He's Come Undone: A Romance Anthology Read online

  He’s Come Undone

  A Romance Anthology

  Emma Barry

  Olivia Dade

  Adriana Herrera

  Ruby Lang

  Cat Sebastian

  Contents

  Emma Barry

  Appassionata

  Olivia Dade

  Unraveled

  Adriana Herrera

  Caught Looking

  Ruby Lang

  Yes, And…

  Cat Sebastian

  Tommy Cabot Was Here

  Appassionata

  Emma Barry

  To Miss Mac, who taught me music should feed your soul and an on-pitch ooooo will be cool.

  Piano technician Brennan Connelly lives to control details: the tension on a piano string or the compression of hammer felt. But he’s never faced demands like those heaped on him by Kristy Kwong, the diva who’s haunted his dreams for two decades. Kristy’s got her own secrets—the debilitating stage fright that’s kept her from performing publicly for years to start—and this concert is the last chance to save her career. But can he locate her lost passion without losing his precious control?

  * * *

  Content Warnings: on-page sex and alcohol use; profanity; on-page anxiety, depression, and stage fright.

  Chapter 1

  Staccato

  As Kristy Kwong flew through her favorite warm up—Hanon’s exercise no. 50—she wasn’t thinking about the fingering, the dynamics, or the decision she had to make between the three pianos on the stage of Boston Symphony Hall.

  Her only goal was not to vomit.

  It was the whole touching an instrument thing, to start. Piano keyboards had once been a checkerboard path down which she’d tripped fearlessly. Now, they were a field of scree without safe passage. Every note, every step, felt wrong. Not just wrong, dangerous. Kristy was going to play this concert in a few weeks, she had to, but her career was as likely to tumble into a ravine as to reach the summit.

  That was the second problem: She sounded like shit.

  Two years ago, the force of her trills would’ve marshaled the audience’s heartbeats to an identical driving rhythm. Or, if Kristy preferred, the tone might’ve been delicately plaintive, a filigree of notes and emotion that had made presidents and kings weep.

  Then, Kristy’s ability to weave sound had been absolute. She could make it cloying, boisterous, sensual, brooding, magisterial. The score itself wouldn’t have mattered; the color she’d brought had been everything. At least until it went to grayscale.

  Okay, she might actually puke.

  She struck the final chord and then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “What do you think?” a voice called from out in the auditorium. That would be Brennan Connelly, the orchestra’s resident piano technician.

  Because Kristy was still jumpy about playing in front of, you know, people, she’d specified he be the only person in the room until she’d chosen an instrument and he’d adjusted it for her. She’d known Brennan casually for twenty years. He was amazing at what he did, and he was as steady as bedrock. That had been enough for her to capriciously accept this gig.

  But even though Brennan and Kristy were the only people in the hall, Kristy’s agent and her assistant were waiting in the symphony director’s office because Kristy did have appearances to keep up. Divas couldn’t go anywhere unaccompanied. They were like Regency debutantes in that regard.

  “Not sure yet.” Kristy’s voice sounded even, a minor miracle. She picked up a bottle of water and took a sip, but it couldn’t erase the taste of bile from her mouth.

  “I could have them bring up the other Steinway,” Brennan said.

  “No.” She didn’t need any grips to witness this, and she definitely didn’t need another piano. Lack of selection wasn’t her problem. “I’m going to…” She had no idea how to finish that sentence.

  She had to play the symphony’s gala, and not merely because she’d signed a contract to do so. She’d broken those like she’d broken hearts back before she’d learned to be scared. No, she had to do this now because people had stopped mentioning Kristy in those “whatever happened to so-and-so” articles. It turned out there was something worse than how disappointing people had found her recording of Ernst von Dohnanyi’s first piano concerto: people not talking about her at all.

  Silence was death. If Kristy didn’t find her voice again, she was going to disappear under the sands of time. No resurrection. No redemption.

  Bitterness rose in her throat, and she took another hasty sip of water. Kristy’s therapist would tell her she had to find something positive with which to replace this spiral of negative thoughts, except she didn’t have anything positive.

  Mozart. She still had Mozart.

  She set the bottle down and started in on his variations on a French folk song. Whatever, it was “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” This had been the first serious piece she’d learned as a child, the piece that had made her want to be a concert pianist. Cascading arpeggios dissolving into a series of triplets. Wolfgang never used a single note when he could use three. He was gold and ivory, brocade and frescos.

  But at the end of every turn in the music, sneering doubt lurked.

  You can’t do this.

  You only managed to string together a career because you’re pretty.

  You ought to quit for good now before you embarrass yourself, spectacularly and publicly.

  Her inner asshole had always been there, just below the surface. Was anyone absolutely sure of themselves? Maybe Emanuel Ax, but he was it. Everyone else was a hair’s breadth away from losing their confidence. In Kristy’s case, all it had taken was a few squidgy performances and some bad reviews, and suddenly the asshole in her brain wouldn’t stop caterwauling.

