Vivaldi in the Dark Box Set

Chapter 13-2

Jayden never sat in the audience to watch his plays.

Dad was down there somewhere, and Uncle Andy. (Secretly, Jayden thought Uncle Andy had a thing for Joy, one of the regulars at Stars, but he never did anything about it.) But Jayden never watched his own plays from the audience. He watched from the stairs to the lighting box, hidden in the dark, and mouthed the words along with the actors, noting every slip, every ad-lib, every deviance. Sometimes, Mum could distract him, because she was an amazing actress and she always drew focus in scenes, but even that didn’t last for long.

This time, he watched none of that.

Darren had every right to be nervous, because he was on the stage for the entire time. Cooper was the protagonist: there wasn’t a single scene when he was off the stage, and where he went, Darren had to follow, providing a live soundtrack to his experiences. And being only visible—and audible—to Cooper.

But the moment the curtain went up, Jayden was captivated.

He hadn’t really talked to Darren about this. The first minute of the play was Cooper writing letters while Darren played. Nothing else. Just a man at a desk, and a violinist. And Jayden hadn’t known what to tell Darren to play. So the first haunting notes that drifted away from the boards and fluttered in the air were new, and beautiful, and fitting.

And then they screeched into a violent clatter of fury when Cooper threw himself up and began pacing, mumbling to himself. Inaudible at first, and then growing louder, but Jayden heard nothing.

He tracked Darren’s smooth glide across the floor, the blank expression on his face visible even from here, and heard absolutely nothing that Cooper said. The dialogue that he’d spent hours slaving over just disappeared in the wake of the furious crescendo from Darren’s violin.

There was a beauty in the music—it was unique. Darren had spent several weeks just rehearsing with Pete, following him around in readings and playing anything that fit what he said and did at any time. It had changed subtly every time. And now, Jayden knew he’d never heard quite that combination before, and he never would again. Tomorrow, it would be different—only the odd note, here and there, but different.

For the first time, Jayden followed the music and the musician, not the actors. Pete’s Cooper was brilliant as always; Mum’s Jayne fretted and worried in all the right places, but Jayden hardly noticed. He followed Darren, from the smooth way he could walk and play like it was the most natural thing in the world, to the raised eyebrow and curled lip when Cooper begged him to stop at the end of the first act. The way he stuck out his chin, turned his head so deliberately, and drew out the final C.

He wasn’t acting, Jayden knew it. It was all Darren, and he knew it, and he couldn’t wipe the smile off his face, because he did it all so beautifully. Halfway through the second act, he drove Cooper to distraction by following one of the other actors around the stage so closely, they almost collided with the violin twice. He met every challenge with an eye roll, a turn of the head, a twist in his body that screamed insolence, and when he deviated from the plan just enough to pause, bow, and make way for Jayne—who ignored him, of course, as she couldn’t see him—Jayden almost laughed out loud in surprised delight.

He should have known.

He should have realised sooner, but he didn’t.

The climax of the play—the hospital room, Cooper finally driven to madness pleading for the imaginary soloist to be gone—was cut out by the lights, the spotlight booming as it was switched off, and the roving lights around the stage formed a ring of tiny lights around the patient and the source of his insanity.

And Jayden’s breath caught in his chest.

Even from the stairs, he could see the faintest glimmers of copper in Darren’s hair. The music wrapped itself around that white face, tracing the straight nose and cupping the set of his jaw. He was bolt-straight, swaying only in the upper body with the movement of playing, and entirely monochromatic. Dark hair, dark clothes, bleached-white skin, the glint of light off the polished wood of the violin, flashing off the bow with every high note, flickering along it with every long one…

Cooper screamed for the final time, but Jayden heard only the music, Darren unwinding with a fluid ripple and crossing the stage, the notes bowling along in the air like moths in a frenzy, the lights catching his face and his shoes and his hair in short sputters and false starts as the lights followed him like a mobbing crowd.

Darren stopped, at the far right and downstage, and turned bodily towards the stairs. When he looked slowly and deliberately up, still playing, one of the roving lights flirting with the line of his arm and the sharp cut of his elbow as he sliced a long rattle of high, tight notes off the strings…Jayden’s heart stopped. He was too far away for it to be real, but when Darren’s eyes came up, Jayden could imagine that shimmer of pale green swimming in his gaze.

It punched him in the chest like a heart attack, and his vision tunnelled on the impossibly beautiful, ridiculously perfect, ethereal shadow tracing the boards of the stage—and right there, right there, Jayden Phillips fell in love.

The music stopped.

* * * *

Darren managed to pack up his violin, change back into comfortable clothes, and had his head in the sink to wash out that bloody gel, before Jayden caught up to him.

“Gimme a minute,” he said, squeezing the icy water out of his hair, but then Jayden’s hands were on his shoulders and pulling him away from the sink, and Darren’s irritation subsided when he found himself against the bathroom door and being kissed as if there was no oxygen in the room and he had the only lungful.

When Jayden finally let him breathe, there was an odd expression on that pale face.

“You okay?” Darren asked warily.

There was something…off. Like Jayden had learned some awful secret. Like he was trying to tell Darren something without actually saying anything. Like he’d found f*****g God. His eyes were too bright, his hands were too tight on Darren’s biceps, his behaviour too forward. Something had happened, but Darren couldn’t think between sink-induced brain freeze and Jayden-induced kiss-freeze. Or something.

“I told you you’d be amazing,” Jayden said breathlessly.

“Thanks?”

“I couldn’t stop watching you,” Jayden blurted out, and he didn’t even change colour. He was flushed already, though, so maybe that was why. “I mean, you were just…this is going to sound really quite creepy and lame, but, I mean, I thought you were gorgeous the minute I saw you, even if you did try to cut off my head with a violin bow, but you on that stage being so cocky about it…I just…”

Darren thought about interrupting, or trying to actually work out what Jayden was trying to say, but Jayden cut himself off and kissed him again, holding Darren’s face in both hands so he couldn’t escape, and pushing him against the door again. Darren promptly forgot about his confusion (though not quite his wet hair, which was dripping down his neck and being quite gross about it thanks to the remnants of gel) and wrapped both arms around Jayden’s back, locking him in.

It took another twenty minutes of slow brain death via oxygen deprivation against the door before Darren was able to persuade Jayden to let him finish washing his hair, and then Scott was calling, asking where he wanted picking up from, and Jayden’s Mum was knocking on the bathroom door and calling for him…

But before he disappeared, Jayden kissed him, short and sweet and fleeting at the corner of his mouth, and whispered, “If I ever catch you with that violin again, I don’t know what I’ll do,” and it made the whole thing completely f*****g worth it.

* * * *