He took another deep breath and then returned to his sister and intern, reseated at the table, pretending they had no idea what was going on at the door.
Ari took his seat.
And then noticed the music playing through the thousand-dollar speaker system—a violin begging for forgiveness and a piano demanding an apology.
Well, fuck.
Chapter Twenty-One
JAX RETURNEDto the house and pulled his mother’s car into the garage. With Hobbes and Naomi visiting Hobbes’s parents for the holiday, there was no point parking outside.
He expected his mother would be there, especially without a vehicle, but a note on the kitchen table informed him she’d gone for a walk to appreciate the mild weather. Jax supposed it was milder than Kingston, at least, and no Cambridge either, but the idea of hoofing it through calf-high snowdrifts didn’t appeal to him.
Unfortunately his mother’s absence left him alone with his thoughts. Sitting in the glow of the Christmas tree, he took out his phone.
He’d unfollowed Ari’s social media accounts after the breakup. Coming across him while he was innocently scrolling through Instagram was a lousy way to start a day or end one. But now he found himself searching for the account again.
He couldn’t get that song out of his head. Hell,eitherof those songs.
He wasn’t an idiot, at least not most of the time. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out artists drew inspiration from real life.
So Jax was feeling…thingsabout Ari writing music about him.
That was what he’d done, wasn’t it? He’d written a song about his feelings for Jax. Possibly more than one song. Jax felt a little stupid for not noticing earlier, considering the number of nights Ari crawled out of bed after leaving Jax a pile of nerveless goo and went to make love to his piano instead. And Jax—okay, maybe Jaxwasan idiot, because it had never occurred to him that Ari,his boyfriend who was a professional musician, would write songsabout him.
What kind of fresh hell was this going to be? Would he be innocently grocery shopping, minding his own business, and thenwham, all of a sudden, over the store’s radio would come the inescapable reminder that Ari used to have feelings for him, but now he didn’t?
Worse—shit—what if someone requested one of his songs at the Rock? What if someone requested one of Ari’s songs at the Rock while Jax was playingand Ari was in attendance? That was, like, a specialInception-level cross-section of Jax’s nightmares.
Of course, Ari probably wouldn’t come to the Rock anymore.
After next week, Jax wouldn’t be going to the Rock anymore either.
One of the good things to come out of his mother’s visit was that their reconciliation had included Jax’s admission that he wanted to go back to MIT to defend his thesis, once he’d saved up the money. When he tried to turn down his mother’s offer of a loan, she threatened to give him the money for Christmas instead, and he was forced to accept a loan as the lesser of two evils. With her help, he’d even be able to rent a place that wasn’t a complete shithole. He didn’t have to be in Boston long. He’d already submitted the work to Grayling’s successor for evaluation. He was just waiting on the committee to decide on an official date.
It was for the best. He needed to close that chapter of his life. But he didn’t want to closethisone—his friendship with Hobbes, with his coworkers at the bar, being Uncle Jax. But he didn’t want to do a postdoc, so continuing in academia was out. He was no longer certain he wanted to work at a think tank either.
And—
And all of that went right out of his head when he got to Ari’s Instagram, because therewasnew content there. Jax scrolled until he found the first post he hadn’t seen—an image of the track listing on the back of the album—and clicked on it.
The background image was a geometric black and white—a smooth, sinuous soft-focus parabolic curve that looked like nothing so much as an artistic ass shot. At least, that was how it struck Jax, though of course it wasn’t. He suspected it was computer-generated.
Alice, said the track listing.1.618.First Sight. September 27. Push/Pull. Solo.
Jax’s face went hot. Wait a minute. September 27 was the day they first… wasn’t it? He wasn’t going to check a calendar to make sure.
He was pretty certain he’d know if he ever heard the song. Shaking himself, he scrolled past the rest of the image and over to the description.
String Theory. Coming March 17.
Jax put his hand to his mouth.
There were a few more pictures. Ari in the studio, handsome and serious with his chin on the chinrest of his electric violin, his eyes closed, obviously lost in the music. A few of the musicians he recorded with—two more with Aiden Lindell and one with a sweet-looking blond girl named Maxi Greene.
As Jax had hoped—dreaded—there were a few videos with song clips.
The first was a clip of Aiden Lindell singing a few bars of “Alice”—the song that had been playing when Jax knocked on Ari’s door today. At first Jax had thought it was a coincidence when he heard the name, but as he stood waiting for Ari, the song spun out a story about the Cheshire Cat guiding Alice, seeing the world for what it was and loving it for its infinite complexities. And Jax had justknownon a level he couldn’t fully explain that he was the cat in question. He’d wanted to break down in Ari’s doorway, demand that Ari tell him everything.
