• Sometimes, the music is just mandatory •

He pressed the bow to the strings. I held my breath, and so did the world as it waited for his next moves, waited for the unexpected. Eternities managed to pass by in just seconds, but then, with a long, slow exhale, it happened.

He let the bow glide across the violin, and like that, every sensation evaded my body; Just one, long note bled from the strings, but I was nailed to my spot, unable to move.

The second note then came, and then the next, and the next. In a violent crescendo, the notes came and flooded until they pierced my ears in a high shrill, and then...

Silence.

My breath froze. The air froze. Even the world froze.

Then... He begun anew.

His fingers wielded the strings with care, almost beautifully, like he was greeting an old lover. One he ended on bad terms with. It was a sad hello... if it even was hello at all. When the next note struck, I quickly realized it wasn't a sad, old lovers reunion.

It was two enemies colliding once more.

The tune changed completely, and suddenly, it was bitter, like the old taste of alcohol on someone's breath. Next moment, bitter turned into disgust. And then disgust turned into anger.

Within seconds, the tune began to grow wild, uninhibited. It was haunted, strident. Manic.

And then... beautiful.

My heart thudded hard in my chest as he played the strings. Played them. Like a fragile soul, he made it believe everything was okay before striking once again, pouring buckets of ice cold wrath over it. And then he soothed it again.

Back and forth. Hate, love. Love, hate. Like a cruel mistress, he wheeled his lover in, then pushed it away; Wheeled it in... throttled it away.

But then it became insufficient. The torture wasn't enough, he wasn't satisfied... he craved... more.

The confusing lovers spat quickly turned into a heated argument as he sloped the bow over the strings and forced them to suffer. He was aggressive. Brutal. He didn't hold back. He hit each string with the bow, sawed across them and then dragged out their screams until they wept. Until they bled.

I suddenly understood him. When he had called the former owner of the violin a butcher, he had been right.

This... this was how to play it.

He played it. No, he felt it. He was moving with each note, his brows creasing and his lips flattening as melancholia mixed with turbulence. He was wild. He played like he was insane. Like a puppet master guiding his puppets until their strings wound up and finally snapped. And yet, he still kept playing. He danced with the violin, fought with it, battled with it while the tune only got crazier and crazier.

And yet, he was in complete control.

As insane as the music got, he was still it's master. He decided what it was allowed to feel. When it was allowed to scream. To bleed. Not one single time did it disobey him. A part of me wondered what he'd do if it did. How would he make it suffer then?

His upper lip curled back when a note of something foreign to me, but poisonous to him vowed itself into the notes; something I thought I knew, but now was proven vigorously wrong. Nothing I had ever felt compared to what he was feeling right now. Like the seas that pooled in his eyes, seas of unknown and undiscovered feelings and emotions flooded from the instrument he used to harvest them with.

It was submission. His face was angry as he moved the bow and dragged it across each note as if it had offended him, had hurt him severely. He beat it to near death in return, made it feel his wrath in each sick note that only grew crazier until a cacophony of wild, crazy and tortured screams bled from the instrument.

The echo from the subway was his companion. The violin's agony bounced off the tiled walls and filled the empty station with music that should've filled a concert hall.

Or a heart.

I suddenly registered something wet on my lip. Tears.

I had been so swallowed by the torments pouring from his heart, I hadn't even noticed how my own was thumping hard in my ribcage, thumping out of control.

Who was he?

The music told me everything about what he was feeling; Pain. Hurt. Confusion. Anger. Wrath. Sadness. More pain.

But not one single note told me who he was or where he came from. Who had taught him how to harness his emotions through this tool. Who had hurt him. Who he was playing for.

He wasn't playing for himself, I knew that much. He was aching, but not for me. Not for the cockroaches climbing the walls. Not for the rats crawling on the train tracks. Not for all the ghosts listening in. Not even for the angels crying in the sky.

He was playing for someone in particular.

Someone he had lost.

His tune came to an end. I wasn't ready. His torturing came to an abrupt stop and then it was done; The cold of winter came back. The smell of vomit seeped into my nose again. My senses, both amplified and somehow subdued by his music, seemed to clench back into autopilot, no longer controlled like a marionette by his torture of the strings.

I realized I had been quiet all along. I hadn't spoken a word. I had just been standing there, listening to his single man opera, completely enthralled by what he could do. What he could feel. What he could make me feel. What he could create with just one instrument and cure with just one melody.

And now I realized, he didn't care one fucking bit.

