2. Illawarra Flame Ch. 07-09

'You have to sign it for me, otherwise it wont be worth anything, the art dealers wont accept it," he had said. 'Look; up, down, up' he had demonstrated how to draw a N. Nicholas wrote Ns on everything now, he was quite the expert at his 'signature'.

She was leaning against the counter waiting for the kettle to boil when she heard the front door unlock and Tyler and Cassie come into the house. He was wheeling a road bike, he still had the helmet on his head and the shoes on his feet clicked against the floor. Cassie was panting heavily, she collapsed in the middle of the floor and looked up at Maya with a big doggy smile.

'You're still here," he said, smiling at her. 'You must not have found my stash of blow up dolls."

She smiled back at him. 'Nope, although I did look."

'Of course you did."

'Why are your suits in the garage?" She just had to ask, it was bugging her beyond belief.

He started laughing. 'You really did check things out didn't you?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

'It's easier that way, I just grab one on my way out the door in the mornings."

'And you dress at the swimming pool?"

'Uh-huh."

'They're packaged that way for ease too?"

'Yeah, that way I don't have to think about it." He undid his helmet and wheeled his bike through the kitchen and back into the garage.

It made sense, she had to give him that. When he came back into the kitchen she asked, 'So do you stay up on Sunday nights packaging suits or something?"

'No, I have domestic help."

She couldn't believe it, Tyler made shitty money, how could he afford that? 'You have a maid?"

'Ah, more like a matron, I'd say. Maria does my laundry, my shopping, cooks for me... And she packages the suits."

'That's why your fridge is so well stocked?"

'Yeah, she comes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays."

'Tyler, how can you afford that?"

He hesitated for a second. 'Come sit down, there's something I should tell you," he was serious all of a sudden.

What could it be? She sat down in the breakfast nook and he squatted in front of her.

'You see... Ah, this is hard," he ran his fingers through his dark wet hair and looked out the window for a second. His eyes came back to her.

'What is it?" She asked.

'Well... I'm a male stripper."

What? Was he serious? He certainly had the body for it. She didn't know what to say, she was flabbergasted.

'The tips are really good... and sometimes I get contract work away from the club..."

She looked at him. He couldn't be serious could he? He looked dead serious.

Suddenly he burst out laughing.

'You asshole Tyler!' She said as she whacked him in the arm, but she felt herself smiling, she wasn't angry. 'I knew you were lying."

'Careful Maya, I'm going to start taking photos of these injuries you've been inflicting upon me."

He was squatting between her legs and smiling at her. His hair was stuck down on his head from where his helmet had been.

She shook her head and rolled her eyes.

'Okay, I'll tell you the truth. I have a lot of sponsors. I'm wealthy from swimming and I figure, I can spend my time away from the pool looking after myself, which I hate, or I can spend my time at work, which gives me something to think about, and something to do after I retire from swimming. So, I hired Marie, and she takes care of it all for me."

'You're wealthy?"

'Yes."

'You don't need to work?"

'No."

'But you do anyway."

'Yes."

Maya understood. Hamid had left her a lot of money, she could retire right now if she wanted to, but she didn't want to, she wanted to have a career. She wished that her career could take up less of her time, but that's just the way it had to be.

On the stove the kettle started whistling.

'You're making tea?" He asked.

She nodded.

'Will you make me a cup too, I'm going to go rinse off."

When he came back into the kitchen a few minutes later he was in fresh clothes and he smelled like soap.

She handed him his cup of tea. 'That was quick."

'No point in dawdling when there's a beautiful woman in my kitchen," he said. 'You turned the teapot right?" He asked. 'I don't want to be jinxed with bad luck tea." He gave her a teasing smile over the top of his cup.

'Nope, I poured yours first and then I turned it so I would get double good luck," she said.

'Bitch," he muttered, ' if anything bad happens to me today I'm blaming you."

He made her breakfast. Fruit and yoghurt and the banana bread that Gracie, and presumably Sam, had made for him. Then he ate five boiled eggs on toast, then he drank two pints of milk, then he ate the rest of the banana bread, then he ate more fruit. Tyler consumed an inordinate amount of food.

'Can you stay a bit longer?" He asked.

'What time do you think would be reasonable to get home if we had flown this morning?"

