she would and was right.
She thought about the way the two wolves had looked at him and recalculated.
She thought about the fact that she had not asked him to be there. That he had been there anyway. That “ Go home, Lena” was not an answer to the question she asked and he knew it and said it anyway and walked away.
She folded Flynn's note and put it back in her pocket.
She went to bed.
She was in the dark, looking at the ceiling, and wondered what it meant that Damien Voss knew the roads she took to get home at night.
And whether he had always known.
- Writer
