F2: Virtuoso

He was a force that swirled around her, touching her here, nibbling her there, caressing her just right until she was swept up into a crescendo of feeling that kept building up to almost unbearable levels. His energy and nonstop assault fired her up and she climbed the high until her mind was leeched of every thought and she was reduced to just a mindless being seeking pleasure, where she couldn't think anymore, just feel. Just as the rhythms of their lovemaking reached their highest point, she broke, overwhelmed by it all and letting herself go into that place that she had thought she could access only on a stage.

As they lay together after a particularly intense bout of lovemaking, drugged and content, she reflected on the fact that she now had what she had been wanting for years. She had a normal relationship devoid all the baggage that she carried from being one of the best classical violists in the world.

She settled her face into the crook of Devin's neck a little more comfortably and smiled.

"A penny for them," he murmured.

Her smile grew bigger. "How did you know I was thinking of something?"

"I felt your smile on my skin," he replied, running a hand down her arm.

"Nothing important really. Well, okay, important in a way. I was just thinking how much I love this." She wasn't sure if she could explain what it meant to her. Her world was so far removed from normal that people who were not within its closed confines could not comprehend what it meant. She tried anyway.

"My whole life has been music, Devin. In a way, my lifeismusic. I've never been something apart from it. With you, I feel like a different person than the musician I am. I feel like I'm more me." She shifted impatiently when she couldn't make the words convey what she was trying to say. "I'm not sure if I'm explaining this well, but... it's just that this... you, make me feel things that I have felt before, yes, but in a different way entirely. I don't know how to tell you how it is... okay, I'm doing a poor job of this," she ended with a sigh.

He responded after a moment. "You know, I know you're a famous violinist, but honestly, apart from the times that you leave me to go and practice or a concert, I don't really know what your life is like."

"Exactly. And I'm not sure how I can tell you what it's like."

He stroked her shoulder while he considered. "How about you play for me?"

She looked up at him. "You want me to? Now?"

"Well, yes. I mean, I think I should get to know what you're like when you're not in my arms, right? And your violin is here too, so I definitely think you should." A devilish glint entered his eyes. "Naked," he added.

At first she felt color flood her face at his request, but with gentle his urging she got her instrument out, stood at the foot of the bed and tucked it under her chin.

"Ready?" she asked, and at his nod, launched into Vivaldi's Spring Allegro.

The roughly three and a half minutes it took for her to play the famous piece was the only time she saw him sit entirely still, unmoving.

The music flowed in his small bedroom as Lei gave it all she had, and more. There was just something extra that came out when she was standing naked in front of him with the smooth wood beneath her hands and the fingers flying over the familiar strings. Her eyes held his for the length of the performance, and when she was done, there was a moment of hushed silence.

"My god," he said finally, "You're right. I've never seen you like that. The way you move with the music... like a sensuous nymph...." He stopped, at a loss for words and simply shook his head from side to side. "I can see why you are who you are."

She gave him a smile. "Thank you."

"No, that was amazing," he continued. "I mean, I'm honestly not the one to know these things but even I was moved."

"It's nothing I do consciously, Devin, so I can't really take the credit for it," she replied lightly. "It's a gift and I merely am the means through which it's conveyed. You know, Perlman once said that for every child prodigy that makes it big, fifty potential ones burn out before anybody even hears of them. I was just the one lucky one."

"Luck has a part to play in it, sure, and so does the being gifted part. But have you not spent countless hours honing that gift to perfection?" he countered.

"Well, I don't know if it's perfect yet," she chuckled, "but yes, I've spent hours practicing.

After all, a gift is no good if not used. So yes, I've spent most of my life practicing. AS my mother says,du wan juan shu, xing wan-li lu."

"What does that mean?"

"It's a Chinese saying that means something along the lines of practice makes perfect. Literally, reading ten thousand books is not as good as walking ten thousand miles. As I said, practice makes the gift blossom, one that would otherwise lie dormant in me."

