He's Come Undone: A Romance Anthology Read online

  The first twelve or so measures were forced, but chord by chord, Kristy gathered herself. The looseness started in her right foot, where her pedaling grew more fluid. Then it spread to her shoulders and down into her fingers. The sick flush left her cheeks, her eyelids fluttered closed, and the piano began to sing.

  Her playing wasn’t wild; no, it was deeply, deeply sad. The melody drifted over the storm of emotion in him…and pacified it. A balm of notes.

  That was the Kristy Kwong he wanted to hear—the one that everyone wanted to hear.

  Brennan took a step back and just let it all, the lovely woman, the ceaseless melancholy of the descant, sweep through him.

  Her performance wasn’t showy. No, he’d bet all the money in his wallet that this was how she played for herself. Seeing it felt illicit, like stumbling on her in the bath. He wouldn’t have been more flustered if she’d been nude because this already felt that exposed. His cheeks were burning, but he couldn’t look away.

  Then a voice came from the darkness of the wings and ruined everything.

  “Brennan? Do you have a second?” Quincy, the facilities manager, stepped onstage and held up a stack of work orders.

  The effect was instantaneous.

  Kristy’s hands leapt from the piano. The joy that had been in her face shuttered, replaced by hard rage, and her body went rigid.

  “Excuse me? This is supposed to be a closed rehearsal.” She was up off the bench, grabbing her water bottle, and flying down the stairs into the house before Brennan had processed what she’d said.

  The spell of that moment and the strange embarrassment he felt at having witnessed something so intimate, broke apart into ten thousand irreparable pieces.

  Brennan could have slugged Quincy, if he were the sort of person who slugged anyone.

  All he could do was to call after her, “Ms. Kwong, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I’ll send him away.”

  “Don’t bother.” She didn’t even slow her progress. She was every inch the icy diva of legend now. “We’ll try again tomorrow—and the stage had better be sealed.”

  The door slammed shut behind her as he called back, “Of course.”

  “Well, she seems nice,” Quincy deadpanned.

  Brennan swung around to glare at him. “You startled her. You know you aren’t supposed to be in here.”

  “I don’t see what the big deal is.”

  Which wasn’t the point. “Closed means closed. Even to you.”

  At least this had given him something to tell Bernadette. Kristy cutting the rehearsal short was the perfect excuse for not having a report—and so he had another day to evaluate, and be stunned by, Kristy Kwong.

  Chapter 2

  Più vivo

  Kristy felt almost embarrassed—almost—about the scene she’d made when she trudged across the stage the next day and found Brennan waiting for her. He sat at one of the pianos with discomfort on his face and his legs crossed in front of him.

  He was probably thinking she was a temperamental witch. Everyone did. General disapproval didn’t bother her, however; only Brennan’s specific disapproval did. But she couldn’t correct his assumptions without explaining why she’d flown off the handle or telling him that she’d been so overset by the surprise interruption that she’d thrown up in the lobby bathroom.

  The other thing that had surprised her? Meeting Brennan. The years had been kind to him. He was still slim and wearing honest to gosh suspenders, as he had back when they’d been kids, but the rise of hipster fashion had put a slightly different, slightly more attractive, spin on his preferred look. If she remembered how he dressed, though, she’d forgotten his dark brown hair, which he now wore longer on the top than the sides, and the chasms-deep brown eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

  He’d turned into quite a hottie, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to give him her fullest diva performance. She made a sweeping stop and gave Brennan what she hoped was an imperious stare.

  He acknowledged it with a grave nod. “Good morning. I’d like to apologize for yesterday.” Always formal, that was Brennan.

  When had Kristy first run into him? Two decades ago, maybe, at Tanglewood back when they’d both been teenagers. If it was in New England and it involved pianos, he’d be there, tuning lever in hand. Knowing he was here had made the Boston Symphony seem as good a place as any to jump back in the water.