'Oh, I heard that all flights out of San Diego are grounded indefinitely," he said, grinning at her wickedly.

She liked the way he was thinking but she shook her head. 'I was thinking around noon."

'One o'clock?"

She smiled, 'Okay, one o'clock."

'Good, three hours to snuggle with you. I didn't get enough Maya time last night, you talked too much."

'I talked too much! Whose fault is that Mr. seven hundred and three questions?"

'Oh, and there's another seven hundred and three where they came from, I'm not finished with you yet Ms. Chandrasekhar," he said with a mischievous glint in his eye.

The use of Hamid's name made her feel uncomfortable. It was her name too, she had legally changed her name, but it didn't feel like her name.

He led her to the couch and plopped down on it, sitting sideways so that his legs were extended, his arms spread out to receive her. She sat between his legs and leaned into him sideways, enjoying the cocoon that his arms made around her.

'Do you think I should change my name back?" She asked him.

Tyler didn't answer right away. 'I think you should do whatever you want to do," he said.

'It's kind of nice to have the same name as Nicholas."

'So keep it."

'It's not very feminist of me though, is it?"

Her head was resting on his chest and she felt the vibrations of his laughter. 'I guess that depends on what sort of feminist you want to be."

'What do you mean?"

'Aren't there, like, a dozen different types of feminism?"

'I don't know." Maya didn't really know what feminism was, she just had this nebulous idea that changing her name in the first place, and now keeping Hamid's name, was somehow contrary to her standing as an individual.

'There are, I took a class in it in college."

She looked up at him. 'You took a class in feminism?"

'Sure I did, I thought it would help me to pick up chicks," he said with a playful smile.

'Did it?"

'I'm kidding, I already had a girlfriend when I took it."

'Oh, Kelly?" Maya remembered the name from the discussion with Josh.

'Mmm."

'What was she like?"

'Well... it turned out that she was somewhat of a cunt."

Maya couldn't help but smile, it was probably inappropriate, but the way he had phrased it was funny to her.

'I dated her for five years, then I asked her to marry me, she said yes and three weeks later I found out she was fucking someone else."

It wasn't funny anymore. 'Oh Tyler, that's awful."

'It was at the time, but now I think it was the best thing that ever happened to me. She did me a favor, I can't imagine what my life would be like if I'd married her."

'What do you mean?"

'We weren't right for each other. In retrospect her infidelity was the least of our problems."

'And you asked her to marry you?"

'Well obviously I didn't realize it at the time. We had been together for so long and she was really pushing for it, it just seemed like the thing to do. I don't know. I was young and stupid.

He paused for a moment, lost in his thoughts. Maya turned over to face him and squeezed her arms around his torso. She laid her head back down on his chest.

'We were living with Sam and Emma and I was so jealous of them, they were so in love with each other. I wanted what they had. I guess I did know there was something wrong, there were so many ways that she would manipulate me to get what she wanted. She used sex as a weapon... She knew my weaknesses and she exploited them."

'Why did you stay with her for so long?"

'I guess I was used to it, it was the only relationship I'd ever been in."

'Has there been anyone since?"

'Only you."

She looked up at him. 'Me?"

He smiled. 'Yes, you... Maya the uncertain feminist."

She couldn't help the smile that spread across her face. He wanted to have a relationship with her, and he'd just told her that in a way that she was beginning to recognize as being uniquely Tyler.

'How about you? What was it like with Hamid?" He probed her gently.

She didn't really know how to answer that. 'Not like this," she said.

'Mmm...' He wasn't going to let her off that easily, he was looking down at her steadily, waiting to hear what she had to say.

She laid her head back on his chest. 'He was... strong willed. He was the director of the ballet company that I danced for. We had been dating for almost two years when I fell pregnant with Nicholas." More like fucking on and off for two years, she thought.

'I was twenty-two, I didn't want to have a baby, I wasn't ready to give up my dancing career. Don't get me wrong, I love Nicholas and now I'm glad that I decided to keep him but it was difficult at the time. Hamid convinced me and then he asked me to marry him."

Hamid was such a charmer, upper class all the way, a wealthy older man, a director. He promised her so much. It was so romantic that he would be in love with the hard working female lead from meager beginnings. She was so swept up in him.

