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Morelli frowns at me, noticing I’ve stopped.
“Do you need me to cut off the shirt with the scissors?”
“No,” I reply, forcing my hands to relax and undoing the last few buttons. Mostly using my right hand, I peel the destroyed garment from my body.
I don’t miss the sharp inhale from across the room as I toss my shirt aside. I smirk mirthlessly at her and raise my eyebrows, daring her not to look away.
And to her credit, she doesn’t. Her eyes track from my neck down the long, angry line of ropy scar tissue that mars my left shoulder and upper arm. Those burns weren’t even the worst – the worst are my hands. Even I can’t stand looking at my own hands. Not because of what they’ve done, or who they’ve killed. But because of who they couldn’t save.
Deirdre’s eyes are still moving, drifting away from the marks the fire left to newer scars. Knife wounds and bullet holes that Morelli has dutifully sutured during the past twenty years in Canada. Years spent fighting tooth and fucking nail alongside my uncle to turn the Titones into something. A famiglia to be feared instead of one that has to flee their homeland in the dead of night.
Morelli works quickly at my back, cleaning blood from my skin, disinfecting, and taking stock of the injury. He knows better than to offer me morphine – I never take it. I don’t hide from pain. I breathe it in. Consume it, let it fill me like rage, until it’s a part of me. Until it forms yet another scar. It’s a penance of sorts. For being alive when she isn’t.
I bite back a hiss when Morelli stars digging for the bullet in the back of my shoulder. Deirdre presses her lips into a thin, bloodless line. Her face is pale, but she doesn’t turn away.
Morelli’s an observant son of a bitch. Always has been. I don’t know exactly what it is he sees in my gaze as I stare at Deirdre, but just as he yanks out the bullet and drops it onto a small metal tray, he flicks the back of my head and sternly tells me, “No fucking tonight. You’ve lost too much blood.”
I snort and want to tell him I’ve never lost too much blood for that, but it’s a moot point. I didn’t bring Deirdre here to fuck her, no matter what my wayward dick thinks.
I brought her here to play for me.
“I told you it’s time for your first performance,” I say in English, grimacing when Morelli starts the sutures. “So start playing.”
Deirdre jumps, as if she was lost in a daydream and isn’t expecting to be spoken to. Morelli joins in with thickly accented English, nodding as he works, “Ah, sì. Beautiful music. Good for healing. Soothing.”
Deirdre’s music has never been soothing. Not to me. It’s electrifying. When she plays it makes me feel like my heart has crawled outside my fucking body and I need to understand why.
“Play,” I repeat. Shakily, she rolls up the jacket sleeves that are gaping around her arms and raises her violin, placing the bow to the strings. My fingers curl around the edge of the stretcher I’m seated on and I lean forward until the sutures tug which makes Morelli scold me.
This is the first time I’ve been so close to her when she plays. Thirty-four years old and I’m practically holding my breath like an excited little kid.
That held breath comes out in a sigh when she stiffly grinds out the notes of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
“Not like that,” I chide her.
She narrows her gaze at me, frowning.
“It’s the first song that came into my mind.”
Morelli finishes up at my back, bandaging the wound with a thick roll that goes under my arm and around my shoulder. I slide off the stretcher. He mutters that I should be wearing a sling, but he knows I won’t do it. He cleans up, puts his tools on top of the stretcher, then wheels it out of my room. He reminds me in Italian not to forget what he said about no fucking tonight as he goes.
I start walking and then stop in front of Deirdre, keeping some space between us.
“Play something else.”
Her eyes dart around the room. She licks her lips, and that pink tongue draws my eyes like metal to a magnet.
“Play for me.”
“I just… I just don’t like performing!” she stammers.
“I know for a fact that that’s not true,” I say.
Confusion wracks her features. She doesn’t know that I’ve attended every single one of her violin performances over the past year and a half. I don’t offer her an explanation. Don’t bother to explain I’ve seen her play more than a dozen times by now. That I know she’s always stiff and nervous when she first hits the stage, but then she closes her eyes and lets the music take over. When that happens, its like the entire audience disappears, and it’s only her and me in the room.
Just like now.
Play that song your mamma loved, I want to tell her. That ballad I heard on her balcony and haven’t experienced again since then. Oh, I’ve listened to the song – some nights I play it on a goddamn loop until it becomes a part of my heartbeat. But I haven’t heard her play it since that summer day. An Eala Bhàn. I don’t even attempt the Irish pronunciation.
