Chapter Text
“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
Edith Wharton
︵‿︵ 🎹 ︵‿︵
Eddie
The month of January is frigid in New York, the threat of ice always hanging heavy in the air, and this night is no different. Eddie shivers against the cold, pushing his hands deeper into the pockets of his fleece-lined jacket as he gazes up at the front face of the B-Side Jazz Club, red and blue neon outlining the sign, stark against the dark of the night. The brick exterior has been painted black, the windows set deep into alcoves, giving the whole building an air of mystery and moodiness that strikes Eddie as undeniably charming.
It’s not Birdland, but it’ll do. Inside, the air is buzzing, warm and thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and strong, dark liquor. The walls are painted a blue so deep it's almost black in the low light, strewn with paintings and photographs from times gone by in careful disarray. The dim lights inset into the ceiling and mounted to the walls cast the room in a yellow glow, the tittering of barflies, first dates, and regulars basking the whole space in ambient sound. Eddie casts his gaze around the place, takes a breath and sighs contentedly, feeling at home in his element. The nostalgia, the ease, the atmosphere. God, how he’s missed this. The stuffy halls of Juilliard and the subsequent staunch concert venues where he cut his teeth could never amount to the pure adrenaline and joy of playing in low-lit bars for well-lubricated audiences, a strong drink sat on the piano and a sense of simplicity in the way his fingers danced across the keys.
On the stage located towards the front of the house, Gareth is already setting up, giving his drums a few experimental licks. Eddie walks a slow lap around the piano, inspecting it, taking a seat at the bench and running his fingertips lightly down the keys. It’s a stunning instrument, an old Steinway that looks to have been refurbished, its black surface glossy, keys pale ivory white. They bounce back with beautiful tension when he plucks a few notes.
“Where’s our star?” Eddie asks, leaning to the side to be able to see around the propped lid of the piano.
“Donna can’t come in,” Gareth relays, giving a dramatic roll of his eyes. “Tonsillitis, she said.”
“Fuck, that’s rough.” Eddie worries at his bottom lip with blunt teeth, testing the give of the pedals underneath his black Oxfords. Donna had been a major draw for their set tonight, fresh off the back of two Carnegie Hall performances that had gotten rave reviews.
“Yeah, rough for us,” he grumbles, setting his drum brush aside. “We had to call in a backup guy.”
Eddie frowns. “A guy? How’s that supposed to work?”
“We can just transpose the key down,” Gareth shrugs. “That work for you?”
Of course it works, Eddie could transpose keys in his sleep, but it’s the principle of the matter that irks him. They’ve had this gig lined up for weeks, and this diva couldn’t gargle a little lemon water and suck it up?
“I mean, yeah. Can I give it a run-through first?”
“Knock yourself out,” Gareth says, standing from his place behind his drums to move towards the front of the stage. “We’re on in twenty.” He hops off the lip and strolls back towards the bar, sliding onto one of the stools. Eddie rolls his neck, cracks his knuckles softly and shakes his hands loose.
He plunks his way through the original melody once, not attuning to things like style or grace, and then does the mental calculations to transpose the key down, plays the melody again in the new key. It’s easy enough, nothing he can’t manage, and he finds himself quickly distracted by the timbre of the piano, the smooth warmth of each note as it hums in the air. He slides his fingers lovingly across the keys, plays a few chords and smiles, closes his eyes and listens to the sounds floating from the piano, fading into the background noise.
He’s always loved music, his greatest solace throughout the tumultuous years of his childhood after a brutal car accident had left him effectively orphaned. His uncle Wayne was a kind man, gruff and unwavering in his affection, and he did what he could, but there was only so much to be done about the crushing grief that ate at Eddie’s edges in the quiet of the night, hollowing him inside until the wind and all of Wayne’s love whistled straight through. There was an emptiness in Eddie that couldn’t be filled, aching and insistent in his chest. He did what he could to ignore it, got into more trouble than he liked to admit. The shot of adrenaline born of the thrill of nearly being caught was the closest thing he could find to feeling alive once more, and he thirsted after it like a drug. He was only fourteen, gangly and green behind the ears, but he was addicted.
