Chapter 28: The Composer's Touch
The tube station entrance gaped before her, a mouth of stale air and echoing footsteps. Hermione’s hand tightened around the strap of her bag. The ache between her thighs was a persistent, intimate reminder. A syllabus of sensation written directly onto her flesh. Remember this ache. His voice was a phantom in her ear.
Surrender wasn’t in her nature. Analysis was. Deconstruction. Control.
But what was the control in walking away from a variable she didn’t yet understand? What was the victory in returning to a dusty library carrel while her skin still hummed with the memory of his?
This was an experiment. A deviation from the plotted path. And a true scientist didn’t flee the lab at the first unexpected result. She observed. She recorded. She pushed further.
She turned on her heel.
The walk back was faster, her heart beating a sharp, staccato rhythm against her ribs. The security guard’s polite nod shifted into a flicker of recognition. The elevator ride up was a study in silence, her reflection in the bronze doors looking back at her with wide, resolute eyes.
She didn’t knock. The door was unlocked, as if he’d expected her. Or simply didn’t care who entered.
The loft was flooded with morning light now, harsh and revealing. The empty whiskey glasses from the night before still sat on a side table. And there was music. Not from a speaker. Something alive, complex, and slightly dissonant.
He was at the grand piano, positioned near the windows like a centerpiece. Shirtless, in just the same grey sweatpants, his back a tense landscape of muscle and pale skin. His fingers moved over the ivory keys with a fluid, ruthless precision that made her breath catch. It was the same focused intensity he’d used to map the nerves of her body. This was just another instrument.
He didn’t stop playing as she approached. The piece was unfamiliar, modern, full of unresolved chords and restless energy. It sounded like conflict. It sounded like the city below them.
She stopped a few feet away, her bag dropping silently to the floor.
His eyes flicked to her, then back to the keys. One pale eyebrow arched. The music didn’t falter. “Come to finish your lesson, Granger?” he murmured, his voice barely audible above the piano. “I was just composing something… fitting.”
“It sounds angry,” she said.
“It’s ambitious.” A slight, wry twist to his lips. “Anger is simpler. This is… aspiration with teeth.” He played a cascading run of notes that sounded like a chase. “You skipped your tutorial.”
“You noticed.”
“I keep track of deviations from the norm. Yours are particularly noteworthy.” He finally let the last chord hang, unfinished, in the sunlit air. He turned on the bench to face her, his grey eyes sweeping over her. “The hairpin’s back.”
“It’s mine.”
“So it is.” He gestured vaguely toward the other end of the loft. “That was my father. On the phone. Twice.”
The confession was abrupt, stripped of context. It hung there, another unresolved chord. She understood he was offering a piece of data, a trade for her return.
“Everything alright?” she asked, the polite question feeling absurd in the space between them.
He barked a short, humorless laugh. “No. It’s never alright. It’s a discussion about legacy. About appropriate associations. About the poor return on investment he’s currently observing.” His gaze was piercing. “You’re a deviation from the norm for him, too.”
She took a step closer. The sunlight warmed the tops of her feet. “And what do you tell him?”
“I don’t answer.” He leaned back, stretching his arms along the edge of the piano. “Let it ring. He hates that more than any insult I could invent.”
She recognized the defiance. It was a different flavor than hers, bitter where hers was fiery, but she knew its shape. “Is that why you’re here? In this loft? To not answer?”
“It’s a start.” He watched her, his head tilted. “Why are you here, Hermione? Really. Not the scientific method answer. The true one.”
Her name in his mouth still felt like a shock. A deliberate intimacy. She moved until she stood beside the piano, her fingers brushing the cool, polished wood. “You said to remember the ache. I found I didn’t want to wait for next time to feel it again.”
A slow, genuine smile touched his eyes this time. “Finally. An honest answer.” He reached out and took her hand, turning it palm-up. He traced the lines there with a single fingertip, a whisper of a touch. “The thing about aches is they’re a memory of pressure. Of impact. You have to keep applying pressure, or the memory fades.”
“Is that what you were doing with the music? Applying pressure?”
“I was composing a score for it.” He tugged her hand, pulling her gently until she stood between his knees. He was eye-level with her stomach. He leaned forward and pressed his lips to the soft fabric of her shirt, just below her navel. The heat of his breath seeped through. “The anticipation is the best part. The moment before the fall. You can taste it in the air, can’t you?”
She could. It was metallic and sweet. Her hands lifted, of their own volition, and slid into his hair. The platinum strands were soft, finer than she’d imagined. He went very still at the contact, as if her taking this initiative was the most surprising thing she’d done yet.
He looked up, his face serious. “Tell me what you want.”
The directness was a challenge. A demand for her own honesty. She didn’t want pretty words. She wanted the vocabulary he was teaching her.
“I want the ache to be yours,” she said, the words clear and steady. “I want the memory to be specific. I don’t want it to fade.”
His eyes darkened. He stood up suddenly, forcing her to look up at him. He cradled her face in his hands, his thumbs brushing her cheekbones. “Then you have to surrender the thing you hold tightest. Not your body. Your control. You have to let me write the lesson plan. Can you do that?”
Her heart was a frantic bird against her ribs. This was the precipice. The moment before the fall. She could taste it.
She thought of the silk ties. Of his teeth on her skin. Of the empty, ringing phone.
“Yes,” she breathed.
The word was a key in a lock. His expression shifted, a mask of focused intensity settling into place. He took her hand again and led her, not to the bedroom, but to the large, low sofa in the center of the room. He sat, pulling her down to straddle his lap. The position was profoundly intimate, her skirt riding up, the hard planes of his body underneath hers.
“Good,” he said, his voice low and approving. He wrapped one hand around the nape of her neck, his thumb resting on the pulse hammering there. “Now, we begin.”