Silent Guitar (Fiction Piece, First Draft)

The man and woman sized one another up on the street side with the silent guitar a barrier between them. His hands rested on the graceful curve of the instrument’s body and the woman’s mind kept returning to how that same hand had recently rested on the gentler curves of her body. He looked at her with impatient expectation, waiting for her to tell him what she wanted so he could return to the song he’d been playing. She waited for him to begin again but she didn’t know that he didn’t want her to hear what that song was. It was about her. It was written the night she left. Wanting and needing her there with him, and knowing he couldn’t have it back, his emotions had spilled through his fingers into a melody of longing and heart ache. He didn’t want her to hear it, not because he was scared of losing his pride, but because it was an emotion that dulled quicker than he’d expected. He didn’t want her back, not anymore, and he didn’t want her to think he did, but the song was so good, hit the heart with such an exact gnaw of yearning, that he continued to play it long after his feelings were forgotten.

She stood there, her February feet bitten through as she waited for him to say something or begin playing again. She wanted to know what he felt, and only through that silent guitar would he be able to tell her. She wanted to come home, to be with him again in the living room, where he’d pluck at the strings sporadically, a melody streaming through his mind but fumbling out of his fingers. He'd find that perfect connection between what he imagined and what he heard. She’d sit there, pretending to read, pretending not to anticipate what he’d come up with, all the time staring at the same sentence on the same page for hours, waiting for him to notice that she had not turned it. But he was absorbed in something other than her, and he never noticed, not even when she packed her books and left.

He couldn’t wait anymore. He began a song, but not her song. A song from further in his past. A song he knew would make her leave. A song he had once insisted was not a greater love than theirs were. In the dark of the night he'd held her and reassured she meant more to him. He knew how she’d take it, and he was right. From the first note, she knew what was coming, and she couldn't stand to hear his desire for someone else, no matter how far in the past it had existed. She fished in her pocket for her guise for coming and tossed her key to his apartment into the empty guitar case. As she gave him one last look, the music filled the space between them and pushed her into a certain but unsteady walk away.