The fourth time that the local sheriff brough Eddie home was the first time that Wayne grounded him, at his wit’s end and worried beyond what he could relay in words. Eddie spent the weekend grouchily rifling through all of their belongings, trying to find something to do in the god-forsaken trailer while Wayne was working. It was in a beat up cardboard box in the closet that he discovered three jazz vinyls, the covers well-worn and caked in dust. Wayne startled to see Eddie holding them when he walked in the door later that evening, the surprised look on his face quickly dissolving into something softer and sadder.
“Those were your mom’s,” he told him, busying himself with something in the closet. He hoisted down an old record player, setting it up on the coffee table in front of the couch. Eddie had never remembered much about his parents aside from snippets and flashes, like butterflies dancing through his brain that he could never quite hold. Except for the crash. He remembered the crash well. It played behind his eyelids on his worst nights, shoving him from sleep in a fit of cold sweat and labored breathing.
Grainy sound poured through the trailer, and Eddie sat, mesmerized, as he watched the record spin in circles, dust dancing in the thick beams of sunlight that streamed in through the window. Memory tugged at him, slipped into his conscious mind and painted a picture of him, no more than four, sitting on his mother’s lap while she played the piano – a junky, upright thing that sat shoved up against the wall in the living room of their two bedroom house – humming by his ear as her fingers slotted against the keys.
“She was always singing,” Wayne said, tears glistening in his eyes as he, too, watched the record spin on the stand. “Always humming or making up some song.”
Eddie hadn’t realized he’d been crying too until his uncle pulled him into his arms on the couch.
With the floodgates now open, Eddie was hooked, taking trips to the library to check out CDs and playing the three old records until the record player broke down and Wayne had to get it fixed. He bought Eddie a piano, just a cheap electric thing, but Eddie took to it like a fish in water, taught himself from the ground up until he had played through everything in the library and everything he could find for free online, inventing melodies and spending hours seated in front of his shitty keyboard until he managed to graduate high school on time by the seat of his pants.
Wayne scraped and saved to buy plane tickets to New York, sat patiently outside the room when Eddie auditioned for Juilliard. Nothing more than a pipe dream, to be sure, but at least they got a vacation out of it. At the Jewish deli a few blocks from their hotel, Wayne told him how proud he was with a shine in his eye. Even if nothing came of the whole endeavor, that singular moment felt like enough.
But things did come, and his acceptance letter arrived a few weeks later, an offer of a full ride and four years at Juilliard to study piano performance. Wayne was as ecstatic as he was anxious for Eddie, even if he wouldn’t say it.
“Don’t let anyone up there tell you that you aren’t good enough, you hear?” he’d said the day he saw Eddie off, the van packed and filled with gas. Eddie hadn’t understood what he meant until he’d arrived at school, and it became exceedingly clear which side of the metaphorical tracks he hailed from. Receiving thinly veiled looks of contempt from his classmates was one thing, Eddie had put up with his fair share of shitty rich kids in the small town he grew up in, but being blatantly ignored by professors was another. Eddie wasn’t sure what he was expecting from academia, but it certainly wasn’t cold shoulders and loaded glances.
But then there was Chrissy. Beautiful, brilliant, talented Chrissy who latched on and never left, took up residence at his elbow and got him into parties, secured him invitations to events and functions until everyone seemed to forget why they’d snubbed him in the first place. It took willpower, to stifle the righteous anger he felt when some old money acting major grinned at him over a glass of outrageously expensive scotch and asked what his name was when they’d lived down the hall from one another for months.
Chrissy’s affection somehow diluted the incessant bullshit, making it all worth it. He knew he was her charity project, but he didn’t mind so long as her efforts kept him out of the crosshairs. There had been others, friends that came along the way — Gareth, Jeff, and Grant, and even Jason, Chrissy’s boyfriend at the time, although Eddie was pretty sure the guy was a total tool. He had the upright, quietly cruel demeanor of the kind of guys that slammed Eddie’s head against the lockers in high school and called him a freak, or worse if they were bent on enacting some pent up religious rage.
