Unplayed Piano
Title: Unplayed Piano
Characters: Jack, Sarah
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through 3.22/23 "Through The Looking Glass"
Disclaimer: Not mine!
Prompt: For lostsquee Day 6: Least Favorite Character
The first thing she remembered after opening her eyes was seeing his hands, covering his face. The same hands that handled her broken body in the ER; that pulled metal from her chest, that saved her life. The same hands he peeled bloody gloves from before turning and walking away to deal with the next problem, throwing her words back to everyone else over his shoulder. The same hands that she only imagined deftly worked on her again in surgery, trying to piece her back together.
Those hands hid his face, his eyes, those warm brown eyes, which were the last thing she saw before going under. Those warm brown eyes that promised her what she was sure would be impossible. In that instant before darkness overwhelmed her, she believed him.
But when he dropped his hands, his eyes told her that he was worried and sad, distraught with despair. But she knew it was all right, somehow, because she felt it, sensed it, even before she wriggled her toes and those eyes of his welled up with joyful tears.
For a long time she believed she fell in love with him right then.
*******
But then she thought maybe it really happened the day that she visited him for the first time, all on her own. Stiff and unassured but walking on her own, she came to his apartment with cookies and a smile, knowing it was lame and expecting rejection, but unable to help herself.
Before she rang the bell she heard the music, but it wasn’t until it abruptly stopped and there was a jumbled tinkering of keys that she realized he had been the one playing.
Inside, she told him he sounded lovely and she asked him to play her a song. It was sad and beautiful and it made her want to cry for reasons she couldn’t even name.
His fingers moved over the black and white keys like she imagined he might touch her cheek if he were to kiss her, soft and delicate but purposeful, knowing. It was the first time she ever saw him handle anything that wasn’t medical, the first time she ever saw him hold anything other than her life in his hands.
But after that day he held her heart and she had never been more sure that she had given it to the right person.
*******
She knew she would find him there, sitting at the baby grand with his fingers moving music into the air.
When he stopped and took a drink she knew it was about his father, because whenever he drank it was always about his father.
She thought she knew him that well. She thought she could read him like a book. For the past two years, she had.
Eying the twenty-something girls who had been eying her husband-to-be, she smirked then, confident that she had won something that anyone in their right mind would want but only she could have.
They played Heart and Soul and she took the easy part, but she still messed it up.
He couldn’t write his vows but then she figured it was about something else. About the way he was distracted every time a car pulled up to the hotel, hoping his father would step out of the cab and into their wedding.
It didn’t occur to her that the problem was between them, that the happiest day of her life would be the day she longed to take back.
For two years, it was all she wanted. For two years, it had been nothing but perfection and crazy in love, always looking forward to the next two years, and the next, and the next…
Even now she wonders if getting married, if saying forever, was the thing that drove Jack away.
*******
It sat there lonely in their living room, much like her. Unplayed, unappreciated. Forgotten.
Jack’s mother had given it to them as a wedding gift, because Margo always loved to hear her son playing the piano. Margo thought it made him refined.
It hadn’t been used in months. Returning home at two, three in the morning and leaving at six didn’t leave much time for sonatas, much less duets.
She thought about taking it up, taking lessons and making use of the beautiful instrument herself, but she had neither the talent nor the patience to learn.
*******
She met him at a club, a jazz club, a place she never would’ve frequented if her girlfriends hadn’t made her come.
When she asked him if he played, he said no. He said he would rather leave the playing to everyone else. He liked to sit back and listen.
She gave him her number at the end of the night and he pretended not to notice her wedding ring.
She pretended not to notice it either.
*******
He told her he could keep everything: the house, the cars, the furniture. She had no reason to keep the piano except spite, and was slightly disappointed when he never asked for it back.
After a few months of waiting for him to stop pretending he cared for her and start actually caring about everything else, she sold it.
It rattled and clunked as two men loaded it onto a dolly and out of her house and she looked away, tried not to hear.
It wasn’t supposed to hurt to see it go.
He never really loved you, she reminded herself.
He never loved you at all.
*******
When she got the news that he was dead, she couldn’t quite believe it.
All that time she spent wishing that he would get out of her life forever, and now he was gone. Somehow she felt responsible.
She lingered long in the church after everyone had left. No body to bury, no one to say good-bye to. Both Jack and his father, gone.
Everyone looked at her as if she had no right to be there. Maybe they simply no longer considered her a part of his life, or maybe they knew she was partly to blame.
There was a piano there, off to the side where the choir would probably stand on happier days. She went to it and set her hand on the ivory keys, plunked out a few notes that she couldn’t name.
But they sounded clunky and out of tune, dissonant and wrong.
She sat down on the bench and she cried.
*******
The call came so late at night it was actually early in the morning.
Her husband told her not to go but she went anyway.
When she walked into the room, his hands were covering his face. They were trembling, shaky. He dropped them and turned to her; he looked like a ghost, pale and deathly. His eyes were somehow vacant and empty but also full to the brim with pain and loneliness.
He looked at her like she was a stranger, someone barely recognizable from a long forgotten past.
He asked her to take him home and she refused.
She thought she loved him once, and as she walked away all over again, she told herself she did it because she could so easily love him still.
She told herself she did it because her heart still ached when she heard the piano, because it was too dangerous to put herself in his hands.
*******
It isn’t until his second funeral that she realizes that she was wrong about everything, right from the start.