She remembered their first time, her first time, it had been in her dressing room after a rehearsal. He had walked in there as if he'd owned the place, thrown her against the vanity table and fucked her. It had been so exciting, she had been lusting after him for weeks, but she hadn't climaxed. She'd never climaxed during sex. It was something that had bothered her for a while until she'd googled it and found out that only about thirty percent of women actually reached climax during sex. She guessed that she was just part of the unlucky seventy percent.

'He had always been so accommodating to me when we were dating, he went out of his way to make things nice for me, but that changed when we were married. All of a sudden he wasn't interested in what I had to say, he wanted me to be quiet, when I spoke he acted as if I were a pebble in his shoe. It wasn't until we were married that it occurred to me that when I was dancing it was his job to make me happy. Once I had quit dancing he had no motivation... I don't think he loved me."

She was crying. She had never said these things out loud before. Tyler was rubbing her back soothingly.

'I loved him in the ways that I could, and I was prepared to spend the rest of my life with him. When he died it was tragic. I had given up my career because he had convinced me to keep his child and now he wasn't even around to help raise him. It was like a triple whammy, I had a screaming baby, no husband and my body was shot, I knew I would never dance again."

Tyler was quiet. He continued to rub her back as she calmed down and stopped crying. His patience was remarkable, this was the second time in three days that he had comforted her like this.

'Maya, I have something for you but I have to get up to get it," he said.

'Okay." She sat up and let him move. He leaned over to her and kissed her softly before he got up, his hand on her cheek, brushing tears away with his thumb.

He went to the wooden cabinet in the corner of the room and opened it up. She hadn't realized that it was a stereo. He pushed some buttons and turned some knobs, picked up an iPod and came back to the couch. He spent a moment shuffling through songs, looking for the right one and then he put the iPod on the floor and pulled her back into his embrace. She leaned into him, waiting for his gift.

It was sublime; angelic and mournful. She had heard the piece before, it was the third movement of Henryk Gorecki's symphony number three, but she had never heard this soprano. She was breathtakingly beautiful, her voice soared with emotion. It was so powerful.

'Who is she?" she whispered.

'Elizabeth Hynes."

She knew that the piece was literally about a mother lamenting the death of her child but the tonality, the timbre of it, the soprano's profound sorrow captured her feelings precisely.

She couldn't compare loosing her career to loosing a child, that grief would be unimaginable, but the sentiment was the same. She had lost her ability to dance, the most important thing about who she was. It was selfish and shallow perhaps, but it was grief nonetheless. And Tyler had known. He had seen it in her and he had understood.

It was at that moment that Maya knew that she was in love with Tyler Gray. It was preposterous, she knew. She had only known him for a few months and she had spent the vast majority of that time trying to avoid him, and yet she felt that she knew his heart.

He was a good man. She'd never met anyone like him before, someone who cared about a child who wasn't related to him, a man who had opened his heart to her and shown her the parts of his life that hurt, someone who understood the drive for perfection and appreciated the beauty in the world.

When the piece was over he told her that he had seen the performance with his family. 'My dad is a cellist, he was part of the orchestra."

'Do you play?" She asked.

He shook his head. 'I can play the guitar and the piano a bit but I'm not talented. Josh can play anything you put in front of him, but Cinta is the one with the talent, she plays... played the piano. Here, listen...'

He reached down and picked up the iPod. He rested his elbows on her back as he looked over her head to shuffle to the song he was looking for.

It was Mendelssohn, Scherzo in E minor, played with a cheekiness and freedom that made her laugh. Jacinta took liberties that most pianists would shit their pants over, but she made it work. She was a virtuoso.

Tyler was smiling at her. 'Now you've met Cinta," he said.

'She's funny," Maya said, still smiling.

'Yeah. You want to hear Josh?"

'Uh-huh."

The music that came through the stereo was like nothing she had ever heard before. It sounded almost like a flamenco guitar, but it was lighter, the pitch and tuning were different, it sounded fresh. It wasn't classical music either, she had never heard the song before, there was a flute and some weird percussion instrument that she couldn't quite put her finger on, it was airy. The whole thing was funky. Funky in a cool way.

'What is he playing?" She asked.

'Ukulele and flute."

'What is the percussion?"

'That's the flute."

