From upstairs on top of the covers, I imagine the club with a new, abstract form where Clooney used to sit. He used to tickle at the keys with practiced ease and comfort, dimly lit by low-hanging lights and obscured by smoke. But they got a new pianist.
With my enhanced hearing, I can hear everything down there. I can hear the mourning cello, the sorrowed guitar, the purring percussion, the resonating piano, and the salty smoothness the velvety vocalist brings to the mic every night.
I can hear how twin hearts find a rhythm in their magic, maybe a hand held or a dance shared in the shadows, a heavy-lidded gaze followed by their scampering, deliberate departure.
I can hear the girls at the bar gossip about the new guy, all rugged and straight lines and calloused hands and young.
The landlord said it'd be noisy, but I have shark DNA anyway and I knew what I was getting myself into, even during the unbearably hot nights like tonight, when I lay on my bed with barely a stitch on, and let the heat and vibrations and emotions rise up through my floor, through my bed, through me.
But tonight, the new guy plays alone, and it is haunting. For the first time since I moved here, I imagine someone else's hands all over my body – rugged, calloused, haunted hands playing against me until I cry out.
He plays like he made my choices. He plays like it is his room above the club, like he is up her, not me. Somehow he plays everything I am now.
After three in the morning and downstairs, he's as quiet as I am upstairs, reflecting on the choices we've made to survive, and before I can feel it throughout my bones, he's playing again. Playing my song.
Maybe his song, too.
He's in rare form tonight, probably his true form. By the way he plucks the piano so painfully, so soulfully, I think it might be my penance – that I should take it where I can, when I can. And I can take it here, now.
Downstairs, I peek through the door's small window which separates us. I can see him, hard at this business of changing the music in our lives, bent over the keys as if in prayer, and I realize that those girls are right: rugged, straight lines, calloused hands, young; and I am right: haunted.
He's handsome, and rough, and it doesn't take me very long to figure out I want him, or to be startled when he looks up and pins me with a stare, lips slightly parted, low light showing a depth in his eyes beyond memory.