"You're being too modest, downplaying the hard work and dedication that must have gone into it."

She simply smiled as she bent to pack her instrument back in the case.

"You know, the violin has a very sexy shape," he began, clearly intending to go somewhere with it.

"It does?"

"Yes. Come here," he commanded. "Do you carry black eyeliner?"

She nodded.

"If you give it to me, I'll show you."

"Show me what? You're not going to mark my violin."

"No, of course not. Just get the liner and come here."

He instructed her to lie on her stomach and a moment later felt him drawing on her back with the eyeliner pencil.

"What are you doing?" she asked him, but he just shushed her and continued.

"Lie still, will you?" he said when she wriggled slightly. "I'm just drawing those two curlicues on you to show you how sexy the shape of your violin is."

"F-holes?" It slipped out before she even thought about it, and a second later, she realized how that sounded.

His hand stilled. "Honestly? That's what they're called?" His voice was amused.

"One is shaped like a lowercase f if you noticed," she replied defensively. "And the other is a mirror image."

"Of course." His voice still carried the hint of a smile.

When he was done painting her to his satisfaction, he asked her to follow him and led her to the mirror in the bathroom. She glanced over her shoulder at his artistry and saw what he was talking about. The hourglass shape of her violin was reflected back at her. Her shoulders formed the upper bouts, tapering into concaves at her waist and then flowing out into the lower bouts of her ass. The indentation of her spine was the natural image of the strings running down the length of her back.

Their eyes met in the mirror and Lei saw his darken with desire.

He took her hand and led her back to the bed, positioning her on her hands and knees, then kneeling behind her. "Beautiful," he murmured as his hands covered her ass, fetchingly propped up for him to enjoy. "You know, I've always been attracted to your dark hair and eyes... exotic, almond-shaped," he said, "but I see I've been missing the little peach you keep hidden."

"Peach?" her voice came out a little breathless.

Devin parted her ass cheeks and ran and finger down the middle, reaching her soft folds and dipping into them. "Yes, a ripe peach," he affirmed.

Her juices oozed out from her as his finger sought her center.

He inserted first one and then another into her, slowly, plunging and taking them out, and then sinking them back into her in a way that threatened to make her limbs stop supporting her weight.

"Please," she whimpered, when it went on too long and she pushed back against him. As his male hardness came up against her ass, she pressed against him, trying to align herself so that she could feel him where his fingers had just been.

"You want me inside you?"

"Yes, please, yes."

He steadied her with a hand at her waist and in a moment was inside with a long stroke that almost buried his entire length into her. Lei gasped at the sudden intrusion, but after the initial shock, the fullness of him inside her warmed her blood as she shifted to accommodate him.

He started fucking her with long, languorous strokes, quite different from the normal spirited thrusts that had been the staple of their sexual relationship until then. She met him stroke for stroke, swaying back to meet him as he sunk himself in her again and again. The rhythm was slow, but all the more intense for the wholly different feelings it evoked in her.

While his forceful thrusts had the effect of making her feel pounded into, this slow assault opened up her senses to a variety of other sensations that she had never been introduced to. Everything was magnified - his entire length sliding into her sensitive pussy, her hanging breasts swaying with their motion, his labored breathing in the fraught silence of the room, and her gasps that punctuated each of his slow strokes.

He reached around and cupped her hanging breasts, using them as leverage to push himself into her, and Lei almost cried out with the feel of his hands pumping at them in time with his drives. The whole experience was beyond anything Lei had ever experienced and as she lost sense of time, of everything, her world was reduced to just his skillful manipulations on her, in her.

The sensations built up on each other until Lei had to bite her lip in order to rein in the cry that would surely break forth, such was the intensity that was flooding her being. It was the moment he tweaked her nipples between his fingers that Lei started to tremble, a trembling that flowed out in waves from the center of her body, escalating into full body shudders that threw her rhythm off. With a cry, she felt herself falling into the whirlpool of sensations that overwhelmed her being and blanked out everything in her mind except the feeling of him still pushing himself deep inside her spasming pussy. His breath hitched once, then twice, and with a tortured moan, he followed her as she felt his warm fluid dribble down her thigh.

