03: duet

She knew she needed to get back into the music.

Leaning on the bongo drums, she gazed at the black markings on the page and tried to focus on counting the thirty-seven measures of rest before the woodblock solo. Once having glanced up at the conductor to check the tempo, she then followed her eyes as they wandered across the room and allowed them to linger on the cute viola player, until he looked up, at which instant they scurried back to their place and attempted to reconnect with the monopods as they marched across the lines printed on paper.

Ba-da-ba-doon-kah! Nailed it, and took a step back. Here, the parallel lines of the staff rotated ninety degrees into her field of vision, and she could see him through the harp strings. As the ensemble moved on to a new section in the piece, she stepped up to the drum and reencountered an uninterrupted line of sight. When she saw him looking at her from behind geek-chic black frame glasses, she dropped her eyes bashfully, though not quite as quickly as before.

As the rehearsal rolled through the evening, they hit upon some mutual sense of amusement at the various goings-on around them, and the spaces between pizzicatos and bass drum hits were populated by plenty of shared smiles and funny, mock-quizzical looks. Odd, she thought, that she had been so sleepy just a few hours earlier and yet she now felt quite awake and alive.

As she was loading the glockenspiel into the van, he walked by and barely paused for a quick glance and a shy smile. When he returned, he stopped to say hi. They each learned the other's name, and they recounted whatever silly thing they had been laughing at. She wanted to say that yes, the situational humor was nice, but mostly she kept smiling at him because he was just so darn cute. But she didn't, because the whole exchange had already attained a level of adorable awkwardness that was actually kind of perfect, and she didn't want to risk ruining it by pushing it over the edge into just plain uncomfortable awkwardness. Either that, or she was just too shy.

(photo credit: mr.beaver)