Not that anyone was judging the way Eddie loved at Juilliard. He was pretty sure at least half of his classmates were queer, and the rest were experimenting on the side. As far as hooking up went, Eddie was in no short supply of guys who wanted to dip their toes in his particular waters. Chrissy teased him for it, said that he was going to get a reputation as the guy that tied everyone up, but Eddie could think of far worse things to be famous for. Most of it was casual, his interest in dating was minimal at best, but that was fine. It gave him more energy to focus on the things that actually mattered. By the time graduation began to peer over the horizon, Eddie had established himself as a presence in the music department, his hard work and Chrissy’s ministrations having paid off in spades.
Amidst it all, though, there was the music, the press of his fingers against the keys like the sound of his mother’s voice over his shoulder. He felt her, on the quiet nights he snuck into the practice rooms and played just for himself. It soothed something inside him that he hadn’t realized had been aching so fiercely. He hoped that she would be proud of him, had she been there to see him walk the stage. Somehow, he knew she would.
Post graduation, he played a lot of concert halls, Juilliard’s springboard at his back, but something was missing. He found it, eventually, after some trial and error, and more than a couple of burned bridges, but he wouldn’t sell his soul for anything less than what he loved. Something he finally stumbled upon in a tiny jazz bar in Soho, the three piece band on the small stage pulling out of him what he thought he would never find again.
He knows he could be making more money, contracting with orchestras and traveling the world, but nothing can compare to the sheer electricity of improvisation and the utterly human quality of melodies played in a back alley jazz bar, the lights of New York city twinkling outside and the smell of cheap wine and smoke in the air. Eddie presses his fingers down onto the keys of the old Steinway, feels the sweet buzz of sound and the slight heat of the blue stage lights overhead, and smiles to himself. It isn’t Birdland, but it’s more than enough.
By the time Gareth returns, he’s lightly liquored, any and all stage fright blasted straight to hell. He does best when he’s had a few drinks, always has. He’d taken to Eddie quickly in school, another scholarship kid with something to prove – it was hard not to feel kindred. Gareth gives him an easy smile when he steps onto the stage, very much upright but significantly more relaxed.
“How many tonight?” Eddie asks, and Gareth rolls his eyes from behind his drum set, adjusting his sticks in his hands.
“Just two, mom.”
Eddie chuckles, shakes his head. Their bass player turns up not a minute later, a man that Eddie recognizes from a couple past gigs. Ryan, he says, and they greet each other with friendly smiles and warm handshakes, talk briefly about the set for the night and the needed key changes. They still have ten minutes, so they hunker down and wait for their substitute singer to show himself.
Five minutes to go, and Eddie is starting to get antsy. His leg bounces restlessly on the ground, his fingers tapping the edge of the bench as he surveys the crowd. He glances over at Gareth, who shrugs. People are starting to gather to watch, filling the tables on the floor and standing to the side with drinks in their hands, looking expectantly at the stage. At eight o’clock, their man is still nowhere to be found. It figures, really, singers can be some of the flakiest performers known to man. Eddie just wishes their mystery man had picked a different day to skip town. He exchanges a glance with Gareth, who nods, reading his mind, and begins to play. The introductory notes to Misty spring to life under his fingertips, and Gareth quickly gets the hint, ushering in a rhythm underneath his playing. Ryan joins not a moment later, pounding out a steady bass line. It’s not ideal, certainly, the bar was promised a singer, but it’s better than nothing, and Eddie’s used to flying by the seat of his pants.
They’ve played through six bars when a flurry of movement erupts in Eddie’s peripheral vision, and a figure breezes onto the stage, tossing his suit jacket next to his feet on the stage and approaching the microphone with practiced ease. He’s wearing a white dress shirt buttoned low on his chest and a pair of slim-fitting slacks, his chestnut hair artfully tousled as he leans into the mic and croons the first couple of notes, jumping fluidly into the song like it’s nothing. And Eddie –
Eddie knows that voice, but – it can’t be. There’s no way in hell. The man turns briefly to regard Ryan, then Gareth, his eyes finally settling on Eddie at the piano, and Eddie almost fumbles over his own fingers as Steve Harrington meets his gaze. Steve smiles at him, just a small tilt of his lips, and turns back around to face the audience, his voice gliding into the next line. Eddie stares wide-eyed at the back of Steve’s head, thankful that he could play Misty with his eyes closed if he wanted to.
