Free A Little Night Music by Kathy Hitchens Page A

reserved only for the mouth?”
    The taut concentration of his kisses relaxed into a slight chuckle. “I can play that wherever you want Sweetheart.”
    To which Elli unleashed a passionate drive to the bed, rendering him mute but for a groan trapped deep in his throat. She pinned him to the bed.
    “I wanted to do this the first time I saw you onstage…” Elli unbuttoned his shirt and teased the hair sprinkling his well-defined chest, unrelenting until she turned the tables and played his taut oblique muscles like an instrument of her own choosing. The muscular tone he had onstage was nothing against the landscape of his body.
    “And this?” In one flick of the wrist, she unbuckled his belt. “On the fire escape.”
    His brows shot up. “The fire escape?”
    “All. Over. The fire escape.” She unzipped his pants. Her middle finger skimmed his hard ridge and shaft straining against his underwear with an agony inducing precision that had the sound of his heart thundering in his ears as he took in a fortifying breath. “And this?”
    “Yeah?” he said, an accidental note cracking his voice.
    “The moment you couldn’t tell me the vision because you knew it would hurt me.”
    “I never want to—”
    Elli pressed a finger to his lips to silence him against things he couldn’t promise, beyond anything right here, right now. “I know.”
    Her hands skated his long limbs—toned arms, firm thighs—and removed the remainder of his clothes. He did the same for her only remaining stitch—panties. And when they had used the entirety of Jon’s version of Like Someone in Love to survey every inch of each other, in every space within and outside the music, his fingertips every so often mimicking his hands on the trumpet valves, Jon used his next three numbers to pleasure parts of Elli’s body that remained unseen, until her body crested, one sustained note of ecstasy to an electrified overture.
    When at last, nothing remained but the urgency of two, each filling a void for the other, Jon rolled a condom in place and slipped inside her—no improvisation, no hesitation, nothing supernatural but the magic they created together.
     
     
    Jon awoke late morning, skin clinging to the sheets from the late summer heat, from a dawn spent tangled again in Elli’s glorious body. He had never known such happiness, yet a dull ache wormed its way past his navel and festered. Happiness, he knew, was fleeting.  As much as Jon had begun to entertain a forever with Elli, he had once done the same with another woman he loved deeply. Would Elli too become someone else? How could he possibly know someone else— really know them—when he had only scratched the surface of his true self?
    Not only had he broken his vow to steer clear of women, he ended up with the one woman on Earth who had the capacity to blast his heart out through his trumpet.
    The risk, it seemed, was greater than the bliss he had found with Elli.
    He studied her face and gently brushed aside a lock of hair that had become trapped in her eyelashes in slumber. He wondered how his story would play out in the Leroux family archives—the one where a white guy from Chicago who could play Dixieland jazz like her father had given her everything inside, but it hadn’t been enough.
    His stomach growled, threatened to wake her, so he crawled from bed, dressed and left a note on his pillow. Gone to get beignets. You’re my finest song, J . He slipped out onto the hot asphalt, the temperature hitting his face like a fry pan on high, eyes cinched against the brightness, and ran full-body into James.
    “Is that any way to greet your partner?”
    Jon stumbled backward. The incongruence of James being in New Orleans, of his old life colliding with the newness he had found here, took an extraordinary time to process.
    James straightened his starched shirt, embroidered with a pricy logo. His gold framed Ray-bans and sparkling watch made him look like a Madison Avenue asshole.
    Is