  But while she liked his dark brown eyes, she didn’t like the pity in his expression. For half a minute yesterday, she’d felt like herself, had played like herself. But then she realized someone else had been listening, and her serenity had popped like a bubble. Which Brennan had seen. He had seen, she suspected, far more than she’d meant for him to.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Not the moment when her performance had been going well, but especially not the moment when it had crumbled.

  “I’d prefer not to—” Of course he would. “—but we need to.”

  “We really don’t.”

  “Believe me, all I want to discuss are the pianos, but—”

  “No buts. Just pianos. Now let’s see.” She’d had trouble yesterday explaining what she’d wanted, but she’d spent all night in her Airbnb apartment with nothing to do but process and reprocess every moment, and she had her words gathered. She knew that once they started on her selection, he’d get distracted. “Door number one won’t work at all.” She pointed at the one farthest from where he was sitting. “It has such a sweet sound.”

  From anyone else, this might be a compliment, but Kristy knew she wasn’t, could never be, sweet. She’d play the part audiences expected from today’s female pianists: She’d grow out her hair, do modelesque photo shoots, and post lots of selfies on Insta, but she couldn’t be sweet. It wasn’t in her. That hadn’t changed even as she had.

  “This is less a concert grand than a parlor grand,” she told him. If not in size, then in tone. “It just needs a lace doily and a fern. Hell, the action’s even stiff—which surprises me in one of yours.”

  He scoffed. She’d struck a blow, which of course she’d meant to do.

  “The action is not stiff,” he said.

  Well, well, well: He wasn’t trying to get her to talk about her meltdown now. She walked to the keyboard of the piano in question and hammered out a few measures of the second Brahms rhapsody. The tension in her arms limited the dynamics, but that just proved her point.

  “Johannes would retch.”

  “It sounds perfect.”

  “Pshaw,” she responded, because she was a very serious musician.

  Brennan grabbed a beat-up leather bag resting at his feet and carried it to the second piano. “Is this where you’d like to start, then?”

  “Aren’t you going to defend piano one’s honor?”

  “I’ve already said the action is fine.”

  “What happened to the customer always being right?” Not that she was a customer.

  “The touchweight on that piano is fifty-five grams. The other two are closer to fifty.”

  “You measured?”

  He adjusted his glasses with a practiced finger. “Of course.”

  Point to Brennan.

  “So no, the action isn’t stiff,” he went on. “But if that feel isn’t what you want, I certainly won’t try to convince you that it is.” He wasn’t smiling, and there was no amusement in his eyes.

  She’d probably annoyed him. She’d been enjoying this, but he’d gotten his nose out of joint. Everyone was always saying she made too many demands, was too caustic. She doubted they’d thought that about Horowitz.

  “Do you have a preference between the other two?” Brennan opened his bag and unrolled what appeared to be a plaid picnic blanket before arranging his tools on it. Some she knew the names of: a hammer, a screwdriver, a chromatic tuner, several mutes, a roll of red felt. But there were several sharp instruments she couldn’t name and a hair dryer she couldn’t begin to guess how he used.

  “Or should I
voice them both before you decide?” he asked.

  “That.” It would give her more time.

  He didn’t complain. Technicians at this level never did—not to her face—but they would roll their eyes and, afterward, they’d whisper and post about her on the classical music forums. Maybe it was the boobs and the long shiny hair—they expected her to be an airhead and were disappointed when she wasn’t. Maybe they hoped she would be a docile China doll, which, ha. But she’d seen the comments over the years: She was a ball-buster. A diva. Overrated.

  Well, yes, at least to the first two. The jury was still out on the third.

  Brennan didn’t cop any attitude, though. He simply lifted the key slip off piano number two and laid it down almost reverentially on the bed he’d prepared for it. Off came the blocks and the fall board, revealing the action cavity. He slid the key frame forward, and both she and Brennan canted forward to look down the length of the piano.

