Rush (City Lights Series, #3)

by Emma Scott

Pretty good but not quite enough. It was amazing—and depressing—how much of my life those days could be described with that sentence.

“There are times in this life in which we must do what is best, and so often what is best is not what is easy.”

“I loved my job, you know? I loved writing and taking photographs and visiting every corner of the world, and losing all that…” He swallowed hard, a jagged lump of pain. “Losing all that is bad enough. But I lost something else, something I craved and lived off of, almost as much as I did air and food and water.” “What’s that?” “The rush. The adrenaline. The thrill of walking the edge of life and death, like a tightrope. I didn’t have a death wish, but I loved taunting it. When I was throwing myself out of planes or skiing down triple black diamonds…that’s when I felt that amazing fear. That chest-tightening, ball-shriveling fear that you’re right there, about to lose it all. Because only when you’re about to lose it all, do you realize how much you have.”

Maybe. Maybe is gradations of darkness. The sweetest torture. Maybe is hope.

After the accident I thought I’d never know the kind of pure, unadulterated bliss I’d felt in Peru ever again. It was lost to me when the rocks stole my sight. That euphoria of endless possibility was gone forever. And then I met Charlotte.

My future with Charlotte, I realized, was the last undiscovered country I would ever travel.

I slipped the glasses on. They felt light but sturdy. And expensive. Ava had great taste. I wondered what I looked like in them. I wondered if I might someday forget what I looked like.

Charlotte called up to me. “Ready?” No. But I’m trying, baby. I really am. “On my way,” I called back and went out.

“Until you, I was lost. Sometimes, you’re the only thing that ever feels real to me.” I stroked his cheek. “I’ll always be right here for you, Noah.”

The strength of my feelings for her scared me more than a knife in the dark.

Lucien’s appearance—the exact details—was slipping from my memory, like a sketch slowly erased. My parents too. And Ava. I had Charlotte but only because I touched her face so often. But now that she was gone…what if I lost that too? The thought made me more nauseated than my hangover.

I laughed and nodded, and we embraced again as if we’d known each other for years. But sometimes that’s just how it is with people; a connection is made, and it can transcend space and time. It can make family out of strangers.

And moving on, I realized, wasn’t the same as forgetting or even letting go. It was making a tentative peace with tragedy and doing the best we could forever after.

I didn’t want to learn to function blind. I didn’t want to be blind at all. My grief wasn’t deep or poetic. It was sinister in its simplicity. I wanted to see again and I never would. That was my torment: two implacable forces, smashing up against one another like tectonic plates along a fault, waiting for the other to give. My blindness couldn’t and I didn’t want to, so I remained caught between them. And it was crushing the life out of me.

“Second thoughts?” he asked softly. “A million of them. But that’s not it.” I hesitated. “I’m…I don’t remember what people look like anymore. Mom and Dad… They’re like blurred photos. And Ava. I know she’s beautiful and that’s all that sticks. And you. I can’t remember you, Lucien.” “It’s all right, my boy. I’m quite past my prime,” he said, trying to be light while I was suddenly stricken with a glut of emotion. A dam—one of hundreds within me—began to crack. I turned to Lucien, and before I could second guess myself or worry what other people thought, I put my hands on his face and looked at him…and he came back. All of him; his kind eyes, heavy brow, and a face drawn with laugh lines. “Thank you for everything,” I said thickly and then cast off from the safety of him into the black unknown.

I marveled at how easy it all had been…and how far away I was from that guy. I only wanted Charlotte, would only ever want Charlotte. My love for her ran so deep, it left room for nothing else, not even curiosity.

I had no idea of the program, of course. I recognized nothing of the four or five pieces they played, but it didn’t matter in the slightest. The music washed over me and carried me along its soft currents. Charlotte’s violin was indistinct from the rest of the orchestra, but I imagined I could hear her anyway. She was there. In the same room with me, even if that room was enormous and she and I at opposite ends. My Charlotte was there, and I could feel her; her energy and love and everything she poured into her music. I felt the stress of the day loosen its grip on my mind and muscles. That feeling, that euphoria of possibility, reinforced the idea that I was doing the right thing. It was quite obviously going to be harder than I ever foolishly imagined it to be. The hardest thing I’d ever done, but wasn’t that the point? I wouldn’t give up. I couldn’t. The long, black road lay stretched out before me, but I would walk it because Charlotte Conroy was waiting for me on the other side.

The tour began and it was immediately obvious it was going to be a daunting whirlwind of dates and cities and one gorgeous concert hall after another. I was only a section violin, second chair, but I played as if I were our soloist, pouring my heart and soul into my music. And my love, that is all for Noah. I played as if he could hear me, suffusing every note with my love for him, sending it out into the ether. “He has supersonic hearing,” I murmured to myself one night in a hotel with Annalie snoring gently in the opposite bed. “Maybe he’ll hear me.”

