BASICALLY IF I wasn’t at class or rehearsal, I was studying, because I had to maintain a certain GPA to keep my scholarship, no matter how talented I was. Thus I was starting to snooze over my laptop—“studying”—when Peter hobbled in the next afternoon. Once he was inside, he kicked the door closed, threw himself face-first onto the bed, and grunted into his pillow.
“Rough day?” I asked.
He rolled onto his back. “It’s bad enough that pretty much everything on my left leg from about midshin down hurts like hell. But Maggie’s piece-of-shit car broke down this morning. She had to get it towed. It won’t be fixed for at least a week. I had to walk back from Dickinson, which I do not recommend doing on crutches.” He let out a pained breath. “Holy fuck that hurts.”
“I’m sorry,” I said for lack of anything better.
He rolled slowly and sat up. “Hey, you have a car.”
Oh, no. “I do, yes.” I did not want to play chauffeur for the next few weeks. I could barely stay on top of everything I had to do as it was. “But our schedules are really incompatible. Don’t you have someone with a more similar schedule who can help you around? What about your girlfriend?”
He tilted his head and furrowed his brow. “My girlfriend?”
“Yeah.” Didn’t he know he had a girlfriend? “That girl Lily you hang around with all the time.”
He laughed. “Oh, dude, no. Lily is not my girlfriend.”
I sat on my bed across from him. “Sorry. You guys seem awfully handsy with each other. I just assumed.”
He nodded, as if that made sense, but he’d never considered it before. “Anyway, no. Lily doesn’t have a car. None of my friends do. Well, Dave does, but he lives off campus.” He held out his hands. “I know this is a big thing to ask, but it would really help me, and it’s only for a few days—a week at most—until I can get around better. If you could just, like, get me to the middle of campus in the morning and pick me up at the end of the day, even, that would be a big help.”
“All right,” I said, not willing to be the asshole who left him in the lurch. “I guess I can manage that.”
His face went bright with gratitude. “Thank you. I’ll make it up to you somehow. I’ll pay for your next gas refill and buy you dinner or something. And not even at the Mac, somewhere in town.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t sure how I’d do with him one-on-one through a meal. We got along okay in the room, but mostly if we were both home, one or both of us was studying, so it wasn’t like we had a lot of social time. He was clearly trying to engage me, but I was resistant. Would we even have enough to say to each other to sustain conversation through a whole dinner? Was I overthinking this?
“Thanks, Logan. I really mean it.”
Heat rose to my face, and I shook my head. “It’s no problem.”
IT WAS kind of a problem, though. I knew I was being an asshole by not wanting to drive Peter to class. I should have been a friend, or at least a nice guy, by helping him out. But my schedule was unworkable as it was. Not to mention he annoyed me so much. His stupid sexy, perky ways, dampened somewhat by the recent injury, were like that first step into sunlight after being inside all day, bright and searing.
But I decided to suck it up. That afternoon, after he asked me to be his driver, he said he was done with class for the day, plus it was Piper Hill night with Lily, so I drove myself to orchestra rehearsal, still seething a little.
Rehearsal was… fine.
First Costner gave us a new piece of music to learn, a Beethoven concerto I was familiar with. Based on how badly the orchestra butchered it while trying to sight-read, I suspected most of the rest of the musicians had never heard it before. After fifteen minutes of trying to play through the first movement, Costner said, “No, no, no. The key is C minor. Three flats. You’re all playing A flat and E flat too sharp. C minor is supposed to sound dark and stormy. Emotional. Not like a little dance ditty. Half steps, violins. Do it again.”
We moved on to the Bach we’d been working on all semester. Costner had me play my solo when it came up as we played through the song, but then he kept cutting me off and saying, “It’s fine, Logan. It’s fine. Measure one fifty-four!” This was the cue to skip right over my parts of the piece and to the parts the rest of the orchestra came in on.
But according to Costner, this was all wrong too. “D minor now. A and E are natural now. Everything is too flat. And it’s messy, second violins. Clean it up.”
We played the same three lines of music eight times, until Costner seemed satisfied, but then he turned toward the second violins again. “We wouldn’t have had to waste time with that if you all practiced more. This isn’t a jam session. I expect you to come to rehearsal prepared. You need to have this down by next week, okay?”
I liked Costner most of the time. He wasn’t usually this hostile. He was a good, if demanding, teacher. But now I wanted to pull him aside to point out that he’d chosen music that was beyond what most of the students could play. But he persisted, and by the end of rehearsal, we were sounding better as a group, and he said, “See that? I knew you could get it. Violins, watch out for those half steps. See you next week.”
The moment rehearsal ended and Costner dismissed us, he walked over to me and said, “You were a little off with timing today.”
“I was?”
He lifted his baton and started waving it to show upbeats and downbeats. “I know you know how to do this, Logan. Keep up with me. I don’t know if you could hear it from up here in front, but you were half a beat off the baton on that last go through, but the last row of violins must have been following your bow, because the sound wasn’t quite holding together.”
“Got it. Sorry about that.”