Eddie has had several brushes with fame throughout his short career, that’s what a diploma from Juilliard will get you, but this is different. This is Steve Harrington, son of Diana Harrington, a New York-bred jazz starlet who’d married into money and given birth to a single son, her little prodigy. Steve had been carted around by his mom to music functions since he was young enough to smile for the camera. Why in the ever loving fuck is he singing at a little jazz bar in Manhatten on a random Friday night? Eddie turns, wide-eyed, to Gareth, who just shrugs again, looking equally confused as he maintains their rhythm.
Eddie swallows, turning his attention back to the keys in front of him where his fingers have been moving on autopilot, and wraps himself back up in the melody. At the front of the stage, Steve’s hips sway ever so slightly to the music, his neck rolling on his shoulders as his voice floats through the club, vibrato ringing like the most beautiful bell Eddie has ever heard chime. The immediate slip into rapture is like sliding into a hot bath after a long day. Eddie’s fingers dance across the keys, listening to the soft slide of Steve’s timbre as it stretches, dips and trills.
Eddie rides Steve’s vocal line, accommodates for his pauses and builds a framework for him to shine. It’s easy, he finds, dancing alongside Steve. As simple as breathing, he’s never felt so connected to a voice before, like liquid silk over his skin. Eddie glances over at him, catches a glimpse of the side of his face, the strong cut of his jawline and the smooth skin of his cheek. His eyes are closed, his pretty lips parted as his voice lilts and dips, caresses each note like gentle fingers over sleep-soaked skin. Eddie notices a couple of moles on his cheeks, one under his jaw. He’s…beautiful. Eddie thinks he’s never seen a lovelier man in his entire life, the soft, lithe lines of him barely hidden under his casual dress clothes.
Before Eddie has a chance to come out of his stupor, the song is ending, and Steve sinks into the final notes like the last rays of evening sun alighting atop a grassy field, bringing warmth and exquisite closure while Eddie plays them out, entranced. The crowd claps, and Eddie blinks, looks down at his fingers to see that he has stopped playing, and the song is over. He mourns its end, wishes that he could live in that blissful space for just a moment longer.
“Apologies for my tardiness,” Steve says into the microphone when the applause has subsided, running a hand through his hair. “I’ll make it up to you.” Steve turns, catches Eddie’s eye, and winks at him. Eddie is so charmed by this man that he thinks he’s going to melt onto the piano bench. He wants to devour him, stuff him into his jacket pocket and take him home where he can take him apart piece by piece to see what makes him tick. To find the well from which that angelic voice springs from and drink straight from the source. Steve makes a few more comments to the audience, a little impish in his delivery, which earns him a pleasant chuckle from the crowd, but Eddie can’t take his eyes off the sliver of Steve’s face as he turns, the flash of his straight, white teeth and the glow of his skin under the bluish light. The strong curve of his shoulders and the slim line of his waist where his shirt is tucked into his trousers.
The silhouette of Steve Harrington is a sinful thing, and Eddie’s never pretended to be a saint. When Steve nods back towards the band, they slide easily into the next song, and that wonderful, ephemeral voice shines in the air once again, stealing all the oxygen from the room. Eddie thinks that if he ever gets to heaven, which he won’t, and the angels don’t sound like Steve Harrington, he’s going to ask to be sent back.
Eddie plays, caught up so suddenly in the tide of want that the rest of the world washes away, and it’s just the tender curve of Steve’s voice, the familiar feeling of his fingers on the smooth ivory keys, and the music they’re making together.
Steve
“Think of it as a favor to me,” Steve’s mom had said earlier that afternoon, watching herself in the mirror as she curled her hair into perfect chestnut rolls. “Donna is an old friend, and you could do with the positive publicity.” Her eyes flicked to his, studying him where he was leaning against the doorway to her bathroom. He rolled his eyes and huffed a sigh, but agreed anyway. Unfortunately, she had a point. The most recent murmurings of his behavior backstage had not exactly been helping with his career, not that he could find it in him to care. But his mother did, so that was something. He’s never been able to say no to her, even when he should have.