He lowered the violin from his chin and then slowly stared down at it with a dark look; with hatred. Then, as if it had been nothing but a cheap, drunken one-night-stand, he parted with it. He put it back into the suitcase and let the bow rest on top of it before he closed it, snatching the latches shut. I was forced to stumble back when he stood up, rising to his impressive height.

His eyes met mine. By the look in them, I thought he was going to yell. Thought he was gonna tell me to scram, or maybe even throw a curse at me.

But instead, he just lift the suitcase towards me.

I blinked perplexed. Shocked. He wanted me to take it?

I looked up at him. He met my eyes. I blinked again. He didn't say a word. He only pushed the violin case towards me again, ordering me to take it.

"N-no..." I heard myself stutter. What was I saying? I should take it. It didn't belong to him.

But it did. The instrument and this man weren't supposed to be separated. Like Ying and Yang, they were somehow born together, yet were two separate things, never meant to be apart from the other. The violin suffered in the hands of others, but he suffered with it.

He had played... but he had been hurting. Last night, he had been cursing and angry. Cold and dismissive.

With the violin... he had felt. And he couldn't stand it.

It was like a bitter love. He cared for the violin, but couldn't be near it. He had stolen it last night and had had an affair with it this night, only to wring it back to it's previous partner.

"Take it," He now said, his voice hard. He kept holding the suitcase out to me, but my hands still didn't flex to take it. When he grew impatient with my statuesque form, he let out a harsh sound and grabbed my hands for me, forcing me to take it. "Bring it back."

"But..." I whispered when he forced my hands to lock around the burly, yet light violin case. His palms were calloused and dirty, but they were gone just as quickly as they came.

I wanted to say the instrument belonged to him, but I didn't want him thinking I was crazy. After all, this was a little crazy. I had no idea what had happened tonight. Something in my heart told me I probably never would.

Without a word, the man suddenly turned on his feet and walked around me, walking back the way I came, back up to the streets. His broken boots echoed against the floors as he walked away, like a bitter parody of a drum trying to steal the encore.

I had half a mind to follow him, but my feet wouldn't move. Stupidly, I stayed behind, holding a stolen violin case which I had no idea what to do with. It didn't belong in my hands, but nor did it belong to The Aristocat Lounge.

