Through the rehearsal space windows behind her, the market was filled with people, and the sound of a carol drifted from someone's stall, probably a Cinnamite vendor, by the warmth in the melody. The sound was distant. The world outside was bright and busy. None of it registered. She was standing three feet from him, and her eyes had dropped to his mouth.
She looked away first. Took another sip of coffee.
"Thank you," she said. "For being thorough."
He did not trust himself to answer. He nodded once, turned to finish his sweep of the room, and listened to her set the coffee down behind him and start warming up.
The song came out of nowhere.
She was humming while he checked the window latches along the far wall. It was something low and bluesy, a melody that curled in on itself and resolved in unexpected places. Her voice was half-volume and unguarded. The sound someone might make alone in their own kitchen rather than performing for an audience.
"What is that?"
He heard himself ask it before he could stop himself.
She looked up from the piano bench where she'd settled, one hand resting on the keys without pressing them. "An old Earth carol, but the arrangement's mine. 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.' You know it?"
"No."
"Right. Obviously not, or you wouldn’t have asked." A half-smile. "Come here. I'll show you."
He should not have gone over there. He had things to do. Things to check. He went anyway.
She made room on the bench. He shouldn’t have sat down. Standing behind her shoulder was already closer than he should have been. But then she patted the bench next to her, and he sat down next to her, close enough that when she leaned forward to point at the opening phrase on the sheet music, her shoulder brushed his arm through his uniform and the contact hit him like a small electrical event.
"It starts here." She sang the first four bars. Her voice was patient and warm, and his truth-sense opened on the sound and found the same pure heat he'd felt during her empty-house soundcheck. "The trick is this interval. It drops where you'd expect it to rise. Try it."
He tried it. His voice came out low and formal and slightly too precise, his Mentharian accent clipping the words into something rigid.
She pressed her lips together. Her eyes were bright.
"You sing the way you talk."
"I am aware."
"It’s like you're filing a report in song."
A laugh broke out of her, startled and delighted, her head tipping back. The sound landed low in his chest and stayed there. He stared at her. She covered her mouth with one hand, still laughing, and the hand was shaking slightly, and her eyes above it were crinkled at the corners.
"I'm sorry," she said, not sorry at all. "I'm sorry, that was— You have a gorgeous voice, Thorne. You just need to let itbreathe. Here, listen."
She sang the phrase again, slower, and leaned in to correct his pitch. Her breath landed warm on his jaw. She smelled like Ember's coffee and the amber-vanilla of her perfume and something underneath both that was only her. His eyes did not drop to the way her mouth moved. His eyes stayed on the sheet music. This cost him more than any security protocol he had ever enforced.
"Now you."
He sang it again. Looser this time, the tightness in his voice unlocking a fraction.
"Better." She pressed a key on the piano, matching the note. "Again."
He sang it a third time, and she joined him, her voice wrapping around his in a way that made the small hairs on his forearms stand up under his sleeves. Two voices in a cold rehearsal space, finding each other.
"Okay," she said, "my turn to learn something. Teach me a song you know."
He did not know why he had offered it. The Mentharian harmony was formal, old, a traditional song with a countermelody sung at ceremonies he'd stood at the edge of his entire adult life. He sang the first eight bars, and her hands went still on the sheet music.
Her lips parted. Her fingers froze mid-turn on the page.
The look on her face was unguarded wonder.
