F I C : rebuild .

[solosection]

There are luxury hotels enough in LA to go around. Once he's unpacked the first box in his new apartment, he does a tour and eventually makes a deal with the nearest one to play Friday nights. Jazz repertory. He spends a couple of weeks arranging some of his own. No one knows, of course, can't tell his work from one more pop cover of Nina Simone's Sinnerman and it doesn't matter enough for him to slap his name onto them. He's there for the love of music. He's there to just play for a little while and forget the rest. If Elio had ever expected credit, he'd probably have asked for it sooner.

___

Marcella is on her third year at Colburn and specializes in the Classical composers, like him. She's from an Italian-American family and people say, mob connections got her in, but Elio listens to her playing and thinks, whatever the mafia might have done for her, her fingers do it better. Her fingers don't need them.

He loves tutoring her in the Mozart, she has such a nimble grasp of the melodies and besides, they start automatically shifting to Italian during her lessons, it feels like a strange sense of home. Her family originates from Milan, where his mother lives now, with her new husband. They both visit the city in the winter, though not at the same time, as it were. They joke about going together someday.

___

His apartment is big enough for a new sponsored Steinway, a bit smaller than his old Model 0, and they move it in on a Wednesday, three months after he's gotten there. He'd told himself that he'd feel less like a foreigner or a visiting B&B tourist once the piano was in place, but that night he sits at it and feels the keys and they're as new and unknown as all the rest. Getting accustomed to the sound of the instrument takes time, Elio knows, but sometimes you have to play regardless of how ready you feel. He's not a concert pianist for nothing. He hasn't moved from Rome to B to L.A. and Paris without learning basic survival.

Sometimes he thinks basic survival is all he's learned.

___

She starts coming by the hotel for drinks when he plays Friday nights. She's always dressed nicely, cocktail dresses that cut up her thigh. During intermission, he meets her at the bar and they talk about Haydn or Beethoven or whatever she's writing assignments on that week, in other classes but his. She never wears any rings, he notices, but a lot of bracelets, from time to time a necklace with the pendant swaying above her cleavage.

Elio knows what flirting looks like. He knows they're doing it.

___

"Do you have a girlfriend, Professor Perlman," she asks him one afternoon when he's tutoring her in the empty practice room next to the library. She has a concert coming up, Mozart, there's little he can teach her anymore, really.

Elio pauses, hands showing her a fingering technique on the keys that should make transitioning from one part of the sonata to the next easier. For small hands. She doesn't have small hands, but they're smaller than his and his aren't the biggest hands around, although they are long-fingered and slender. Borderline effeminate, he's been told.

"I don't," he replies honestly. He can tell she's about to open her mouth and ask the natural follow-up question, so he beats her to it. "I don't have a boyfriend either, currently."

She smiles. So does he.

___

Every once in a while, he'll think about her when he masturbates. It's never particularly detailed, mostly it's just the memory of her hands playing the Mozart, but it's a pleasant buzz and he doesn't think he's wronging anyone by doing it, so. However, he already knows they can't pursue anything. She's his student, it'd be ethically despicable and in reality, she's in no position to navigate such a relationship, with him in power.

Besides, he's never had much luck with women. Even worse luck than with men.

___

Walking the two blocks from the hotel to his apartment late at night between Friday and Saturday, L.A. never feels far enough from New Hampshire. It's just a coast-to-coast flight away and as easily as he can choose to stay, he could choose to go. Find him. Oliver. They're sharing a continent now, if nothing else.

It's more than they've shared for fifteen years.

___

"Will you flunk me if I kiss you," she asks one morning in Italian. Elio thinks about Marzia, then, suddenly, for the first time in years. Remembers her grabbing his cock through his pants, going you're so hard. He feels transparent from it. Turning towards her, they look at each other for a long moment. Her fingers are tugging at the hem of her shirt.

He wants to kiss her, but it would be a bad idea, so he doesn't. He's learned his lesson, hasn't he? About bad ideas.

"Don't kiss me, Marcella," he tells her. "You'd make things very difficult for me."

As soon as he's spoken those words, he regrets it. He knows whom he's learned them from.

She doesn't ask how she is making things difficult. Obviously, she's smarter than he was, back then. They return to the Mozart.

___

When he finds her on the floor of that practice room next morning, his first inclination is to close the door and recite the Kaddish. Exalted and sanctified be His great name in the world which will be renewed... It isn't wise, but really, Elio doesn't think he ever was. Oliver was wrong about that too.