“Just shut the fuck up, man,” I sighed.
I was done with him. Done with today. Done with everything that wasn’t the woman in the backseat of my car holding her world together by a piano string.
“What do you like about classical music?” I asked her, despite my brain telling me to stop in my tracks and reverse.
The less I knew about her, the better, but right now, I would do just about anything to remove that thorn of sorrow from her evergreen eyes.
Scarlett didn’t look at me as I spoke to her, but I knew she heard me and could tell she was thinking. With her head resting against the window, she spoke in a voice sweeter than any music note.
“There’s no cheating. It’s just raw. Just the instruments and nothing in between.”
I nodded, digesting her words. “Do you still play piano?”
Slowly, she tilted that thorned sadness right to me.
“I don’t feel like it much anymore.”
God, she was so sad. So fucking sad.
“Did you do a lot of rich kid extracurriculars growing up?” Derek interjected.
Scarlett dropped her stare back to the passing street lights outside her window. “Just piano and gymnastics.”
“Oh, gymnastics? Now that’s a fun spectating sport.”
I opened my mouth to slap some verbal sense into him but exhaustion ended up closing my lips together. Derek wasn’t worth the shit on the bottom of my shoe, much less my time or words. Only one person in this car was.
I turned my attention back to her. “Did you like gymnastics?”
“I used to,” she mumbled.
A funny feeling circled in my gut. “What happened?”
That funny sort of feeling twisted in on itself as Scarlett slowly slid her eyes over to me, her gloom turning sick, rotting her green eyes from the inside out.
“People disappointed me.”