  If the outside of a grand was an impenetrable lacquer shell, the interior was claustrophobic and cram jam. With the action pulled forward, the piano gaped, a toothless skull. On the action itself, the hammer shanks and pins were squeezed one beside the next like the legs of some giant centipede.

  Kristy’s nausea was definitely back.

  Next to her, Brennan made an appreciative grunt. To him, this was probably some toy-land fantasy park. She gave him a sidelong look. Technicians all seemed to have backed into the gig down idiosyncratic paths. But if she opened her mouth to ask about his, she might be sick again.

  So she merely watched him remove the action completely and carry it to a table on the side of the stage. Intense focus had come over his features. Sparring with her didn’t get him going, but this did. Kristy doubted Brennan was aware she was even there. He lifted and dropped several of the hammers, then repeated the gesture, seemingly judging their response times. His nod was approving, and his touch almost indecent.

  The expression of blissed out concentration on his face: Damn, but she envied that. She could still recall how she used to hide in practicing. How playing had once put her into a state somewhere between meditation and hyperfocus. Every shade and emotion amplified by the audience. Every breath and note flowing from the previous one.

  Doubt had corroded any beatified feelings she’d once had. She’d get around to being angry about what she’d lost once she got over being so scared.

  He stooped to pick up a tool with a fat handle and three sharp points protruding from the head like some sort of torture device. “Once we agree on a direction, you can step out if you like. It will take me a bit to get this one done.”

  “I don’t mind waiting.” She would’ve once. Heck, at one point she would’ve thrown a fit if anyone had made her wait for any reason. But walking out of the concert hall would necessitate walking back in and then getting back on stage, and those acts hadn’t come easy lately. It would be better to remain and try to master her anxiety. She couldn’t very well get ill midgala.

  He didn’t acknowledge what she’d said; he only had eyes for the mechanism. He pushed the tool into the felt of the first hammer, withdrew it, and considered.

  “What tone do you want?” he asked, still examining the action.

  He’d asked it the day before too. Who are you—that was what he really wanted to know. Her sound was, or at least had been, romantic without being weedy. Emotional enough to sweep someone rational off their feet. Intimate enough to make the concertgoer forget there were two thousand other people in the room.

  But all the certainty she’d once had in the glorious contradiction of her had collapsed, leaving a black hole where a star had once been. There were no words to articulate that. Even just saying it out loud might make it permanent. Thinking about it, having it ricochet off her insides, was bad enough.

  Brennan finally, finally looked up, and even in her agitation, she could appreciate those eyes of his.

  “It needs to sound like the Rachmaninov yesterday felt.” Had felt for thirty seconds before the asshole had burst in, anyhow, and wrecked her best performance in recent memory.

  “Aren’t these pieces…larger?” he asked.

  “Yes.” In length, in scope, but that wasn’t what she meant.

  “So shouldn’t the sound be—”

  “Are you always so literal?”

  “Yes.”

  His answer was so matter-of-fact, it diffused her annoyance—and raised an interesting hypothesis. She’d managed to play yesterday knowing he was watching. Knowing he might be judging her.

  Could she do it again?

  “What about this?” She walked to piano number three and played the section of the second Brahms rhapsody where the melody fragmented. The logic of the piece dissolved into chords that wouldn’t line up, never resolved. It was a moody stew of notes. Romantic, yes, but arching toward Modernism.

  She needed to play it faster, and she wasn’t quite wringing the emotion out of it like she wanted, but her playing was tolerable. That was a relief.

  “Do you see—” she began, but the rest of the sentence wouldn’t come.

  Brennan had followed her and was leaning over the piano’s harp, one ear cocked to hear what she was trying to say to him. She was suddenly, intensely aware of his aftershave. Of a faint scar along the index finger resting on the music shelf. Of the bones of his wrist peeking from beneath his sleeve cuff.

