Disclaimer: I don’t own any of these characters.

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a project between oh-you-pretty-things any myself. You are actually reading chapter 2. If you want to read chapter one, you will need to visit the profile of oh-you-pretty-things. In fact, if you want to read any of the chapters from Will’s POV, visit her profile. Otherwise, you might et very, very confused.

THIS FIC IS RATED M for explicit sexual content, violence, smoking, drinking and drug abuse. All in a day’s work for your lovely authors. ;) Just kidding. Wait. Kind of kidding?

Another day of this modern capitalist mindfuck down, and I stood on the crowded tube platform waiting on a train to get home. It took unusually long, and I was certainly not in the mood for this. I don’t like to be kept waiting. This, I fear, is a product of my upbringing.

The train finally pulled up to the platform and I squeezed in, with approximately a million other Londoners. Like a four-year-old, I made a mad dash for a seat. A window seat. I was thwarted in my efforts by a short, round woman who looked up at me smugly. I was only tired before, but now I was cranky, too. How dare I not get the window seat?

It’s not a far ride, anyway, and I forced myself to rationalize that other the other adults on the train had long gotten over not getting their way in matters of train seating. I live in Central London, not too far from the record store I work at. Yes, I work at a record store. Yes, I live in Central London. It is, in fact, possible to do both of those things. Of course, that’s only because I’m still getting on my feet and therefore do not feel bad about the help I get from my dad. It’s just us two, after all, and I’m fairly sure he’d keel over if I denied his help. I also have no idea what I want to do with my life and all I’ve been able to come up with in the past year is “not work in a record store.” And my useless university degree is in violin performance and isn’t even from a Uni, but a conservatory. So that doesn’t help. Sighing, I popped my earbuds into my ears and turned up the volume, allowing the music to wash away the day. The Sibelius violin concerto. I don’t care how edgy I’ve forced my musical taste to become, the Sibelius remains and will remain one of my favorite works on the planet.

I squeezed back out the train a few stops later and began the short walk to my flat. It’s not much, just a “junior one bedroom” which is really just a euphemism for “rather than one normal-sized room, you will have two very small rooms and your kitchen will be in a closet.” Daddy would not have had it any other way. He believes that any other borough would be not only unsafe, but too remote and that I would be too far from…things. The fact is simply that Daddy is not and has never been a city-dweller and so he thinks anything other than the tourist friendly areas are crime-riddled hovels that lack so much as a grocery store. I’m not complaining. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love being in the center of it all. And rolling out of bed 20 minutes before I have to be at work.

I unlocked the door and walked in, taking approximately four steps before collapsing on my sofa, Heiftiz still sawing away at the Sibelius. The flat I so small that I don’t even need to move from this position to gracefully place the iPod into my Sound Dock (another gift from Daddy, I’ll admit, but it really does help me practice! I think!) without missing so much as a sixteenth note of the piece. In another graceful series of moves (and again, without getting off of my sofa), I took off my shoes, replaced them with a pair of fluffy pink slippers and lit a cigarette. I took a long, deep drag as the third movement began, percussive and strong and there’s really no one more fit to play this than Jascha Heifitz was and I love this recording and soon enough, I had gotten to the point where I had to roll over and make sure that I hadn’t lit a hole in my sofa or inadvertently ignited my curtains. While I was at it, I turned up the volume.

This of course prevented me from hearing my spare key turn in the lock and the door swing open. However, no matter how loud the tutti orchestral passages were or how Heifitz absolutely stings the double stops that are in like 104th position, nothing could have prevented me from hearing Jim YELL a greeting to me as he walked in. Jim is my boyfriend, and the ultimate case of buyer’s remorse. Boys in blazers and ties named James were all the rage in sixth form, but now, I’m straddling this strange void between the wide world of boarding school, conservatory, French lessons, and polished silver flatware and the less cushy universe of, well, it’s like Bohemia, rough and gritty, but with more Starbucks. So it’s gotten consistently harder and harder to take someone like Jim seriously. I take a final drag and then put out my cigarette. And I was only half finished with it.

