Page 2 of Love & Notes

My anxiety is already playing havoc with my body at a frequency that would concern a professional. The cold weather that I have stupidly ignored for a week has worked its way into my hypermobile joints. My muscles are working overtime, and my fingers ache where I am gripping the neck of the violin so tightly with pure white-knuckled desperation. I have performed through pain before. I can do this.

He is just a guy in a leather jacket.

An incredibly good-looking guy in a leather jacket who has not stopped looking at me.

That is fine. That is completely fine.

But those dark and mysterious eyes continue to study me, I can’t help but notice. Somehow, I can’t take my eyes off him, either.

Snap out of it! You've worked too hard for this moment.

My head shifts back to the score in front of me as the piano accompaniment begins.

The opening of Vivaldi’s Winter is a relentless and precise piece that demands a technical exactness that on any other day, in any other state, in front of any other audience, I would deliver without breaking a sweat.

Today is not that day.

From the first phrase, it's a disaster.

The aggressive staccato notes are supposed to mimic cold and physical discomfort, which is, objectively, hilarious given the circumstances. My fingers find the opening position and immediately begin to betray me. The hypermobility does what it does on bad days—my fingers hyper-extend, bending inward at the joint—precisely at the wrong moment. They lock with a sickening tightness, a pain shooting up my hands, and through my wrists. It’s a miracle I don’t drop my violin on the spot. The pain is excruciating.

As a true professional, I try to recover—to do any of the multiple things my muscle memory knows how to do when things start to go wrong, but what I actually do is drag my bow across the bridge. Shit.

The sound that comes out of my violin is not Vivaldi.

It’s the complete opposite of Vivaldi.

It’s a monumental catastrophe.

This is definitely not a dream come true.

My performance is something that you would expect from an intermediate violinist, not someone who is at one of the best conservatories in the world undertaking a Master of Music postgraduate degree. It’s the sound that makes every trained musician in the room flinch simultaneously.

My heart stops.

I try to recover, again, which in itself is becoming a bit of a joke. This performance should be perfect. It should be better than perfect. There are absolutely zero excuses for my amateur playing. I try my best to find my fingering in the next passage, pretending that all of this did not happen, but my brain has completely detached from the score and has decided that now is a good time to stop functioning altogether.

This is a fucking disaster.

An absolute, cataclysmic disaster.

I stop playing altogether mid-phrase, as the note hangs in the air. The whole hall falls into silence.

The spotlights now bake into my skin, which I hope at least disguises the crimson flush of embarrassment working its way up from my collarbone to my face.

Then, from the second row, a sound cuts through the silence. Slow, deliberate clapping. Not applause. There is a very specific mockery and intent, and it's coming from the boy in the leather jacket, who has straightened slightly in his seat. He's now looking at me with an expression of pure bewilderment.

He leans forward, his elbows resting on the seat in front of him, his intoxicating, yet unreadable eyes fixed on me.

“Bloody hell.” He mocks.

He’s British.

He shakes his head slowly, the corners of his mouth pulling into a smirk that is devastating.

“Well.” He pauses. “That was an absolute catastrophe.” Another pause. “You’re so incredibly uptight that the music couldn’t even breathe. What was that?” He laughs. “Are you sure you’re in the right place?”

British asshole.