When time makes enough space for them to breathe again, Emmeline finds that an unanticipated calm has joined them in the room. She thinks Otho can probably feel it, too - he looks as though he's existing slightly more easily. It's a paper-thin, gentle thing, a veneer, really - but a welcome one. The air's a little clearer, each sound audible like rain into still water. In this moment, life shifts into a film sequence, everything shot in close-up: the soft corner of his mouth, the crush of sheet music kissing the stand where it lies, her pulse in her wrists and neck. Velveteen.

That piece he suggested: it pulls at her. There's a specific allure to unheard music, a power that comes with being the one to give it voice, to give it form. And he'd handed it to her - his fingertips, his tight, rounded handwriting. It's... something. An offering? A bridge; a connection. The string between two cups.

She looks at him and he doesn't smile but she believes he might be thinking of doing so, and she nods and so they begin. They play the song (she knows this isn't the right word but it is, it is) that he put so carefully in front of her and that feels a lot like a metaphor for something she can't quite grasp; she can't help but close her eyes as she improvises over the main melody and she thinks Otho might have closed his, too, but she wants very much to imagine that he plays with his eyes open. He is a person who spends so much time hiding and looking away from things - even at his own house, he used to avoid eye contact with her - anxiety and invisibility cloaking him, cutting him off. So Emmeline wants him to see, unafraid; she doesn't even mind if it's her. She thinks that to be seen by Otho might not be a bad thing. It might, in fact, be the opposite.

Playing this piece (this song, this epiphany - it's beautiful, lighter than she'd have guessed) is baring her soul - playing anything is baring her soul - and her heart. Time doesn't pass while music is played by those who breathe it. It stops and waits, respectfully, perhaps sways, loses itself in the lyricism. (Music can be lyrical without lyrics.)

Logically, she knows that the sound they're making here is just (just!) her piano and his violin, but she is flooded by the notion that they are the instruments - her and him, him and her. What if they're the ones being played by the notes? The bow is sliding, gliding over not strings but his ribs and she isn't playing the keys but her arteries - there is blood in this music, there is love and anger, it rushes hot-red through them. She knows she's never played the piece before but it's indescribably familiar, like everything about this boy. Why? She cannot for the life and death of all of her selves work it out. Maybe there is nothing to work out. People aren't puzzles, they're mysteries. There's no solving them, only unravelling. 'Mystery' is right, she thinks, likes the way it feels like a cavern barred from the outside. Unknowable without risk to both sides, but oh, the ache to find out is so strong. Temptation is an extraordinarily powerful force.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

A modulation and yes- they climb higher, higher, higher until the roof breaks and the ceiling crumbles and the two of them stand amongst clouds - is it still called standing if their feet aren't touching the ground? - and the tremolo is an earthquake, and she knows the crash back down (so very far) to earth is inevitable but she clings to the skyline and feels the piano twist itself to fit her hands, wraps around them like bandages - the hills of her knuckles press all the right notes and she has not felt alive. This is alive, the sound, the human-ness, the church-like volume of the whispering hearts. Something rises in and out of her; her body stops being her limit. She is happy? No. But she is living and glad of it.

Then, a tragedy: they don't reach the end. All the glorious tension spilling into the room; no cadence to resolve it.

A knock on the door splits the music in two and gravity answers it. They collide with the world, the real one - Otho looks at her and she sees the clouds in his face. She sees that he just tasted the same sunlight that she did and she wonders if she might be in love with it and him. She knows she can't be, but that doesn't stop the wondering. He spares - no, gives - her a glance and she is sure that he wants to say something to her as much as she wants to say something to him and what a miracle that balance is. But she hears him swallow the words on his tongue as he opens the door to a ghost. Adelaide swans into the room on feather-light feet and feather-filled wings and Emmeline gasps and hurts and grieves all at once and then she comes to and it's a student, not Adelaide at all. It's one of the ones she'd feel intimidated by (all straight lines and neat folds) if she wasn't already cut out of herself and raw. There isn't room for any more feelings in this poor young body of hers.

Vaguely, she hears the person who is not Adelaide tell them to return to the classroom. She doesn't want to, can't. Too much has just happened and to fill the space her thoughts need with other people will overcrowd her. The world is so noisy, so much, such a lot of the time that sometimes she can't properly cope. There is a vast, uncrossable difference between noise and volume - music has volume: dynamics, breadth. Traffic has noise. Traffic makes noise, and noise makes thought-traffic in turn. It's quite a fitting image, she thinks. She's stumbled across it, as she often does with ideas (the best ones are accidents or mistakes) but it does feel as though her thoughts stack up and pile into each other and beep horns, start conflicts of their own. The question is where they're all trying so determinedly to go.

Otho shuts the door behind the student as they leave and she starts. He looks at her, stops, looks at her again.

'You play beautifully.' He says, and the compliment falls awkwardly, perfectly. She smiles, glows, fully, a blush warming her face. Blush is too pretty a word.

'Thankyou,' she says, and it sounds overly fervent, religious. But it's okay, unexpectedly so. Neither of them quite abide by 'usual' as a concept and their strangeness creates a harmony between them. So it's okay that she then says: 'You play sadly.'

He meets her eyes. 'I try to play honestly.'

'You play sadly.' (She meets them back.)

He ducks his head, smiles (sadly), and nods. 'Yeah.'