He kissed me roughly on the forehead. “Hey Babe!” he said in that perpetually enthusiastic tone of his. He flopped down on the sofa and I rolled my eyes and pulled away. Did he not see me lying there?

“I need my legs, James, so if you could get up…”

Almost as though he hadn’t heard me, he reached for the remote and turned on my TV. “Manchester United is playing Chelsea! C’mon, we have to watch this!” Absent-mindedly and almost possessively, he pulled my legs back across his lap.

As easily as he missed the lower half of my body, he also seems to have missed that Shostakovich 9 is now playing on my Sound Dock and as far as I’m concerned, turning on a sodding football game while Shosty is playing is an unforgivable sin.

“Jim, Manchester United is always bloody playing Chelsea.” I sighed loudly and swung my legs over so that I was sitting upright. I grabbed my iPod and spent half a moment trying to find somewhere else to go. Of course, I was severely limited in my options, this being Central London and all. My options were: my bed, tucked neatly into the corner of the only other room. (It also bears mentioning that this is the same room where my closeted kitchen is. I’m one of a very elite group of people who stores non-perishable food items under their bed and can fry eggs without actually getting up on Sunday mornings.) I shut the door to the other room behind me, apparently without my absence so much as registering on Jim’s radar.

I sighed again. What I really needed now was to practice; to feel the friction between string and bow hair and the hollow vibrations of the instrument on my shoulder. I picked my case up off the floor and set it on my bed, carefully removing my violin. I rifled through the unkempt stack of sheet music on the stand in the corner of the room. Ah, the Paganini Caprices, I thought to myself, eyeing Jim through the glass-paned door. Those pieces could raise the dead; perhaps there was a chance they could wrest Jim from his football match. After all, I could only force him to enjoy classical music if he could hear it.

Paganini’s Nearly Impossible Caprice No. 5 in A minor opens with a szforzando a minor chord, which I prepared brilliantly and executed with great panache. I could almost feel Jim jump six inches off the couch, but he still didn’t remove his eyes from the television. The entire opening is a cadenza, which I took presumably too fast. However, eyeing the third octave A that was quickly approaching, I slowed down and took my sweet time getting there. This particular A is marked fortissimo and I took no prisoners. Vibrating like there was no tomorrow, I hit the note, gave it a full down bow and let it hang in the air for a few seconds.

Finally, Jim noticed that the world included more than football and himself. For approximately ten seconds, that is. “God, Lizzie, could you keep that thing down?!”

So, my plan was not going well. And I was only on the second line of the Caprice. Poor James, not knowing what he had gotten himself into by choosing to date a classical musician.

I finished the cadenza without further interruption. The next section was marked “agitato” which was not a hard character for me to get into that particular afternoon. It was also marked, by a well-meaning violin professor perhaps, quarter note equals 176 beats per minute. A vast sea of sixteenth notes spread out across the nearly two pages in front of me and I scoffed. This is why I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I loved to play the violin, but didn’t see what there was to gain in being able to play sixteenth notes perfectly at 176 beats per minute. The whole thing sounded better to me down around 138, but that’s not what would be expected of me, should I ever choose to play the audition circuit. The only things that kept me doing this were my need to feel the way I do when playing and the fact that I am actually good enough, talented enough, to go somewhere with it. If I ever become more enthusiastic and get over my absurdly long lazy streak, that is.

I had just modulated into a brief passage in f minor when I felt my violin being tugged away. Jim roughly grabbed the neck and yanked it from my arms, causing me to momentarily stop breathing. Is it possible for him to anything gently? I asked myself. Helplessly, I reached out and grabbed for my violin; a look of what could only be described as terror plastered across my face. I mean, my violin wasn’t a Strad or anything, but they don’t run cheap.

