Brandy Colbert - Pointe

“I am, too.” I squeeze his hand.

And I am happy—I am—but I’m mostly nervous. Maybe even more so than when I was getting ready earlier. Hosea will be my first since Chris. What if I don’t remember what to do? I thought I would feel different going into this. Worse about planning to be with him, about helping him cheat on Ellie. But I’m not sure how I can feel bad about it when I know he’s supposed to be with me.

I look around now. It’s your typical living room: love seat, recliner, couch, and coffee table. It’s almost too much furniture for the room and there’s barely enough space to walk around but it works because there’s no clutter. Not even a stray sweater or a discarded pair of shoes on the thin carpet. Just a couple of old photography books on the table next to the TV remote. An artificial Christmas tree sits in the far corner, small and white with silver ornaments and garland. I look under the tree, see a couple of wrapped gifts, and flush when I think of the mountain piled under the massive tree we brought home the first week in December.

A piano sits in the opposite corner. That makes me smile.

“Want the tour? It’s small,” Hosea says almost apologetically.

“I’d love a tour.” I unbutton my coat and drape it over the arm of the couch before we move into the next room.

It is a small place, with just the front room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms and a bathroom off a short hallway. But it’s clean and tidy and it smells nice. It smells like Christmas, like fresh pine and warm cinnamon, and I only notice the scented candles burning in the kitchen as we’re leaving the room.

“And this is my little hole,” he says, pushing open the door across the hall.

The room could belong to anyone with its beige walls, bare except for a calendar of landscapes hanging from an orange pushpin. A bed with a plain navy comforter is shoved up against the far wall, across from a three-drawer bureau and a small desk and chair. His room is clean, too, and I wonder if he cleaned for me or if it always looks like this.

“Where’s all your stuff?” I ask, looking for any sign that this room belongs to him.

That’s when I see it. A picture on top of the bureau. It’s not in a frame. It’s just a loose photograph, leaning against a dark wooden box. It’s slanted at an angle so there’s a bit of a glare, but I can still make out him and Ellie. They’re at a party, outside in the summer. Or maybe a festival. His arm is around her and she’s standing close to him, her body pressed to his side. Ellie’s mouth is open in a wide smile. She looks pretty. Hosea is smiling, too, the glowing orange tip of a clove barely visible between his fingers. They look comfortable together. Happy.

“When I moved in, I wouldn’t put up anything because I was convinced I wouldn’t be here that long.” His voice surprises me. When I look at him, he moves to the right, blocking my view of the picture. “Guess you can see how that worked out.”

“It kind of looks like a guest room,” I say, trying to shake the image of that picture.

I gaze at every wall and corner, want to burn this into my memory in case I’m never back here again. I make a special point to not look at the picture but Hosea is still there, still standing in front of it. My eyes slide to a different side of the room. I wonder where he keeps his pills, but it doesn’t seem right to ask. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of him now.

He flips the light off once I’m finished looking around. “Grams says it looks like a serial killer’s room.”

“That’s nice,” I say, laughing as we walk back into the hallway.

“Yeah.” He cracks a smile. “She’s . . . Like I said, I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive her for making me come live with her, but she’s not so bad. She gives me my space.”

“Where is she now?”

“Her sister’s, down in Lincoln.” He stops at the doorway to the kitchen. “You want something to drink? Or eat? I can’t cook but she left some lasagna.”

“I’m fine,” I say. “Already ate.”

And it’s true, even if dinner was only three bites of pasta that I swallowed, four that I spit into my napkin, and the rest pushed around my plate until my parents had cleaned theirs.

“Or toast.” He nods at the little silver toaster plugged in on the counter. “I make perfect toast.”

“As impressive as that is, I’ll pass this time.” Again, I examine every crevice of the room because I still find it hard to believe I’m standing in Hosea Roth’s yellow-and-blue kitchen, holding his hand. My eyes stop on him. “But I would like to hear you play.”

“You’ve heard me play lots of times,” he says in a strange voice with a strange look. One I’ve never seen on him. Flustered.

“Yeah, the stuff we’ve danced to for a million years.” I shake my head as I move back to the living room. “I want to hear your music.”

He stands in place so long, I wonder if he heard my response. Then he follows me, eyes the piano for a bit before he slides onto the bench, as if it’s an impostor or he’s sitting down for his first lesson. I perch on the edge of the couch as he turns and says, “Whatever I play sounds like shit on this thing. It’s really cheap and out of tune, just so you know.”

He could probably play “Chopsticks” for an hour straight and I’d be thrilled.

“Stop stalling,” I tease. I’m a little nervous, too, though, and I don’t know why. I guess because I don’t know what to expect. All he’s ever played in front of me is Tchaikovsky and Minkus and Gershwin—the music we know by heart, can play with our feet. Maybe I won’t like his music as much.

He twists his wrists, stretches his fingers, and without warning he launches into a piece so startlingly gorgeous that I slide from the arm of the couch into the cushion. I watch his fingers move deftly over the keys, stare at the back muscles straining under his shirt as he pours every last bit of himself into his music. It is a cross between contemporary and classical, interwoven with surprising patches of dark chords that resonate down to my core.

I wonder what he thinks about as his fingers dance across the keys. If, like he said back in the gazebo at Klein’s house, he’s thinking about how his song makes me feel, if I’ll be that one person in three hundred who is unduly affected by his talent.

