“This is culture,” Joey announced, from the exact center of Mike’s couch, one arm slung over his eyes, socked feet up on the armrest like he’d filed a claim on the whole piece of furniture and expected it to be honored.
“You’re playing, I’m resting my eyes and absorbing it.
This is basically a museum.
I’m a patron of the arts right now.”
“You’re asleep.”
“I’m appreciating, with my eyes closed, which some cultures consider the highest form of appreciation.” A yawn cracked the sentence in half.
“Keep going.
Don’t stop on my account.
This is doing wonders for my soul.”
Mike kept going.
The scale under his hands ran clean and automatic, the kind of thing his fingers did whether or not anyone in the room was technically listening, and by the third repetition Joey’s breathing had settled into the low, even rhythm of a man whose soul, wonders or not, had clocked out entirely.
It was, Mike had to admit, a strange kind of company not the audience the hour was built for, not really an audience at all, just warm background noise that happened to also be a person.
He’d expected the hour to feel smaller with someone unconscious six feet away.
It didn’t.
If anything the room held the sound better with a body in it, less like playing into an empty box and more like playing into something that could actually receive it, even snoring through the receiving.
He was thirty-five minutes in, deep into the repertoire he’d need that night three sets at a restaurant on the East Side, a room that had rebooked him twice now on the strength of exactly nothing more than being competent and on time when the knock came, familiar in its rhythm, and he knew who it was before he’d finished the phrase he was on.
He didn’t stop playing to answer it.
He called out instead, hands still moving.
“It’s open.”
Phoebe let herself in with the easy economy of someone who’d been in and out of this apartment enough times to have stopped treating the door as an event.
She took in the scene Joey horizontal and unconscious, Mike at the bench, the whole small room humming with sound that had nowhere to go but stay in it and something in her face did the thing it did when she found a detail she liked better than she expected to. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“He’s asleep.”
“He’s appreciating art.
With his eyes closed.”
“That’s what he told you?”
“Verbatim.”
She settled into the one clear patch of the couch not currently occupied by Joey’s socked feet, close enough to watch his hands without getting in their way, and didn’t say anything for a while, which was its own kind of company too the specific quiet of someone who’d learned that watching him work was its own conversation, one that didn’t need words layered over it.
He finished the section he was on.
Didn’t start the next one right away.
His hands ached faintly in the way hands do after thirty-five straight minutes, and behind that ache sat a smaller, older debt a handful of days back, an eight-minute gap he’d never fully made up, the edge of the Ear just slightly less certain than it should be on one particular tune he’d need tonight, the one that always got requested, the one that couldn’t afford to wobble.
“You’ve got the gig tonight,” Phoebe said.
Not a question.
“Yeah.”
“You should keep going, then.
I’ll be quiet.”
“You don’t have to sit here for it.”
“I want to.” She said it simply, no weight added, and then, a half-beat later, with the studied carelessness of someone pretending a thing mattered less than it did: “I have a shift tonight anyway.
Feet.
The usual.
So it’s not like I’m free to come watch you be good at something in front of strangers.” This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
He heard the shape of the sentence underneath the sentence the door she’d left open without quite walking through it, the invitation she wasn’t going to ask for because asking wasn’t her currency, watching was.
He opened his mouth to say something that would’ve closed that door cleanly, a real invitation, come if you finish your shift in time, I’ll leave your name at the door and Joey, deep in whatever dream a man has about being a patron of the arts, chose that exact moment to make a noise somewhere between a snore and a complaint, loud enough that both of them lost the thread entirely.
Phoebe laughed, quiet, careful not to wake him.
Mike let the moment go instead of chasing it back down, turned back to the keys, and picked up where the hour had left off the harder tune now, the one with the debt sitting under it, running it once clean, then again, testing the edge of it the way you test a stair you’re not sure will hold your weight.
It held.
Mostly.
There was a place in the bridge that still felt a half-degree softer than it should, a note that landed slightly late instead of exactly on time, small enough that Phoebe wouldn’t have caught it and Joey, three feet away, definitely hadn’t.
Mike caught it.
He filed the wobble away not fixed, not yet, just known, the quiet weight of a thing that would need to be paid for later, tonight, in front of a room that hadn’t agreed to be patient with him.
He looked at the clock on the wall.
The hour had eaten the whole afternoon, same as always, and Central Perk the couch, Gunther’s flat commentary, the small daily proof of showing up wasn’t going to happen today, not with the gig sitting three hours out and every one of those hours already spoken for by keys and scales and the debt he was trying to work back down to zero.
He chose the hour anyway.
There wasn’t really a version of tonight that worked if he didn’t.
“I have to keep going,” he said.
“I’m going to miss Central Perk today.”
“I noticed.” Phoebe didn’t seem bothered by it, exactly more like she was filing it too, in her own way, a small data point about what a man chose when he could only choose one thing.
“Go warm up.
I’ll wake Joey when it’s socially responsible.”