  Sure, one moment of sheer terror pinged through her—he’s listening to you—but she grabbed at the bodily details of him to blot it out. He needed to hear. He needed to hear. He was an Aeolian harp, and she was going to set him humming.

  She started to play again, shoving all her focus into him and into the music. A descending chromatic scale, and the freckle below his left ear. A voice shift from one hand to the other, and the way he inhaled sharply when he heard something notable. A sweeping crescendo, and the way he rubbed his fingertips together.

  His body swayed—no, not swayed, shivered with the music. Caught in it like a leaf in an autumn breeze. If Brahms spoke to him, then there was something unsatisfied lurking underneath that man’s windowpane shirt.

  Why, Brennan Connelly, what a revelation.

  She sounded the last chord feeling giddy and, okay, smug too. That had been at least as good as yesterday. She hadn’t played that physically close to another human being in years, since before her breakdown. She’d refused to play for her agent, and she’d kept the symphony director across the studio when they’d selected pieces a few months prior.

  Moreover, she hadn’t noticed someone, really noticed the color and texture of him, in…years. At least since she’d stopped performing. The knowledge pealed through her.

  Oh. She was supposed to be talking to Brennan and not ogling him.

  “The sound isn’t perfect because this piano’s not voiced correctly. I mean correctly for me.” She didn’t want to insult him, at least not when she’d only just decided there was a sensual creature lurking under those suspenders. “I need it to be able to do that but better.”

  “Right.”

  Because his nearness still had her flushed, she didn’t hear the skepticism in his answer.

  Impetuoso

  A headache was brewing behind Brennan’s eyes. He and Kristy had worked for eight hours, right through lunch and now into dinnertime. He’d tuned and voiced the pianos she was deciding between. He’d listened to her play both, and then he’d revoiced them to her additional specifications.

  At her command, he’d made the tones rounder and then made them flatter. He’d adjusted the touchweight for various keys, replaced felt, applied lubricant to several mechanisms she’d insisted were stuck, and heated a section of the action she thought might be slow.

  “So that’s what you use a hair dryer for,” she’d drawled.

  Throughout this process, she’d been charming and dedicated, but her playing was still hesitant. They were rapidly approaching the limit of what Brennan could do to adjust the pianos; she still wasn’t satis
fied because she didn’t know what she was searching for.

  Brennan had more than a hunch.

  “It doesn’t sound right,” she said after finishing a rendition of a Tchaikovsky mazurka, which had been somewhat bland.

  You. You are the problem. The words were on the tip of Brennan’s tongue, but his rules kept them inside. He was a master piano technician, not a therapist. This wasn’t remotely his area of expertise. Saying something to her would be cruel and unprofessional, and he tried so hard to be neither.

  But they couldn’t go on like this. It wasn’t good for either of them. “I suggest we break.”

  She’d been glaring at the piano cabinet, as if the fault were somewhere inside it, but she looked up at him, her brow creased. “For dinner?”

  “No, for the night. We’re not making progress.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I can’t believe you’re giving up this easily.”

  Nothing about this had been easy. From the expertise required to the physicality of the work to his growing desire for this maddening, brilliant woman he didn’t know how to help. No, this hadn’t been an easy day.

  If Kristy didn’t know she was a genius, if she couldn’t sit at the bench and let go of whatever held her in check, what could he say? He wished he had half the talent with human beings he had with pianos, but this wasn’t his area.

  Not wanting to argue with her, he began to pack his bag.

  But she wouldn’t let it go. “I would’ve thought you were a fighter.”

  “Discretion, I’m told, is the better part of valor.”

  That earned him the smaller but warmer smile he’d started to recognize as her truest expression of amusement. He wished he were the kind of man who could put that smile on her lips every day. That man would likely know how to heal what ailed her.

  “See, you’re witty.” Kristy’s voice was pitched low and coy, and it brushed up his spine. “I could tell that about you.”

  “Have you decided which piano to use?”