  Kristy should’ve been more resilient. Of all the things she’d learned to hate about herself, how thin-skinned she’d turned out to be topped the list. She simply hadn’t been able to shake off those mistakes. How could she now that she knew the exact taste of failure?

  Even Mozart couldn’t help. Midmeasure, Kristy lifted her hands from the keys and pressed them to her eyelids.

  Out in the theater, Brennan cleared his throat. “Do you want me to—”

  “No.” She hadn’t intended to snap at him. Nor did she apologize. She’d learned long ago not to. If people called her difficult, well, that was just a sign of respect. She’d rather be known as prickly than a doormat.

  She gave her hands a well-practiced shake and tried to play off her abrupt stop as intentional. “I’m done warming up. I’m going to try the real piece now.”

  After all, she wasn’t going to be crisp and light and Classical in this performance. No, she needed a cleaver of sound: overheated and Bavarian and Romantic. She needed to rip off the bandage and see if this instrument was the one. If it had enough color for the Schubert and the Brahms—if she had enough color for them.

  Her heart walloped against her ribs, her breath was a scythe in her throat, then...

  She tore into the hardest section of the Schubert: a hailstorm of notes immediately before the third movement. She should’ve been pushing the instrument to its limit. The vibration from the piano’s harp should’ve been resonating up the strings, into the hammers, through the keys, and into her body.

  And it wasn’t. There wasn’t a single pulse-altering tremor. She was playing the Wanderer Fantasy, but she wasn’t performing it.

  See, her doubts said. You’re an absolute fraud.

  She lifted her hands from the keyboard, but that w
asn’t enough. She stumbled up, needing the weight of her feet on the ground. Those are all lies. You’ve worked toward this for thirty years. You just need to get through this performance, and you’ll see everything is fine. You can do this. You were born to do this.

  But while she might repeat those words over and over, they were a staged home; she couldn’t live there. Besides, when you suspected deep down that you were a worthless hack, calculating the hours of effort you’d put in was actually the opposite of comforting.

  Out in the seating area, Brennan cleared his throat again. Because she was freaking out in front of him.

  Terrific. Just what she needed on top of the massive crisis of confidence and identity.

  She flipped her hair over her shoulder, thanked God for her resting bitch face, and tried to make this seem like part of her plan. Her plan to suck, apparently.

  “Well, we have some work to do, don’t we?”

  That, she directed at both of them.

  Penseroso

  Kristy Kwong was still beautiful.

  Two decades after they’d been aspiring teenage pianists, she could make Brennan Connelly breathless with a single shake of her pretty head or a roll of her expressive eyes.

  She’d made it, he hadn’t, but he’d always followed her career. That had made it easier to study for this moment. To spend considerable time with her catalog, which held a place of honor in his alphabetized CD collection—the sound quality was so much better than digital—in order to inoculate himself.

  As he’d flipped from one album to the next, he’d paid particular attention to the lush photo spreads of her that would often gratuitously appear in the album notes. Kristy in some ridiculous getup, Wellingtons and a satin ball gown, outside a studio looking pensive. Kristy reclining next to a soundboard, listening to master tapes with a Mona Lisa smile on her face. And always, always Kristy’s hands: stretched across the keyboard, holding a rolled up sheaf of music, twisted in her glossy hair, or clutching a bouquet of scarlet roses.

  A steady regime of still photographs, however, hadn’t prepared him for the real thing. He walked down the aisle of the symphony hall and climbed the steps to join the flesh and blood woman who was insulting his pianos.

  Brennan prided himself on his reserve. He was an instrument, not an artist. Long ago he’d made peace with that. And instruments didn’t get to feel. He voiced the piano to someone else’s specifications, someone who didn’t need to know that middle C should resonate at 261.6 Hz. That part, the mere calibration, was his job. Feeling was someone else’s.

  Except Kristy simply shooting him a cocky grin had him trembling so hard, he wasn’t certain he would be able to do what he needed to.

  “What’s the matter?” Kristy tipped her head to the side, and that glorious hair of hers rippled like a cascade in the Berkshires. “Cat got your tongue?”

  No, you do. But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, say that to her. When #MeToo had thrown open the doors to the concert hall and taken down some of the conductors, soloists, and donors Brennan had known his entire career, he hadn’t been in the least surprised. So many men in classical music were arrogant asses.

  Brennan’s entire goal had been to make himself in their mirror image. When they moved right, he jerked hard to the left. He’d always behaved scrupulously, both because it was correct and also because it was professional. Without decency, a code of conduct, civilization would crumble.

  He couldn’t imagine how much sexism Kristy had probably put up with in her career. She was female, she was talented, she was successful, and she was beautiful: Most men couldn’t handle that combination. Exactly as he’d kept his distance from her when they were fifteen, he’d never do anything now that might make her uncomfortable.

  But even if they’d met as old friends—setting aside that they hadn’t truly been friends—and she’d… flirted with him, he still wouldn’t have said it.

  He couldn’t banter. Couldn’t match wits. Couldn’t parley. It was simply beyond him.