“C’mon, babe,” he said, again in that sleazy boyfriend tone of his. “Let’s put this away.” He laid the violin in the case, again lacking any and all forms of grace, and shut it, without first pushing the violin all the way into its slot or securing the neck. I gasped audibly, but Jim, of course, didn’t notice. He shoved the case on the floor and put his hands on my hips, pulling me up against him, securing one arm around my waist.

With his spare hand, he pulled his own iPod out of his pocket. Oh god, I thought to myself. Here it comes.

“Babe, if you wanted music, all you had to do was ask!” He put the iPod into the dock on my nightstand, still holding me tight. There was a part of me, somewhere deep inside, that still liked this. Which is why I hadn’t run screaming at this point. It’s so hard to make up one’s mind when what they were in the past and what they face in the present were so radically different. I liked to think that I stayed with Jim because it was comforting on some level. It reminded me of the days gone by, before I had to pay bills.

Well, ok. So, I didn’t actually put up the money for the bills, but I did have to remember to actually pay them.

My reverie was broken when I heard Dave Matthews Band coming out of MY iPod dock. Dave Matthews Band?! I almost felt betrayed that my iPod dock didn’t outright refuse to play this garbage.

Before he could kiss me, I stopped him. “Jim,” I said (somewhat rudely I’ll admit), “We listened to Dave Matthews last time. Do you ever seek out new music?”

He smiled like it wasn’t a big deal. “No, babe, that’s what you’re for!”

“But you never actively listen to any of my music.”

He looked at me quizzically, like I had just presented him with a question about quantum physics.

“But I’m not like you, Lizzie. I just listen to it because it sounds nice.” Now, he went in for the kill. And as he kissed me, all I could feel was disgust that someone could say such a thing. If that makes me a snob, then I make no apologies.

But I didn’t stop him.

We eventually ended up in bed and some time later, I heard him snoring. I turned my head towards the window and noticed that the sky outside had gone pitch black. I was hungry and unsatisfied and still cranky. I hadn’t taken my eyes off the ceiling the whole time.

I pulled myself out from under his perfectly sculpted arm. If there was one thing and only one thing in the world Jim knew how to do, it was keep himself in shape. On the physical side of things, this should have kept me satisfied. I mean, Jim wasn’t a bad looking bloke. Quite the opposite, really. And it’s not that he was bad in bed, either. He was just so bloody uninteresting.

I put on a robe and walked into the other room. Sighing, I collapsed on the couch for the second time that evening. I laid there, wondering what to do next.

Suddenly, I remembered that I had forgotten to take my pill. While an accident would have been convenient in that it would have made my mind up for me about Jim, I didn’t feel like shouldering the burden of convenience for the next 18 years. I rummaged around in my purse for the pills, which I quickly located hiding under a layer of gum wrappers and receipts. I pulled the package out of its little sleeve and a stray piece of paper that had gotten shoved in the sleeve with it fluttered down to my lap. As I swallowed the pill dry, I picked up the little card and looked at it.

Will Turner, blacksmith, it read.

I studied the card. Ah yes. He had been the impatient prick who bought a Sarah McLachlan CD from me today. I tried to picture him in my mind’s eyes, remembering that I had found him somewhat attractive. He hadn’t seemed like the type to have a girlfriend that would listen to Sarah McLachlan. In fact, he hadn’t seemed like the type who would be in a major chain record store in Central London at all. I would have pegged him for a punk who owned mostly vinyl, with his unkempt hair and Chuck Taylors.

Probably not my type, I thought to myself. Still…

That’s right, I thought, the afternoon’s scenario coming back into focus. He had waited impatiently, only to ask vaguely for suggestions. Ha. Maybe…

I eyed the card in my hands as though it might try to flee or alternately, strangle me, as I grabbed the phone. What the hell was I doing? I dialed the number.

It rang and rang. Oh, what am I doing, I thought and hung up. Who calls a complete stranger at 11:30 on a Friday night? Surely he was out with his Sarah McLachlan-loving girlfriend.

So, I shoved the card back in my purse and went to bed.

AN: Does Will call her back? Find out at oh-you-pretty-things profile!