More than a Melody (H.S) ON HOLD

51

SMUT WARNING (:

fifty one

The estate was beautiful.

The word beautiful felt so less than when being used to describe it.

The villa was adorned in classic Italian baroque architecture, the stone walls doused in history and class. Each room smelled of the earth around us, the drooping vines and distant coastal spray. I could taste the salt peppering my tongue the longer I inhaled, tart and unfamiliar, a sheer disparity to the Pacific.

The silence, though, was the most noticeable. There was no hum of an AC or tick of a ceiling fan, no groans of aged wood or thumps of obsolete engines. I could hear how Harry tapped his fingers in a nonspecific rhythm from across the room, or how the wind brushed up the braided tassels dangling from the drawn curtains.

"How could you ever leave this place?"

I genuinely was confused as to why he would choose to come and live in Astoria when such a treasure existed under his name.

"I always find my way back," is all he says, a simple response that hardly settles my befuddlement. If it were a choice of mine, I could easily stay here forever. But being that it wasn't, enjoying it felt wrong. This wasn't a vacay or retirement splurge, this was an emergency escape, an end route. Basking in its beauty was wrong, no matter how breathtaking the primeval pillars were.

"How about I show you upstairs and help you settle in and then we eat? Yeah?" Harry nudges my shoulder with his playfully, having taken notice of the sudden solemn expression that became of me.

I give a brisk nod and we both head up the stairway.

Artwork rests in frames along the stone, original pieces scattered throughout the halls. Each one tells a different story, one I try to decipher while swiftly turning corners and taking in every overwhelming triviality.

There is one of a woman, her body is painted in fine lines of graphite but an aura of diverse colors embodies the world around her. The outline of her leg is twisted around another, the blending hues of outer color mingling together into a blurry blob of oil. The two bodies conjoin, the lady's neck is pushed back and the man is curled into her. The painting is so vivid and riddled with fervency that I don't remember where I'm going until Harry calls out to me.

"Jane?"

He cuts me out of my sudden fixation, waving me over.

"Your room?"

The hallway is dim and Harry nearly resembles a shadow, the kind of shadow that dances along the walls when a car drives by at night, the headlights maneuvering and gliding in warm colors across old posters in a room. But there were no cars nearby, none to mimic the image of late night wanderers driving down a dusk street. It was quiet here, withdrawn, hidden behind foothills and trees and ancient gates. More private than Astoria or Cannon Beach could ever be.

"I can give you a proper tour in the morning, or afternoon, depending how long you sleep."

A single bed supported by the stilts of a finely carved, mahogany frame lies in the middle of the room. There is a balcony diagonal from the entryway, the curtains tugged aside and the doors pulled open, allowing a breeze to spiral past us and down the hall. Harry looks to me with anxious wonder, hoping to gather some sort of response from the rise and fall of my cheekbones and the pulsing of my eyes throughout the room. I look to him, watching how he sets aside my belongings but leaves his own.