* * * *

Lei sat backstage, ready as always in her trademark white ensemble. There was just one change. The characteristic flower in her hair was red this time, not white.

She fingered the neckline of her dress, then with a determined effort, stilled her hands and folded them in her lap. She was nervous. With thousands of performances under her belt, today was the day she was most nervous about. She had played Sibelius too many times to count, it was one of her favorite pieces, but she had never performed with Devin in the audience before. She wondered if she would be conscious of him and if that would harm her performance.

She knew that her playing had changed during the last few months. The way she played for him was subtly different from the way she normally played. It came from places within her than only he had opened up. The one time she had played for him had proven that. But on such a large scale, with an audience of hundreds, she just didn't know how the subtle change in her style would go over.

Her brain also insisted on reminding her of the time that she had played for him, and what had followed after. That lent a flush to her cheeks and another edge to her nervousness.

To add to it, George Yosef, her Juilliard teacher and virtuoso violinist would also be in the audience. He rarely came to his students' performances as he realized that it might be distracting, but he had sought her out before the show and said that he was looking forward to this one as he had been hearing a lot about the way she had been playing recently.

Lei just hoped everything would go well.

The thunderous applause that greeted her as she entered the hall was the same, but Lei's smile might have been just a little less bright that evening. Once on stage, she sought Devin out first, acknowledging him. He placed a hand on his heart and smiled slightly. Then she looked at Yosef and inclined her head just a little.

Despite all her misgivings, once the audience had settled down and the concert began, Lei lost herself like she always did. Her focus remained tightly on the piece, each note, each pause... never wavering even a bit as she had feared it might. She was lost to everything but the well of feeling that she now had access to that she never could before.

She wrenched all the emotion from the music and released it as the notes swirled and flowed out of her instrument. She threw herself into the performance like never before. It came from every inch of her body that moved with the music like she was one with it. Never had her performance been so ferociously determined and so physically challenging as it was that evening. Where earlier she had merely seduced the audience with her music, that night she met them head on, pouring all the energy that she had to offer from the deepest reaches of her being. She fairly attacked the third movement that awed the audience with its boldness. As the last note died down, she opened her eyes to stunned silence.

The applause that followed it honored everything she had poured into the performance. Never had she felt an emotional impact of the kind she felt after that recital, tears welling up in her eyes as her heart thundered to the ovation that greeted it.

Devin found her backstage amidst well-wishers and quietly hovered on the side, content to see her receive the accolades she deserved.

George Yosef also came up to her, and while she was a little nervous of his reaction still, she faced up to him and waited for the verdict from the person who had taught her all she knew.

A slight smile graced his lips as he inclined his head at her, telling her without words that she had done well.

"It was okay, then?" she asked, wanting to hear the words.

"Lei, child, that was the most moving expression of Sibelius I ever heard," he said simply.

She flushed with happiness at the praise.

"You know, earlier you played with a technical brilliance and mastery that was a result of the gift that had been given to you, but today, you made that gift your own. I'm proud of you," he said sincerely, giving her a light kiss.

Lei took a deep breath at his words. She knew Yosef did not bestow praise lightly. "Thank you," she whispered when she could speak through the emotion. "Thank you so much."

"No, thankyou. It seems that something has finally tempered your knowledge and talent, elevating it to a level that has rarely been achieved by anyone in my lifetime by any musician. Whatever it is, I'm glad you found it."

"Du wan juan shu, xing wan-li lu," Lei replied through the tightness in her throat. "Practice makes perfect, but experience is the greatest teacher."

Her eyes sought Devin's over the surrounding throng. Yes, apart from the technical mastery, her music could now be dipped in the emotions that he had set in motion in her, and come out all the more vivid for it. The white flower had blossomed.