The Pianist

Prologue: Your Gift of Love

Music and love tend to walk hand in hand. There is just something about a tune, the way it flows and tingles through the veins and leaves you breathless and asking for more. Like making love without the pain of betrayal and frustration later on.

For the performer, it is a steadfast reaction where you're half in the moment and half going out to your audience beckoning them to you.

For the listener, he is like a snake charmer.

You lose all your resolve the first time the note hits and find yourself wrapped in some nameless emotion in which, just in that moment, you would be willing to do anything just to hear that sound again, just to hear that tune played one more time, a whisper of a lover on a single breath of song.

…You would do anything, just to hear his voice once more.

It may be the passions of the woman speaking within. That illustrious fantasy of having the man we all think we deserve. In dreams, there are no hindrances. In reality, there is little truth to what we do.

Who am I beneath the surface?

No one ever knows. Is there a path to the real you, when you subconscious is usually the most truthful? We live for ourselves, we are women of a selfish charm and there are no lies in that statement. We are selfish in a way in which we want a man who will be willing to bend at a moment's notice, who sweep us in a passion and have us begging on hands and knees to have them at our side. We act as if we are strong, but it's an act. We want the man to be our support. To hold us when we're weak even when we don't have the words.

…

The first time I saw Inuyasha I trembled inside. It was a horrific and magnificent experience all at once. He was everything you want in a man without even knowing who he was. I just, filled in the details for him. I didn't need to hear his voice right away; I made up my own words for him. He didn't need to touch because I could already imagine what he felt like. There is just something about an object you want so bad, but cannot have. I spike these crazy notions and all of a sudden your mind is conjuring up ways to lay your claim but your body just will not budge and in the end, you look like a total fool.

I felt like a schoolgirl who could tell her valentine what she felt and I was sitting 20 rows away from him. He was just so beautiful and elusive when he was up on stage that it was hard not to notice. Never had I had these feeling all in one sweep before. Never had I fallen so in love with the music of a man before I even met him. Women were supposed to be smart. I was supposed to be precocious and judge his character before even thinking of love.

But…it just happens.

Kouga was one of those things that just happened to be there. My mother (good god and her set ups!) scheduled a party and we met casually. Because of business negotiations between my father and his, we were set to be married. Only, I was 11 and he was 12 when we met. He was also shy and very boorish at times, but we got along fair enough. I used to think that if this is as close to loving someone as I can get than it cannot get much better, right?

I was dead wrong.

But I felt a type of love for Kouga. It was that protective, nurturing type of feeling that I got whenever he was around and sulking (which he did more often times than not). I felt attached to him in some way. Whether it was the fact that he was the only boy I had real close contact with, or the fact that he was possessive of me is uncertain, but that connection is there.

But why, I asked myself, why do I not feel so deeply for Kouga if I know him so well? Why is that I hardly knew Inuyasha yet I felt his presence within that made my heart race and my breath hitch?

The music he produced with those very hands touched my soul. I reached out to him even when he did not know I was there.

The first time he set his fingers on those keys I told myself I would not fall, that there was no room to fall. But I fell anyway. I was selfish because I wanted to. Somewhere deep down inside I wanted him to play those notes just for me. I wanted to be the little girl lost in her own fantasy. I didn't need the white stallion or the night in shining armor.

I just needed the music of his soul. The freedom that I knew he possessed.

…………The love that drove me to my most gifted and cursed past.

For Inuyasha, the pianist.