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This is not the first time Larissa's hands have itched to pick up staff paper and pen, to commit to memory the way Justin's voice rises and falls when he reads his poems to her. To her, like he wrote them for her ears alone, but she never lets herself follow that train of thought because she doesn't know where it could lead.
It's an unorthodox kind of ear training. Justin does not have the voice of a trained singer—he breathes into his chest, into his heart, a kind of simple, inefficient authenticity that she envies sometimes, until she needs to call on her voice to do something spectacular.
But spectacle could never compare to curling up on the couch, listening to Justin's voice move through his words, wanting to close her eyes to hear them better but afraid that if she does she'll miss something important.
All the while, she imagines melodies falling into place around them, making the air sing like it was always meant to.
The air isn't meant to do anything, of course. Larissa knows that. But she also knows that Justin's writing has music in it. How could it not? And when he reads it, she feels like the world stands at attention, waiting to hear its starting note.
Justin's attention is fixed on the paper in his hands, wrinkled around the edges, smudged where he erased lines. The poem flows, one verse into the next, sunsets and the ringing of golden bells and threads of celestial harmony running through it all, and how he can do this with words she will never know.
Justin writes in pencil, for the clarity of whittling his writing down to only what he wants to say. Larissa composes in pen. She likes the look of a manuscript that shows love's labor.
Somehow, they fit together.
His voice settles into the final lines of the poem, syllables dancing to a close, and one heartbeat passes, then two, then three, before either of them break the stillness, before Larissa dares to breathe.
"So?" Justin says, almost murmurs, barely lifting his gaze off the page. "What do you think?"
Larissa matches him, hushed. "I think it's beautiful."
He smiles, and she knows what he's going to say the barest instant before he says it. "You always say that."
"And I'm always right." But Larissa knows how unsatisfying that is, for people like them, who always want to know more. "It's lyrical. You fit the words together in a way nobody else has ever arranged them before, but when you read them, they sound... inevitable."
"Inevitable." Justin mulls it over. The sunlight slanting in through the window gilds his cheeks, his temples, his collarbone. "In what way?"
"Like they were always meant to be said," Larissa says softly.
The words hang between them for a moment, unsure, fragile, before he turns to her, and he lifts the paper, holds it out, and there's something searching in his eyes. "What if they were meant to be sung instead?"
Larissa can feel her heart beating against her ribs. She's never asked Justin if she can set one of his poems. The music comes to her, easier than it does for any other text, but writing it down has always felt like a border that, once crossed, could never be uncrossed. He speaks those words like they spring directly from the spark of life inside him. She couldn't just set them to music of her own creation.
Not without permission.
Her mind is already racing, picking up scraps of melody lines, a harmonic progression that hides its arc until it reveals closure, recalling the cadence of Justin's voice and examining rhythms she can use to notate it. Triplets, maybe. Her heart feels like it beats in threes—they called it symmetrical in the Catholic Church centuries ago, but she swoops from one measure to another in constant motion, with none of the waiting that comes from duple time. Maybe that's what makes triple time perfect. "Can I?"
Justin flips the paper so she can read it, can see the inscription at the top, underlined twice: For Larissa.
She smiles, the kind of smile that reaches down into her chest and lodges there. The paper settles into her hand, and she reads the words again. It's not the same as hearing Justin read them, but it's enough—she notes the elisions, the periods, the places where his writing stretches and skims over the page with the freedom of a seabird.
"You conduct," Justin says. "When I read to you. Did you know?"
Larissa glances down at her hands. They're clutching the paper, determinedly still. "I didn't."
"It's so small, I don't think you would notice. But that's how I knew you had ideas for compositions." He shrugs, like he hasn't just plucked out the conflict that burrows a little deeper under Larissa's skin with each new poem. "I wrote this one for you."
Ideas hum, all calling for her attention, and the piano in the corner seems ready to burst with potential, with this poem that Justin wrote for her.
"Thank you," Larissa says, and she hopes he knows how much she means it.
Judging by his smile, he does.
The song comes quickly to her.
Justin is gifted with phrasing, and Larissa has spent hours mentally transforming his voice into musical notes, following his emphasis, the love he puts into certain words.
When half of the music is written out, the neatest she's ever done, she realizes it's composed for soprano. But transposing it now feels wrong, not when the notes that came to her flew onto the page like this.
