Page 43 of Play Me

The car starts and drives away. Hot tears drip down my cheeks, burning my eyes, and I can just make out his blurry image through the window.

“Sebastian...” I say, trying to reach out for him and then everything fades to black.

Chapter Fourteen

SEBASTIAN

The moonlight bathes the room in a soft cool white glaze. As the silvery orb rises higher and higher in the night sky, I watch the shadows cast on Cadence’s face change. The soft light catches on the bridge of her nose, on her flickering eyelashes, on the curve of her lips; showing me a hundred and one different faces to her. Each one twisting tighter and tighter.

Even in the dark I can see the bruise spread further and further across her cheek and over her eye as each minute ticks by. Dark and purple, there are spidery veins running like streams over the expanse of the wound. I lean in and press the cold compress against her forehead, willing the soft, damp fabric to soak up the pain and leave her the delicate, pristine Cadence that I know.

Sarah told me that Cadence passed out for a while on the drive home, but was up and alert by the time the doctor had come to see her. They’d given her a painkiller and she’d fallen asleep by the time I’d arrived at my hotel room.

Sarah wouldn’t leave without her friend, so Marius offered to bunk with Brad for the night so she could sleep in his room that adjoins with mine.

And here I am, wondering how I could have let this happen. How, even in my presence, watching over her, Cadence is now lying in my bed, with the side of her face brutalized under the hand of a drunken idiot.

It had all happened so fast. And it was not the way tonight was supposed to end.

I had been on such a high performing tonight. It’d been the first time I’d been on stage performing since we had really gotten to know her. As with the first concert, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Cadence in the audience during the whole set. I drank it all in, the way her face lit up in those first few bars of each song, trying to figure out what we were going to play. And then the way she would lose herself in the music, dancing to the rhythm of my cello.

I couldn’t wait to get back to her in that booth. I hadn’t wasted any time pressing up against her, our heads leaning in so we could hear one other, I’d believed everything I’d said to her. These last few weeks, I’d felt like she was part of the band, and if there was the tiniest inkling of her thinking she would join, I’d fight to the death for her right to become one of us. She’s more than proven she can keep up with us, and she has the creativity and talent to only make us better.

But when she left the booth with Brad and Marius and I watched her dancing with them I felt a lightning strike of jealousy rip through me, something I’d never felt before. After a few songs of absolute torture, I grabbed Hailey and dragged her to the dance floor with me, wanting just to be near Cadence. But she turned away from me each chance she got. It made me really wonder, is there something going on with her and Marius? Since the day he drove her home, there’s seemed to be a closeness between the two of them, and she jokes with him and flirts with him when she’s always careful to keep me at arm’s length.

At least I could understand when it was with Brad and Marius, but then when the fuckhead came up behind her, it almost killed me to watch her lean back into him, letting him grind against her and her reaching up to touch him. Hailey had watched me seethe and held me back, telling me I had to let her do what she wanted.

But then, when it seemed like she didn’t want his advances anymore, and was trying to get away, I couldn’t get to her fast enough. We’d drifted a little way from the group and hordes of people were in the way when I tried to get to her. I keep playing that image in my head of him yanking her by the hair back and striking her across the face with his backhand. In that moment I could’ve died. Or sold my soul to the devil to let me relive that moment, only this time, I would have gotten to her in time.

She had been so limp in my arms, so small and helpless. I wanted to breathe life back into her, back into the woman I first met in the shop, ranting and lecturing me, the woman in the music class room, her face lit up with pride, the woman in rehearsals, lost in the passion of creating music - not this battered, injured little bird in my arms.

When I went back to the club, the guys had dragged the asshole out to the side alley and were teaching him what happens when you hit women.

Marius held him back while Brad was letting out some repressed anger. When they saw me, they’d each taken an arm and waited. Watched me take my belt off and wrap one end around my hand. They knew what was coming, and there wasn’t an ounce of mercy for anyone who got what they deserved if I’d decided they deserved it.

“Do you think hitting a woman who doesn’t want your sticky, dirty fingers on her makes you a big man?” I’d come up close to his face, and asked him; his stinking breath making me disgust with him even more.

He’d just whimpered.

“Well, it’s not. It makes you a small, small man. A small tiny man with a teeny weeny, shriveled chicken dick. One that’s going to shrink up into your body and take a long, long time before it’s going to want to come back out again, when I’m done with you.”

I’d raised my hand over my head.

“Sebastian. Don’t.”

A voice had spoken up.

It was Dennis.

“She wouldn’t want this.”

“She didn’t want him either, and look what happened,” I turned around and reminded my manager.

“So, how does that make you better than him?”

I replayed the moment his hand had hit her and the way she’d crumpled to the floor. And I wanted to hurt him, have him crumple to the floor as many times as it’d take for me to forget that moment.

But it wouldn’t ever be enough.