“Not a problem. Get it right next time. Can you come to the second violin sectional on Friday afternoon? You don’t have a class at three, do you?”
“No, I don’t. The second violin sectional?”
“I want to go over the key signatures with them again. You can colead the sectional with me and Nancy.” Nancy was the second violin section leader. “I’ll send you an e-mail with what I want to cover.”
“Okay,” I said. As the concertmaster, I had among my responsibilities to lead violin sectionals. I was, essentially, the orchestra leader, kind of like a captain, so teaching sectionals was something I’d been doing all semester, but usually I worked with the first violins. I didn’t mind another rehearsal so much as I already missed the downtime I’d have had Friday afternoon.
Costner patted my shoulder and told me to have a good night.
As I packed up, Ellie walked over. “Guess what,” she said.
“It’s Tater Tot day at the dining hall?”
“Oh, if only.” Ellie looked off into the distance as if she were imagining such a great and wonderful time. “No, I have two important pieces of news. Neither of which is violin-related.”
“Good. I’ve had enough violin for today. What’s up?”
“Rachel finally dumped her horrible boyfriend. I think for good this time.”
“That’s good. Is she back to normal?”
Ellie smirked. “In between bouts of weeping, yes.”
“What was your other piece of news?”
“I totally killed the midterm in my lit class.”
My relief for her was palpable. Ellie had spent much of the previous week fretting about that exam. “Congrats!”
“No grades yet, but I knew the info on the test cold. Seriously, ask me anything about nineteenth-century British lit. I know it. Symbolism in Wuthering Heights, the belief system of the pre-Raphaelites, how crazy Lord Byron was, the domestic politics of Jane Austen, I got it all up here.” She tapped the side of her head.
I had to look around for the little rosin cake that lived in my violin case, since it wasn’t in its pocket, but I said, “That’s awesome,” as I looked. It was on the music stand.
“How’s your poor injured roommate?” Ellie asked.
I grimaced. “He asked me to drive him around campus. I guess Maggie’s car broke down.”
Ellie let out a burst of laughter. “What did you say to that?”
“I agreed. Not like I had a choice.”
“Wow. He really gets your goat, doesn’t he? What is it about this guy?”
I picked up my case and slung it over my shoulder before grabbing my music folder and shoving it in my bag. “I don’t know. He’s annoying. He’s hot. I find the combination of these two things super desirable, apparently.”
She pointed at me. “I knew it!”
We walked out of the orchestra room and toward the staircase that led back to the parking lot. “Don’t plan the wedding yet,” I said. “Sure, I’m attracted to him. He’s also straight and my roommate. And even if he were gay, which he isn’t, it’s not like I could make a move on him without fucking up my housing situation more than it already is.”
“Valid,” said Ellie. “You going back up the hill?”
“Yeah. Want a ride?”
“Sure, thanks.” She elbowed me. “See how easy that was?”
I groaned as we got to my car. I had to fish the remote starter out of my pocket and get our instruments carefully arranged in the backseat, but once I was behind the wheel, she said, “He is pretty cute.”
“Can we not?”
“See, I kind of figured the reason he annoyed you so much is because you secretly like him. You’re acting about as mature as the boy on the playground who pulls on the girl’s pigtails. Maybe you should make a move.”
“And get punched in the face? No, thank you.” I put the car in gear.
“Peter would never punch anybody. And he could be into dudes. You don’t know. Stop being a child.”
“Trust me, my interest in Peter is not childish.” A sudden mental image of him wriggling out of his jeans, with those powerful thighs and the bulge in his little red briefs, made me feel flush all over. “But it’s not like I like him as a person. He’s still annoying. This is all just lust.”
“There’s something kind of sexy about the situation, isn’t there? He’s your roommate. Maybe he comes back from the shower one afternoon and drops his towel….”
Ugh. “No. You should watch less gay porn.”
“Or now he’s injured, you could Florence Nightingale him back to health, and when it’s over, he’ll be ever so grateful….”
Heat washed over me, but I shook my head. “Forget it. He would never.”
“He’s really not so bad. He’s kind of anal about backstage theater stuff, sure, but he seems like a nice guy. Half the girls in Theater Club are in love with him.”
“They can have him.”
I drove up the hill, and Ellie was silent for a few minutes, but when I pulled into the parking lot behind Emerson, she said, “I guess I don’t really know him that well, but from what I’ve seen at Oklahoma! rehearsals this semester, he doesn’t seem as bad as you say.”
“Can we not talk about this anymore?”
She pulled her violin case out of the backseat. “Sure. I have to study anyway. I killed one midterm, but I have two more to go. See ya!”
She blew me a kiss and walked toward her dorm.
I got my own stuff out of the car and trudged back to my room. Rehearsal had run long, so I wasn’t that surprised to find Peter by himself, snoozing on his bed. Thankfully, he was wearing pajama pants this time.
God, he was beautiful.
But, no, I was moving on with my life. I had a music theory final to study for. I put my violin away and got out my book and tried to ignore his gentle snoring.