She takes a deep breath and continues. Justin plays piano, he sightreads well, and maybe this way she can show him what she means, why she sets this line rising to the top of the staff and why this one cascades down immediately afterwards. How his words sound to her.
Larissa can feel a turning point approaching.
One way or another, when she sings this, things will change.
It worries her, but it's a distant sort of worry, a cousin to the stage fright she used to get. Larissa is experienced in matters of nerves, both hers and other people's. Justin's. They don't scare her. But they're there, a pit in her stomach, a jolt of something when Justin calls from the kitchen to ask if she wants a snack.
They say: this will be the deepest part of yourself that you ever show.
And Larissa says: then I'll show it well.
The song complies.
Larissa is starting to think Justin was right. These words were meant to be sung. All she's really doing is taking the music that bubbles under the surface and giving it a voice. It almost writes itself, but at the same time, she knows it doesn't. Larissa is holding the pen. This is her music, for Justin's poetry, and they fit together so neatly that the seams are almost unnoticeable.
But they exist, which makes this all the more beautiful.
She's written more complicated pieces, showier pieces, pieces with clever devices and musical symbolism and all the things that are praised in future generations—or at least, she hopes they will be. But this piece feels like nothing she has ever composed before. It is so truthful that looking at it makes her soul ache.
She writes For Justin at the top. Underlines it twice.
It's ready.
The sunlight has sunk and pulled away from the room, but Larissa hadn't even noticed the shift to evening. The room is full of light, from the lamp that Justin must have turned on. He sits on the couch now, legs stretched all the way to the other end, reading.
"Justin," she says, and he looks up so fast that she thinks maybe he wasn't reading after all.
Maybe he's nervous too.
Larissa stands up from the piano bench. "Can you play it?"
Justin sets his book aside and comes to look over the music. It's four pages of black ink against cream paper, the piano and the voice stretching and twisting and reaching towards each other until the very last phrase, when they finally merge together.
He sits down on the bench. "Yes. How fast do you want it?"
She indicates the tempo, and stands just behind him so she can see the music over his shoulder. With Justin sitting and Larissa standing, she could easily drape her arms around him, could lean forward and press her cheek to his.
She doesn't. She waits.
"Ready?" Justin murmurs, hands poised over the keyboard.
Larissa does have to lean forward to see the lyrics, written small under her notes. Almost without thinking about it, her hand floats into the air, hovering over Justin's shoulder, and Larissa watches it for a moment before letting it settle onto the soft fabric of his shirt.
"Ready," she says.
And she breathes.
Justin plays the introduction like he'd heard the version in Larissa's mind, like he knows exactly what she wants it to sound like, and it's second nature to inhale, to fill her ribcage with air and let the notes soar like the seabird skimming over Justin's poetry, creating art out of nature.
The music fills the air, swelling and falling and rising like the tide, and Larissa hopes, she hopes, she hopes, she needs Justin to know what this means, what she has written for him.
His hands fly over the keys, and her breath courses through her lungs, and she has never felt so alive.
The pages turn, and she doesn't know who turned them, but all too soon they're reaching the final page, and his piano and her voice mingle, and they share the same space and the same air and the same essence.
And then the final chord hangs in the air, and Larissa is waiting as long as she can, lengthening her decrescendo with every last molecule of air in her lungs, and Justin is lifting his hands off of the keyboard but holding the pedal down, and the notes ring, they ring with the same inevitability of Justin's poetry.
She doesn't dare breathe. Justin's shoulder is completely still under her hand.
But the strings of the piano can only last for so long, and finally they, too, fade into silence.
Justin slowly releases the pedal, softly, not disturbing the stillness they've created.
Eventually, he shifts a bit on the bench, turning toward her hand, and he says, "It's beautiful."
Larissa presses her forehead to his and closes her eyes.
She can feel his breath fanning across her cheek, and when he covers her hand with his own, she feels that too, and they stand there for an infinite moment before she murmurs, "You always say that."
She feels his laugh before she hears it, knows it'll happen a moment before it does, bursting the bubble of quiet with pure honesty.
"Thank you," they both say at the same time, and then Larissa laughs too.
"Seriously," Justin says, and he pulls away. Larissa opens her eyes to see him watching her, dark eyes almost overwhelming in their sincerity. "It was meant to be sung."
"I'm glad it was," Larissa says.
"I am too."
And Justin takes her hand, presses his lips to it, and Larissa wants to wrap her arms around him and not let go.
So that's exactly what she does.