Which is why he finds himself sitting in the backseat of a taxi, stuck in mile-long traffic on his way to a shitty little jazz club that he’s never even heard of to cover for someone he’s never even met. He glances at his watch, crosses his arms and peers out the front windshield at the long line of taillights stretching down the freeway. He wouldn't have been late in the first place if he hadn’t gotten held up at Robin’s gallery show, but she had spilled punch on her dress, and Steve wasn’t just going to leave her there in her hour of need, so he’d darted across the street to a boutique and picked something out for her, holding the garments above the stall door in the bathroom while she shimmied out of her soiled clothes.
She’d thanked him, kissed his cheeks and told him enthusiastically how much she loved him, but by the time he had ushered her back into the gallery, he was already running late. It’s eight o’ clock on the dot when he spots the neon sign for B-Sides looming in the distance, just a few minutes past the hour when the taxi pulls up to the curb. Steve breezes into the club and finds that the band has started without him, which – rude. He skirts around the crowd and steps up on stage, tossing his jacket to the side and crowding in close to the microphone.
It’s an easy song to pick up – everyone and their mother knows Misty – and he slides into the melody with practiced ease, even though he’s quietly wishing that he hadn’t agreed to do this. He’s more than a little bit hungover from drunken brunch with Robin that morning, and he’s been on his feet for hours, not to mention the scattered costume change that he’d ministrated not two hours before. He’s tired and more than a little bit cranky, so he sinks back, lets his voice do the work.
In a moment of pause, he turns his attention to the bass player, who smiles warmly at him, and Steve smiles back. Behind Steve is the drummer, who regards him when he casts his gaze back. Off to the right, though, is perhaps the most gorgeous man that Steve has ever seen, seated at the piano and gaping at him with wide eyes.
His hair is dark, falling over his shoulders in tight waves, stark against the pale color of his skin, the elegant column of his neck that dips down into a black dress shirt left partially unbuttoned. The man’s eyes are a dark brown, deep and sparkling under the stage lights. And his full lips –
Well, Steve could do horrible, sinful things to lips like those.
His eyes slide down, just the briefest glance given to tattooed fingers that are still somehow dancing across the keyboard despite the man’s obvious ogling, the intent line of his stare doing wonders for Steve’s ego. But it’s not just the smolder of his gaze, or the pretty lines of his face, it’s the sounds coming from the piano – the lilting orchestrations of his fingers that give Steve pause.
Steve has been singing since he could carry a tune, attending voice lessons and riding the tails of his mother’s fame until he didn’t know where her success ended and his began. The magic of the music has dwindled as he’s grown, his penchant for cynicism just a consequence of the politics of the music world and the automatic fame he’d inherited. But the way the man’s hands glide over the keys is unlike anything he’s ever seen, the sounds somehow so different than anything he’s ever heard. It’s freedom, and wandering, surging waters. Trickling streams that carve canyons year by year and scattered rainfall hitting the windowpane in early autumn while a fire blazes nearby. Lovely, soothing heat and chilled glass.
It stirs something feverish and wanting inside Steve. Something he thought had long gone dormant, never to blaze again. He has learned to live without its warmth, clamping down against the ensuing chill and to sing his pretty songs the way people liked to hear them. Flashed smile after dazzling smile until he couldn’t muster another to save his life.
But here, in the smoke-clouded air of a tiny jazz club he’s never heard of, something is different, and it both begins and ends with the musings of tattooed fingers, hands that flit smoothly across the keyboard and sounds that spill straight from the metal wires of the piano to the pits of his soul.
Steve blinks, nearly misses his next entrance, and turns his attention back to the performance at hand, but the pianist’s presence looms like a benevolent shadow over his shoulder, and he can’t help but sneak a couple more glances back towards him as he sings. His voice flows over the notes of the piano, and for the first time in what feels like forever, Steve feels himself relax into the song, his shoulders falling slack as he sways lightly with the beat. He takes the microphone in both hands and closes his eyes, wants nothing but sound and sensation, and is greeted with a wave of bodily nostalgia so potent he feels like he could cry.