I look at his jaw from the side, set in its hard lines as his creativity flows through him. I pretend that he will never play this song for anyone but me. I could sit in this tiny living room and listen to him make music forever. But then he’s finished and the room is silent and when he turns around I don’t know what to say.

“What do you think?” he finally says. And I can’t believe how anxious he sounds, how nervous he looks when his eyes meet mine.

“That was your song?” I stand up, smooth my hand down over the front of my top.

“Yeah. I mean, I composed it. Yeah,” he says again. Then, as he stands, too: “Did you like it?”

“Not liked. Love.” I take a couple of steps toward him, which in this little room means two more will bring us close enough to touch.

“You could be famous,” I say softly. “If other people heard you play—”

“I’m not that good. I’m not anywhere close to being that good.” He actually blushes, his cheeks flushed by my words.

I decide that particular shade of pink is outstanding.

He looks away and then down at the floor. “I still have so much to learn and I need to save up for a better piano and—”

“You’ll find a way. You’re special,” I say. “I can’t believe nobody knows this about you.”

“It’s enough that you know.” He sticks his hands into his pockets and he’s still not quite looking at me. “It wouldn’t be fair if you didn’t. I get to watch you dance all the time and you’re pretty much perfect out there.”

“I’m not as good as Josh. He’s the best. Ruthie’s really good, too. And I still have so much to work on before my auditions—”

“You look perfect to me.” His eyes lock onto mine again with such intensity it almost frightens me. “Everything about you is graceful.”

This time I turn my head because I don’t know how to look at him after he’s said something like that. He closes the space between us and still I don’t look at him, don’t move even an inch. My breath quickens the closer he gets and then he’s in front of me. Blocking the light, reaching out to me, tracing his fingertips along my cheekbone. My eyes roam over the loose strands of hair that frame his face. He swallows and I watch his Adam’s apple bob, wonder if he’d like it if I kissed him there.

Somewhere along the way we slipped from want to need and it’s in every part of our kiss. In the way he bites down lightly on my bottom lip, gently coaxing my mouth open. It’s in the way my hands press into his back, always pulling him toward me, always wanting him closer. I savor it all—the quick catches of breath, the warmth of his lips, the sugar-sweet taste of cloves on his tongue.

The need is why I take his hand without question, why I follow him down the hallway, why I find myself undressing him moments later. We take turns. His black T-shirt. My cardigan and tank. I feel a tiny bit of relief as my fingers brush against the top of his jeans and find buttons in place of a zipper. He lets me unclasp my bra and he stares as I do it and I hope he’s not disappointed, that he doesn’t care I have little use for one. But I relax as he swallows, as he meets my eyes and tells me I’m beautiful.

We lie down on his bed and he pulls me close, slides my body across the cool, soft comforter. His hair hangs in front of him, tickles my collarbone and teases my skin like the silky strokes of a paintbrush. And I can’t believe how much room we have without the confines of a car. How much softer his bed is than a backseat, how his piano hands sloping along my spine are such a nice change from a door handle digging into my back.

He is gentle with me, so much gentler than I thought anyone could ever be. His lips travel across my neck, my shoulder, my navel, and when he stops to ask me if I’m okay, I take his face in my hands and I kiss him. Hard, so he won’t see the tears in my eyes. No one has ever asked me that.

It’s uncomfortable at times, but it’s never unbearable. I keep waiting for his rhythm to change, for him to treat me like the rag doll I sometimes felt like with Chris. But Hosea is sweet—the whole time. He interrupts his kisses to ask if this feels good or that feels better, to make sure I don’t want to stop at any point. He is extraordinary and right now, tonight, he is mine.

Afterward, I go to the bathroom and I sit on the toilet and I cry. Shoulder-racking sobs that I bury in my hands and hide under the rush of the faucet. I can’t let him hear me but I can’t lie there with him, hold it in while he is so kind. Stroking my hair and kissing my neck and saying how happy I make him. I press a pink hand towel to my mouth and I choke down sobs, because tonight can’t last forever and he’s not mine.

Not really.

THE LAST TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE TRIAL SNEAK UP ON ME SO fast that I gasp when I look at the calendar and see I have twelve days left.

Because of winter break, it’s the first time I’ve been in the studio with Hosea since we slept together, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been so conscious of someone in the room. Every shift on the piano bench, every turn of the sheet music, every twitch of his wrist makes me think of being with him.

Ruthie can tell something is up. She keeps eyeing me during class, which doesn’t help, because my timing is already off. I can’t focus when I keep wondering if Hosea sees me now and thinks of what my feet really look like under these shoes. I tried to keep them out of view that night, but he looked at them as we were getting dressed.

My feet should be displayed on a warning poster in a podiatrist’s office. They’re hideous. I can’t remember the last time the skin on them wasn’t thick and dry, hardened by calluses and blisters. My toenails are obscenely short because if I let them grow out even a bit, I will pay for it. Not to mention the scars from where the skin has cut open and bled and healed itself. If I end up in a professional company, I will give up the chance of ever having semi-normal feet.

I asked him not to look at them, but he wrapped his hand around my ankle, pulled my foot onto his lap. He slid his palm over the top of my foot, brushed his thumb along the slope of my arch. I let out a breath without making a sound. His long, beautiful fingers were touching my deformed feet when all I’d ever wanted was to hide them. He curved his fingers around my toes, pressed lightly on a callus as he said they show I’m committed to my craft. Then he leaned in and kissed me and as I kissed him back, I wished so much for time to stop. Just a few extra minutes where everything was good and special and ours.