With every performance, I felt the music grow and bloom in me, my heart thawing from the longest winter. As an artist performing and perfecting her craft, in the cities of Europe that held so much of the musical history, I was having the time of my life.

I had to ask for help everywhere, every day, of strangers as they passed by, snagging them as they went and hoping they’d forgive my intrusion. Or—worse—interrupting conversations with terrible German or halting Italian, praying for an English speaker to tell me which seat was mine? Which way to the ticket office? Which way to the cabstand or train station or hotel front desk? Which way to Charlotte? I wanted to scream and fall at her feet and touch her cheek, her hand…just for a moment, to remind me what it was all for.

The vast majority of people on the planet are kind before they are cruel, but I didn’t escape the snickers and jabs of the not-so-kind.

I had no way of knowing, of assessing the people around me for potential danger. I had to trust. I had to hope. And sometimes, I just straight-up prayed.

I told her I loved her and that I missed her and that I was working to make myself whole so that we could be together, because it was clear to me that I’d have to shatter first and be put back together. This journey was going to break me down in every way, and I’d either arise from it victorious, or it would destroy me, and the way things had begun, I worried it would be the latter.

One Monster with no Azapram would do me in. And I was walking a thin line, already. The old anger and bitterness—the absolute hatred of my situation—had been awakened, and each difficulty was another log on the fire until the inferno was raging. I felt feverish. My teeth clenched, and I had to remind myself to loosen up before the Monster awoke again.

Another nameless, faceless stranger, here and gone again. My world was populated with them; guardian angels I would never meet but who made it possible for me to take the next step to Charlotte.

I was hurrying as fast as I could, but once the water hit me, I slumped and turned my face to the spray, my weariness expanding and spreading through me with the water’s heat. Charlotte. Where are you? Why aren’t you here with me?

That’s what Noah was currently trying to do, I realized—fall back in love with life and living.

Okay, baby, I answered, because Charlotte had been speaking to me, even if she hadn’t known I was there to hear it. She hadn’t met someone else—the idea was ludicrous to me now. She was waiting for me, and her heart ached for me as much as mine ached for her. I heard it in her music, as plain as if she were speaking words. My anger melted away like wax in the hot sun. I won’t give up, I promised her. I won’t. No matter how hard it gets, I swear to you, Charlotte, I’ll keep going. For you, baby. For you…

I reached out and she put the crook of her arm to my fingers. There was more of her to hold, but so fucking what? Marit was an angel of mercy, and she was beautiful. And it didn’t matter what she looked like, anyway. She could have been as gorgeous as Valentina in real life, but she’d never get any closer to my heart. Charlotte owned that particular piece of me. Hell, she owned all of me, heart and soul, but thanks to Marit, instead of heading to the airport in defeat, I was back on that long, dark road to where Charlotte was waiting. Saint Marit, that’s what she was and always would be.

I grabbed for Marit’s hand and squeezed, my other hand holding my head as I bent over, wracked by sobs I tried my best to keep quiet. I broke open, broke apart, and let all the rage and pain and bitterness go. It was too hard to hold on to, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I thought I was holding on to my old life, but there wasn’t anything left of it. Only ugly residue, and that, I finally realized, wasn’t worth holding on to. Everything I thought I knew about what it meant to be a man was stripped away. What remained was what it meant to be a man who loved a woman as much as I did. To be a human being experiencing this life in all its ugliness, its beauty, its pain and hate; good and evil; love and death. So yeah, I sobbed like a goddamn baby, but I’d never felt more like myself—whatever that was or whatever it was going to be—than at that moment.

“So…remember when I told you it was crazy, what you were doing?” “Change your mind?” “No,” she laughed. “But it’s kind of heroic, Noah. I don’t think you see it that way, but maybe you should.” I smiled. “I think you read too many comic books.” “Probably,” she said, and I could hear her voice retreating down the hall. “But I love them because, in the end, the hero always gets the girl.”

Throughout this tour, she’d become a best friend. Not replacing Melanie—no one could do that. Annalie didn’t need a title. I just added her to the list of people in my life I wanted to know forever.

My girl. My love. My Charlotte.

but even more than the ecstasy of lust, the love I had for her spurred me. It drove me deep inside her, to make her mine—not as a possession but as a completion of me. My life. She is my life.

“A last wish I’m afraid won’t ever fade. I’ve made peace with my blindness, but if I could see just once more—just one thing in this world—it would be you. I would only need a second. One second, and I would hold the image of you in my heart forever.”