Nocturne by Alyssa Wees

Author:Alyssa Wees [Wees, Alyssa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Worlds
Published: 2023-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

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Fingers in my hair, playing, pulling my head upright from where I had sagged heavily to the side, my neck stiff and sore, insisting that I open my eyes, that I look—but when I turned, no one was there. The car slid so slowly through the streets that if not for the tiny bumps and bounces as we jostled over potholes and cracks in the pavement, I wouldn’t have thought we were moving at all. Every window was frosted, even the windshield, and the sunlight—sunlight?—was so bright that I couldn’t discern anything beyond the interior, our warm little world of leather seats and spinning dials on the dashboard, the hum of the engine and murmur of the radio, faraway voices unintelligible. Lulled into a placid trance, it took me longer than it should have to realize that it was no longer Mr. Russo in the driver’s seat—it was Lorenzo.

“Hey there, bearcat.” Even with his back to me, I would have known him anywhere: his tall, lanky, sixteen-year-old frame, wrists so thin they looked likely to snap at the slightest provocation; slightly hunched shoulders, thick curling hair kept just a little too long, too shaggy, prompting Mamma to scold him that it was past time for a trim. And his voice—it had a melody, an ebb and flow like the waves of Lake Michigan, a lightness to it like morning, like the world always on the brink of beginning. I leaned forward, straining for a glimpse of his smile, but no matter how far I stretched from the backseat he angled his face away from me so that I couldn’t see beyond the edge of his jaw, the side of his cheek. “Where to, Gracie girl?”

Where to? Did it matter where we went, so long as we were together?

“Voglio…” I said slowly, reaching for a language I hadn’t spoken in an eternity, even though it wasn’t necessary. It felt right to use it, more honest. True. “Tornare indietro.”

“You want to go back?” His hands drummed the steering wheel, completely out of tune with the music on the radio. “Back to the beginning? Or back to the end?”

I stared at the nape of his neck, wanting so badly to touch him, to tug on his hair. But I was afraid that if I did, he would disappear. “How can I return to the end when I haven’t been there yet?”

“The end came and went a long time ago,” he said, but now his voice wasn’t his; it was no longer light. Instead it was Mr. Russo’s voice, deep and measured like an anchor scraping along the bottom of the sea, dragging me along with it. “It came and went without you.”

I sighed, sinking back into my seat. “I have to go to rehearsal.”

“And then?”

I was so sleepy. I let my head loll to the side. “The Master’s house.”

“And then?”

I closed my eyes. “There is nowhere else.”

And, quietly, as I drifted off again, Mr. Russo’s low voice with Lorenzo’s playful cadence: “Oh, bearcat.

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