Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 124135 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 621(@200wpm)___ 497(@250wpm)___ 414(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124135 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 621(@200wpm)___ 497(@250wpm)___ 414(@300wpm)
“Is he…?”
“He’s stable. That’s what his dad said.” Scale after scale tapped its way along the piano. I put my free hand on my chest. “The emotions…” I shook my head, not knowing how to explain it.
“They consumed you,” Lewis said. “Broke you.”
My hand froze on the keys. I met his eyes. “Yeah.” I drowned in confusion. He’d understood.
Lewis pulled an orchestra chair beside me. His fingers found their way to the keys too. I watched as his hands moved as if of their own accord. I saw the colors in my mind. So I started playing similar colors that meshed. I played a harmony. Lewis’s lip hooked into a smirk. I followed his cues. Spectrums refracted in my mind. And I chased them until Lewis pulled his hands back and dropped them to his lap.
He sighed. “It’s how I started drinking. Taking the drugs.” He tapped his head, then his chest. “The emotions. The colors I would feel when things went wrong.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t cope. I used alcohol to numb the pain. And my life spiraled from there.”
“Your emotions get heightened too?” I stared at him, floored.
Lewis nodded. “I taste it too. And see colors.”
“I didn’t think synesthetes ever had such similar symptoms.” Lewis nodded. I felt a lightness in my chest I couldn’t describe. Because someone else knew. He understood. All of it. All of what sometimes buried me in so many sensations that I shut down. Built high walls to fortress the feelings. Who I really was.
Lewis closed his eyes, inhaled, then took something from his jacket’s inner pocket. He placed a silver hip flask on the top of the piano.
“It’s whiskey,” he said, staring at the hip flask. “I’ve been sober three years.”
I just listened.
“When I was asked to compose for the gala in a couple of months, I thought I could do it. I thought I’d mastered my demons.” He flicked his chin in the direction of the liquor. “I thought I had a grip on the emotions that rose in me when I played. When the colors came.” He laughed without humor. “When I opened up my soul.”
His gaze dropped to the piano keys. He played a single F note, the sound and bright-pink hexagon vibrating in the air. “But I have too many regrets, Cromwell. Too many ghosts in my past that I’ll never escape from. The ones that always come and find me whenever I compose. Because they are what lives within me. My music wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t leave everything on the sheets of music.” He ran his finger down the filigree pattern on the flask. “But I can’t handle the emotions that come because of my synesthesia. I was stupid to think they wouldn’t resurface.”
“Have you drunk any?”
“Not yet.” He laughed again, but it sounded more like he was choking. “I just carry it around with me. To prove to myself that I can resist it.” Before I could say anything, he said, “I’m not composing at the National Philharmonic’s Gala.”
I frowned. Then Lewis turned to me. “I told them I had someone else who could debut instead.” As mentally exhausted as I was, it took me a few seconds to realize what he was getting at. A dormant heat that lived in my blood sparked to life as his words sank in. Shivers broke out along my skin, and I felt my pulse race. “The way you just played…” He shook his head. “It’s up to you, Cromwell. But if you want it, the place is yours. The program director remembered you from your youth. They now want you more than me. The musical genius who just one day stopped playing, making his big return.”
My heart slammed in my chest. “There’s not enough time. It’s too soon. And I’d have to compose an entire symphony. I—”
“I’ll help you.”
I looked at him curiously. “Why do you want to help me so much? It can’t all be to repay my father.”
Lewis glanced away, then facing me again, said, “Let’s just say that I have a lot of errors I need to amend. It’s one of my twelve steps.” He went quiet, and I wondered what he was thinking. “But it’s also because I want to, Cromwell. I want to help you compose.”
Adrenaline pulsed through me at the thought of being back on a stage, an orchestra surrounding me, giving life to my creations. But then ice cooled that excitement. “Bonnie…I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t…” My jaw clenched when I pictured her on her bed. Then in the wheelchair, and her face when she saw Easton’s blood on me. “I don’t know if I can.”
Lewis’s hand came down on my shoulder. “You don’t have to make decisions now.” He shook his head, and his hand slipped away. “I shouldn’t have asked you right now. It was insensitive.”