But its true owner had rejected it.

~~~

"I miss work for one evening and you manage to find what appears to be Mozart's long lost descendant?" Dan noted that Sunday morning as we both sat on our couch, sipping our morning coffee. It was past 11am, but to us, that was morning. "Jesus, Mel. And you didn't even get his name?"

I shook my head. I didn't know where the hell my brain had been last night. I hadn't said one sentence, let alone asked for his name. Would he even have answered me? I didn't think so. "I still can't believe it. You should've been there, Dan. You should've heard it. It was... I can't even explain it. It was that unbelievable."

"You sound like you heard the birthcries of baby Jesus," He chuckled, calmly taking a sip of his coffee. "I would've loved to have been there, but I was a little busy last night."

"Oh yeah, that's right. How was your date?"

"Quite a mouthful."

"Dan—"

"If you start being a prude now, I'm telling Carlos that his missing violin is currently sitting in our living room."

I sighed and glanced at the violin lying on our coffee table, noticing Dan doing the same. I hadn't known what to do with it, so I had brought it home with me. I couldn't very well leave it in the subway, hoping maybe he would come back to reclaim it with a changed mind. The thing I regretted the most was not asking for his name. A part of me wanted to put a name on the soul who had touched mine.

Another part wished I had followed him and shoved the violin back into his hands and shackled it to him.

Instead, I had ridden the tube home with a stolen violin in my lap.

"I'm gonna go take a shower," I finally said, sighing and putting my coffee mug down.

"You do that," Dan agreed, slinging his feet up on the now empty couch. "I'm gonna stay here and wait for Kyle to wake up."

"Wait, he's here?"

"You didn't think I sucked him off at the restaurant, did you?"

I shook my head, then walked into our bathroom and locked the door, shrugging out of my morning robe. I stepped into the stall and turned on the water, tempering it. I then reveled under the warm spray for a good ten minutes before I begun the soaping process, rinsing my hair and lathering up my body.

It was strange. My skin felt oddly... tingly. A sensation I hadn't felt in over a year. It had been like that ever since last night, ever since...

I shuddered.

Maybe violins had a secret power over me. Some people curled their toes at a British accent, and apparently, my skin flushed at the screech of a violin.

I finished up in the shower and stepped out, wrapping a soft towel around my body. I grabbed my hard brush and did my best to comb it through my thick curls that stubbornly remained filtered. It helped after I added some oils and then finger-combed the rest.

After that, I lathered my body in my favorite moisturizer and headed into my bedroom to get dressed. I wasn't in the mood for anything serious, so I simply put on my sweatpants and pulled on a loose top, letting my hair air dry on my back.

By the time I came back into the kitchen, Dan and his date Kyle was awake and was cooking some breakfast, it appeared. They were talking and chuckling when I came up to the counter.

"Oh, Kyle, this is my roommate, Melody," Dan introduced as I stuck my hand out to Kyle who shook it with a smile "Melody, Kyle."

"Nice to finally meet you," I smiled and allowed myself to take a glance down Kyle's persona. He was only wearing his boxers, so practically everything was on display. He was a dark blond guy with a fairly tan skin and a chiseled body. Standing next to Dan with his gorgeous six-pack and Hollywood face, the kitchen suddenly turned too hot for me.

"It's my pleasure," Kyle smiled back and reciprocated the favor of giving me a thorough glance, though not with the same hungry eyes I had given him. "Dan talked a lot about you last night. If you need help finding some dick, I'm friends with a few straight swimmers," He offered with a little smirk when I glared murderously at Dan for oversharing. "Want me to hook you up?"

"Forget it, I've tried to get her to go dick-hunting with me for six months," Dan commented, sipping a mug of coffee while Kyle stirred the scrambled eggs on the stove. I shot Dan another glare when his lips twitched in bemusement. "But it's like she's lost interest in riding- or hell, even finding actual, non-battery driven appendages."

"I can't say I know what that's like," Kyle told, shooting a look at Dan. I had to roll my eyes when Dan smirked at him, then set his mug of coffee down to lean in and place a kiss on Kyle's lips. The kiss quickly evolved before my eyes, turning into tongue, petting and all things I did not need to see or hear that early in the morning.

I cleared my throat loudly. "Excuse you, but I still very much do like me some dick, and the live gay porn in my kitchen isn't helping. Stuff it back in your pants unless you're gonna let me participate."

Dan placed one last kiss on Kyle's lips, dragging his bottom lip in between his teeth, before drawing back, breathing heavily. Kyle licked his lips and then grinned at him, some private thing passing between them, I was sure.

I was shaking my head when Dan finally turned his eyes to me and sighed. "We're trying to make a point here, Mel. Tell me you don't want a nice smooch like that in the morning by a hot guy as well, then we can move on. But since you do," He said and leaned forward on the counter to look at me, "You're coming out with me and Kyle next Friday and we're going to help you find a healthy dick."

"I am very capable of finding a man by myself, thank you very much," I said with a little purse of my lips when Dan snorted and shook his head. "Mason doesn't count, you can't call him a man, and if it wasn't because I decided to go celibate—"

"But you ended that celibacy two days ago," Dan reminded me. "And since then, the only man you managed to find is a tramp on the street with a freakish talent, and you even managed to lose him, so, no offense, Mel, but we're going to help you find cock on Friday."

"I'm good at finding cocks," Kyle contributed, leaning a little backwards to poke his head out behind Dan's broad frame. I gave him a flat look.

"Fine," I finally gave up, rolling my eyes when Dan grinned victoriously to Kyle. If it would shut them up, I would go out with them and see what they could scope out. "But no gay bars. I don't care what you say, how straight can straight guys be if they come there."

"Don't worry, we'll find a good place," Dan assured, now opening the fridge to grab some OJ. "We got this. You just worry about looking good." He told as I began walking back towards my bedroom.

"Bitch, please. I always look good." I didn't hear Dan's reply as I closed the door and let myself fall down into my bed, staring up at my ceiling. I had a mirror up there. I saw the deep, thoughtful look in my dark eyes that squinted ever so slightly when I thought as hard as I currently did.

Right now, my biggest concern wasn't finding a man or even looking good. It was finding a certain man and making sure the violin found its way back into his torturous hands.

Usually it was the instrument that tortured the man, but this time around, it was the man who had tortured the instrument. He had wielded and whipped the poor strings under his bow, and he had liked it. It had been clear as day.

What was left as a mystery to me was why he then parted with it—handed it over to a stranger. I needed to know. Had to. I didn't know why, I just did.

Groaning tiredly, I rolled over on my stomach, bunching my hands under my pillow and settling comfortably until Dan called with breakfast. Since when had I become the obsessive type?

"I must be losing my mind."

• • •

Aren't we all?