His voice sounds like satin in his own ears, gliding easily up and over the high notes, settling easily into his lower range. He lets his head fall to the side, trills over a few improvised notes just because it feels right. He takes his time, allows each sound to work itself from his throat on its own, and the piano glitters steadily along with him, cradling his tune with careful hands. The last couple notes leave his mouth, and he opens his eyes, feels somehow as if he’s woken up from a deep night’s sleep, fully rested and brand new, yawning into the world with new purpose on the back of pleasant dreams. The blue stage lights obscure his vision, and he blinks against the glare, listening as the piano fades behind him and the audience begins to clap.
The noise dies down, and Steve shifts back into his usual self, closes the door softly on the lovely, fleeting moment and settles back into his skin.
“Apologies for my tardiness,” Steve says into the microphone, pushing back some of the hair that has fallen into his eyes. “I’ll make it up to you.” He turns, can’t help himself, and catches the pianist's eye, dropping a wink his way. He preens to see the dark haired man sit up a little straighter, his eyelids fluttering. There are a couple of delicate, silver chains glinting at the man’s collarbones, and Steve wonders how they would feel between his fingers, what kind of expression the man would reward him with if Steve pulled.
He has to bite his bottom lip to stave off the spark of desire that lights him up like a lightning bolt, and he forces his body back around, flashes that cruel little grin of his mother’s that has everyone eating out of the palm of his hand. He gives a brief nod to the band and the drummer taps out the introductory beat for their next song.
︵‿︵ 🎹 ︵‿︵
Steve stays after the show, something he’s not usually compelled to do, but something about the night has him feeling sentimental for the days of auditions and stage fright. He sits on the lip of the stage and talks with strangers who come up to congratulate him on the set. He never shakes hands, but he finds himself reaching out warmly for people as they gather near, laughing and making small talk like there is nowhere else he’d rather be but chuckling at the musings of strangers.
Once the crowd has dwindled, he pulls himself to his feet and walks to the back of the stage where the pianist has just finished packing up, and is typing something on his phone.
“You’re really good,” Steve says, and watches with endearment as the long haired man startles, blinking down at him with those big, dark eyes. He’s a good five inches taller than Steve, lanky and lithe. His black dress shirt hangs off what look to be strong shoulders, the long lines of his body tapering into a pair of black, straight-legged jeans and well-worn Oxfords. Steve can see the tendrils of tattoos peeking from beneath his shirt on his arms and chest. He certainly doesn’t look like any of the pianists that Steve has worked with. Where the hell did they find this guy?
“Oh, uh,” the man stammers, fumbling to get his phone into his pocket. “Thanks, that’s – I mean, you were great.”
Steve smiles, wishes it wouldn’t be a huge social faux pas to just grab the collar of the man’s shirt and slot their lips together, because Jesus Christ does Steve want to kiss the stutter right from this man’s lips. He’s not used to waiting, Steve Harrington. The man opens his mouth like he wants to say something, but closes it, biting his lips between his teeth.
“Well, um. Have a good night, Steve,” he says after a beat, picking up his jacket from the bench behind him and shrugging it on.
“Right,” Steve nods, vaguely disappointed. He isn’t sure what he expected, but a stiff thank you and a curt goodnight was certainly not it. Maybe a phone number, or at best, an invitation back to his place. Steve would have gone, he’s not ashamed to admit that. He contemplates saying something of substance, the effects of the man’s playing still lingering in the chambers of his mind like a siren song, but instead he simply says, “Have a good one.”
The man gives him a small smile and brushes past him, hopping off the stage and disappearing into the club. Steve stares after him, wondering what forces of nature combined to make such an enigma of a person.
It’s only when Steve is halfway to his house in a cab that he realizes he never asked the man’s name.
The incessant city lights streak by the window all the same, the ghost of a spark that could have been swallowed up by sound.