  So he gave a tight shake of his head and asked instead, “What are you looking for?” Giving her the tone she sought was as much as he might offer her.

  When she’d been giving the pianos a try a few minutes prior, the sound had been incongruous. It wasn’t what you expected to hear coming out of an instrument Kristy Kwong was playing. It hadn’t sounded bad as much as constrained. It was not the almost wild display for which she was famous.

  He’d heard the rumors about why she’d taken time off, everyone had: She’d had a nervous breakdown and flamed out, and she was never coming back. But Brennan hadn’t believed the whispers. Maybe because it was too depressing to imagine someone with as much talent as she had unable to perform.

  Now that he’d seen and heard her, he was, frankly, worried.

  Even the symphony director, Bernadette Wolcott, had asked him to make a report. “You know, just let me know if you think she’s up to it.”

  “What?” he’d asked. “If you don’t think Ms. Kwong is prepared for this concert, shouldn’t you assess her?” That was Bernadette’s job, after all. He just took care of the pianos.

  Bernadette had waved this suggestion off. “I know she’s prepared. I mean…I want to know if you think she’s emotionally ready. Stable. You’re the only one she wants in the room.”

  He’d been so shocked, he hadn’t given his assent or refusal. Evaluate Kristy Kwong’s emotions? He could never.

  Across the stage, Kristy appeared to be perfectly in control of her humor, and that was good enough for him. Whatever stiffness he’d heard in her playing this morning was doubtless because she’d been warming up.

  With regard to his question, Kristy took a deep breath, opened her mouth, and…closed it again.

  Pianists weren’t always able to clearly explain their goals, he knew. Their relationship with the instrument was different from his, so he was used to coaxing, cajoling, and reading between the lines. He didn’t like doing it, but he often had to in order to get them the sound they wanted.

  “Was the tone too bright?” he prompted. “Too mellow? Bell-like? Growly?” It couldn’t be all of those things as they were contradictory, but he hoped one of those suggestions could be a springboard for Kristy.

  A long pause ensued, and then at last Kristy said, “More color. It needs more color.”

  Her voice was almost as small as her playing had been. The Kristy he’d known was never, ever tentative, and something inside his chest splintered at hearing it from her now.

  What had happened?

  Rather than ask, he only nodded, trying to encourage her. Needing, frankly, to do so. Needing her to be as he remembered.

  She gave a sad shrug. “The sound needs to be big enough, loose enough, to seem reckless but not so much so that I spin out.”

  The sound needed to be, or she needed to be? Because none of the passion he associated with her playing had been in her performances today.

  “Right now, it’s too…” She gestured, sketching something in the air that doubtless was exactly what she wanted but that he couldn’t decipher. “Do you see?”

  He didn’t. Not at all. But he wanted to.

  His envy of virtuosity—it made him feel like an ass. He clung to rules, to politeness, partially because he didn’t want his jealousy to show. Brennan had mostly left the pain over not being among such a group in the past, but when Kristy gave him the smallest glimpse into the ineffable cave of her artistry, he burned that he couldn’t follow her there. He was forever the kid with his nose pressed up against the candy shop window.

  Knowing none of this, she tried to explain again. “The tone, it’s like a stick pin right now.”

  “A pin?” he echoed. There was nothing pin-like about any of these pianos, which were all extraordinary instruments that had been played by the world’s top talents with one of the most accomplished symphony orchestras in the country—and he shouldn’t be taking this so personally. He was going to make a few changes and she’d relax and then
, then she’d play how she needed to.

  He tried another tack. “Can you…that is, will you, show me?”

  “Show you?”

  “At the bench. Play something that manifests the sound you want.” Because clearly they both agreed her earlier efforts hadn’t.

  She sat and glared at the keyboard. She set her hands on it—and then moved them back to her lap. Her breaths were coming fast now, her chest bobbing with them. She glanced at him and then back at the instrument.

  She was terrified, and her fear was an icy blow to his stomach.

  How? What? Was it his proximity? “Do you want me to sit in the house?” Maybe if he went out into the audience she’d feel better. “Or I could stand in the wings?” He sounded as desperate as he felt.

  If he had to, he couldn’t have explained why—not even hand gestures would help him—but he wanted her to be as remarkable as he knew she could be.

  “No, I can do it,” she ground out.

  He wasn’t certain she could, however, and a soup of feelings stewed in his gut. Sadness that something had shaken Kristy, since she should never be anything less than a tower of strength. Frustration that anything or anyone might’ve hurt her. Grief for the music she might not play. Fear because what on earth was he going to tell Bernadette? Hell, was Kristy capable of doing the gala?

  He simply didn’t know.

  And even worse, he suspected Kristy didn’t either.

  He shouldn’t feel this much about this situation. He’d known her a long time, and he was a…a fan. But this was his profession. This situation was precisely why he was devoted to his ethos. Could he help her? That was all that mattered.

  Then softly, hesitantly, Kristy began to play. Not the devilishly hard Schubert or Brahms pieces she’d scheduled for the gala, but an elegy by Rachmaninov.