'Really? It sounds so... I don't know, I can't even explain it."

'Yeah, Josh is really creative. He wrote that and recorded it in two sittings."

'Is that what he's in school for?"

'No, he's doing architecture. He might be able to make it as a composer but it's really hard and there's no money in it. I don't mean the money is lousy, I mean there is literally no money in it. Architecture suits him though, he'll be awesome at it if he can make it through this next year."

'Do you have any recordings of you?" She asked.

'Nothing serious, just stuff accompanying Josh and Cinta. We used to mess around when we were together for the holidays."

'Play me something?" She asked.

'Hmm... lets see...'

It started with a guitar picking something that she didn't recognize, a piano joined with supporting chords and then a flute entered with an unusual rendition of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', the tune floated effortlessly, the piano and guitar now simply supporting it. Then suddenly, somehow seamlessly, it morphed into 'O Fortuna'. There was laughter, Tyler's laughter.

Jacinta was going nuts on the piano while the flute accentuated, articulated the melody. Somehow she evaporated into the background and the Flute took over. By now Maya knew that Josh was playing the flute, he was doing that weird percussion thing and playing the theme to the pink panther, but it was faster, funkier, Tyler's accompaniment on the guitar was simple, intuitive, the piano trickled in the background. Tyler missed a key change.

'Shit," she heard over the recording.

There was the laughter of a girl. 'Keep up fat boy," she said.

'I'm not fat, I'm just big boned," said Tyler's voice.

Maya laughed along with Jacinta's recorded voice. She looked up at Tyler, he was smiling at her in a contented way.

'Prove it." That must have been Josh's voice.

The guitar took the lead. He was playing Chopin's Funeral March, but it wasn't played in the intended tempo, it was still dramatic but it was faster, it was joyful in the way it was accentuated by the piano and something else, she couldn't figure out what it was. It wasn't a clarinet but it was similar, yet sharper.

'What's that?" She asked.

'A plastic recorder."

'You're kidding?"

'Nope. I told you he was good."

Maya shook her head. There was some serious talent in Tyler's family.

The recording ended with laughter and the whole thing falling apart.

'See, I told you I don't have talent. I can mostly keep up but that's about it."

She smiled at him. He was being too hard on himself, it wasn't the talent that mattered, it was him. They loved him the way he was and Maya loved him the way he was. 'I liked your funeral march, that was cute. Chopin would have had a heart attack, but it was cute."

He smiled back at her, his eyes locked on to hers, shining an olive green in the diffuse light. She felt his cock pressing against her belly through his pants, his hands were still resting on her back. He was turned on, but he wasn't making any demands.

'Let me drive?" She flipped over so that her back was leaning into his chest and held her hand out for the iPod. He gave it to her and wrapped his arms around her, letting his hands rest on her belly. It made Maya's pussy ache to have his hands so close to her intimate parts while he was clearly aroused, but he didn't try to touch her in that way.

She scrolled through the artists. She recognized a lot of it but there was a lot that was new to her. He walked her through it, showing her the highlights. His big hands curled around hers and helped her to select the right songs. He had a lot of classical but he was also into unusual music, the sort of stuff you would have difficulty assigning a genre to, music that was nuanced and creative. Music that took talent.

It was one o'clock way too soon. She called a cab. She didn't want to have to explain Tyler to Hamid's parents.

He kissed her goodbye. A kiss that left her tingling and wanting more. He used his tongue and it gave her an ache in her chest, like that feeling you get when you're trying not to cry, the feeling you get when you're just about to be completely consumed by emotion.

'When can I see you again?" He asked while she was still in his arms.

'Not until after Hamid's parents are gone, they leave on Tuesday."

He looked disappointed. 'So I guess I'll see you at work on Monday?"

She nodded. Outside the cabbie laid on his horn.

He leaned down and kissed her again quickly. 'Don't forget me okay?" He asked.

She smiled. 'I don't think that's even a remote possibility."

*** Note for the readers: A four minute excerpt of Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, movement 3, sung by Elizabeth Hynes is available free on itunes. Go to the itunes store and search for Elizabeth Hynes, it is in the USC Thornton album. There is also a very nice recording of Olga Steeb playing Mendelssohn's Scherzo for piano in E minor in the same album. Enjoy! ***