The Anatomy of Emotion

Chapter Eleven

"I'm just going to sketch here until my six o clock. If you could go open the gallery and make the rounds through it in the meantime, I'd appreciate it," she gets off of the sofa.

"Um... alright," Saria rises and thumps out of the flat, casting odd glances over her shoulder as she shuts the door.

Maeva retreats to her bedroom and tosses the laptop on her pillows, staring at it like one stares at a spider, deciding whether or not to smash it or let it outside. She curls her fists at her sides. A deep breath fills her lungs, and she lets it out slowly, audibly. After a long moment, she plugs her headphones into her laptop, and sits cross legged on the bed to listen. The piano fills her ears like a soft touch, like the way Corin would cup her face when he kissed her. She balls her hands in the hem of his shirt, and stares at it as she listens, waiting in tension for the song to go on.

Corin's voice comes after only a few more keystrokes. He rarely sings in French, but here it is now, soft and gravelly with emotion.

"Stay for tonight, if you want to, I can show you what my dreams are made of, as I'm dreaming of your face..."

Maeva sighs and closes her eyes. All the feelings she keeps tucked very tightly in her sternum begin to escape, threatening her chest and her stomach and her throat. She can hear his voice deepen; imagine his fingers moving faster over the keys as he sinks into the music.

"How the hell did we end up this? You bring out the beast in me; I fell in love from the moment we kissed, since then we've been history."

His words are straightforward, waking up memories of kisses and glances, fueling the emotions piling up inside her. She takes a breath at the same moment the song does, and it rushes out with the chorus.

"They say that love is forever, your forever is all that I need..." he murmurs it like he is looking at her, "please stay, as long as you need."

Maeva blinks at her hands, knuckles drained to a true white. She looks at her laptop in front of her, the notch crawling along the line of the song, listening to Corin spill his heart all over his piano for her. Her own itches to spill back, pressing at the surface like some smoking chemical in a beaker. She isn't sure what that will feel like, what that will do. So she closes her eyes and caps it as tightly as she can.

She listens to the song three more times, fighting very hard to keep her emotions from overwhelming her. But then she will sink into the sound of his voice or hear something new in the song that releases more feelings, and the container will crack or a few drops will escape out the top. It is always the longing that gets out. Splashes down through her, makes her feel thin and empty. Clashes with the rational, frightened part of her that keeps the lid so tight on her emotions.

There is a faint tremble in her lower lip, and she bites down on it.

"They say that love is forever, your forever is all that I need. Please stay as long as you need..." Corin's voice deepens, and she knows what comes next, "can't promise that things won't be broken, but I swear that I will never leave..."

Her teeth slide from her lip and her lashes dissolve into tears. That final feeling shatters her control, and everything she has bottled up washes through her head and her bones. She muffles her sobbing in his shirt, tastes her own tears on the fabric. They taste bitter and sweet, like the fight inside her. Common sense telling her torrid emotions to get their asses back into a jar, lest the inevitable happen and they find themselves cold and alone. The emotions ignoring it and running everywhere, searching, because all they do is want, want, want. Want him.

Maeva cries for the rest of the afternoon. She curls on her side with the song playing an endless loop through her headphones. Drowns into her head, sinking deeper with no visible way out. In a brief moment between sobs, she wonders if this is what he feels like all the time.

When she is finally dry, around four thirty, she doesn't get out of bed. She just blinks her swollen lids and does something even more idiotic than listen to the song—she looks through social media. She watches pieces of the interview Corin had done right after their night in California, reads through the explosion of comments about the drawings all over him, the bruises on his neck, and who had done them. Her head turns with the sweet memories of laughing as she drew on him. She has found she misses the drawings he had done on her.

At the top of one of her feeds, she finds a series of pictures she has never seen before. They are from the last Eurydice concert in France, when that horde of people had approached her for pictures and autographs. Someone had compiled a bunch of them into a single post. She sees herself smiling beside the grinning girl with pink hair, a drawing she had done and signed of Alex on someone's forearm. The last three she lingers on for a while.

Someone had captured the moment she had found Corin crouched behind her, where he is looking at her like she is everything, and she is looking at him like he floors her. Then, she is watching him softly as he smiles at the dumbfounded people in front of him. The last is just after he pulled her up on the stage, when their fingers are waffled together and they are giving each other a charged stare. It looks like obsession, even a little bit like deeper things than that.

Her longing roars back up her throat, and a few more tears squeeze their way over her lashes.

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A/N: Thanks for reading! Isn't Corr a sweetheart? Tell me your thoughts in the comments!

Song Credits:

"If I'm James Dean, You're Audrey Hepburn" by Sleeping with Sirens.