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It’s something so difficult and so profound for some people: the idea of meeting someone and the future whispering this person will be the axis your soul pivots on, getting to work building comfort and devotion from scratch, caring and being cared for.
For some people, it’s heavy chains pressing into their wrists from all the years before; loving, being loved, means being an inconvenience. For others, it’s the faint song in the air between their hands; easier than breathing.
Sometimes you don’t even have to search for it, because sometimes the story is written like this: two people’s souls had already once touched a lifetime ago, a lifetime they don't remember, but feel like it's been there for their whole lives.
They were meant to find eachother again.
Even then, though, it’s not as simple as punching numbers into a calculator or plugging numbers into a formula and fingers crossed it works. The universe, and all the little factors that’ll eventually fall into place, will make you work towards it, even if it’s meant to be.
It’s already the afternoon, and yet Teacher Huang still has a long day of math tutoring ahead. She sorts through the papers splayed out on her desk—notes, worksheets, answer keys—as more children walk into the room and find their seats, as their chatter crescendoes.
She only looks up from hastily writing out today’s lesson plan for a moment, and it’s just as a boy with glasses and dark hair shuffles into the room. He seems to hesitate, almost, before taking a seat in the second row—next to the quiet boy with a mullet haircut and an instrument case resting by his feet.
Both seem around similar ages—thirteen or fourteen at the very least.
“Do you play violin?” the glasses boy asks with bright-eyed interest, gesturing at the other’s violin case, holding out a hand as if saying, this is me. The other accepts his handshake with a smile, and just like that, two people have just found their new center of the universe.
The math tutor smiles to herself as the two strike up a conversation happily, as a new friendship slowly finds its wings; she loves seeing friendships form in her classroom.
The next Friday, the boy with the violin case—Eddy, she had learned—hurries into the classroom just moments before he’d have been late. He hastily slips into his seat next to the boy with glasses—Brett—and sets his violin case down on the floor.
“It was awesome seeing you at youth orchestra last week,” the math tutor hears him say.
“I was so surprised when I saw you there by the stage, actually,” Brett laughs. “It was great seeing a familiar face, though.”
(They were meant to find eachother again.)
Today, Teacher Huang spends the first half of the lesson teaching at the chalkboard, later walking among the rows of desks and handing out pages of math problems, occasionally stopping to help confused students through their questions.
A few tables down from where she’s standing, Eddy’s jotting down all the rough work towards the answer, speeding through every question on the page. Meanwhile, Brett’s staring with blank exasperation at the first question, head tilted.
“You need some help?” the math tutor hears Eddy ask him.
“I guess so, yeah,” Brett sighs, looking up at Eddy, a small smile plastered on his face like apologizing is the only thing he’s ever known. “You keep working, though, I’ll ask the teacher.”
Eddy shakes his head. “I can help—I won’t go to the next worksheet without you, it’s fine.” He leans over and walks Brett through the first equation, his pencil trailing along the page to his explanations.
“It’s not…inconvenient for you?”
“Not if it’s you I’m helping—why would it be? You’re my friend, yeah?”
That overtone of worry in Brett’s eyes wanes into relief, a harmony of belonging—even with something as comforting as being cared about on purpose, with something as comforting as finding a person to feel belonging with. Teacher Huang listens to their interaction with a small smile; it’s so easy for Eddy to love him and for Brett to be loved by the boy next to him.
(For some people, loving and being loved means being an inconvenience. For others, it’s easier than breathing.)
That’s how the pillars beneath a bond are built, with something as effortless yet life-changing as loving someone on purpose, without inconvenience—loving someone because you see crevices in their soul where yours fits perfectly.
• • •
In a duet, the music fills the silence between two people.
It all comes down to whether it’s played right: if the melody and harmony lock their overtones together, if the two vastly different timbres of two same instruments find a happy medium where they echo one another. If two people are destined to meet again and again, if they choose to stay together, then the silence will find its words.
It’s not an easy feat, actually. Behind every perfect recording, every friendship, there’s hours spent working towards as close to perfection as possible, mistakes and failures, years of honing a craft, a passion—years of building something that will last.
Grace slumps lazily on the piano bench, allowing herself a practice break and scrolling through social media (sacrilegious, she knows, but it’s a secret well-kept between her and the practice room walls). Her flute rests on the closed lid of the piano, empty of music.
The faint sound of two people practicing a sweet romantic duet in the conservatory’s practice room next door answers the silence of hers. As Grace listens absentmindedly, she can’t place an exact name to the composer, but the flowering fairytale impressions sound somewhat like Sarasate.
The melodies flourish within the wall that separates the two practice rooms—chords and fast runs, octaves and trills, laughter as one of them screws up their part, and Grace listens.
It’s something about how the two violinists next door make the duet their own, their own heartbeats in sync beneath the music: the growth of a bond, a motif that has one path of onwards. The passion in their playing makes it feel like Grace is listening in on something deeply personal, private.
(She wonders: does having someone by your side make the little and big things a little more bearable—the nasty practice rooms with broken air conditioning, everything in and around them changing as time passes? How much of it is a blur? How much is crystal clear?)
She picks up her flute again, practices more of the concerto she’s learning, before packing up. She leaves the practice room around the time the two people from next door leave theirs—two guys with violin cases slung on their backs, who can’t be older than about eighteen or nineteen.
“My fingers are in pain!” one exclaims. “Why’d we have to practice Navarra of all duets?”
“You’ll get better at your part,” the other laughs.
“I’d be playing even better if I played the first violin part.”
“Nice try, but nah.”
As the two walk down the hallway and out of sight, Grace closes the door of the practice room, lost in her thoughts, lost in the music she’d heard from next door.
She thinks about Sarasate’s Navarra seamlessly fitting the two violinists’ playing styles, the way it sounded as though the duet was written for them. The notes echoed like they’d been brought together through music, through a melody and harmony that found one another again and again.
Because in a duet, the rest of the world fades away, to the overtones only the two instruments can hear.
• • •
It takes a lifetime’s worth of music to touch every heart in a concert hall.
Practicing a concerto isn’t solely memorizing it note for note and hoping it’s enough. The whole interpretation process goes like this: shaping the colors and dynamics in the piece, broadening emotions that’ll paint an image in the silence, finding a tempo that’ll hold it all together.
It takes forever, honing a craft as hours, months, years walk past you—and still you feel like you’ve barely learned any further. The process of practicing takes forever sometimes, but eventually, you’ll find a way to get music across to everything around you—to the musicians seated behind you, the conductor, the silence at the very corners of the audience.
It takes a lifetime’s worth of music to learn how to communicate through it.
The orchestra conductor walks onstage with the soloist following closely behind him, to applause and a filled gathering of seats before the stage. The soloist shakes hands with the concertmaster and bows to the audience, waits for the applause to die down before lifting his violin to his shoulder.
Even before the music comes alive, even only through the way Brett rolls his shoulders to rule out tension during the opening tutti, through the way he lifts his bow to the G string, unhesitant in his movements—it’s easy to tell that Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto was practically written for Brett Yang.
What better piece to perform for his debut tonight?
It’s easy to tell that Brett’s practiced hard for this, the dialogues of majesty and mourning and passion, somehow phrasing the concerto to be entirely his own and yet still entirely Tchaikovsky’s. He’s played through all the practice rooms and rehearsals, shaping colors and dynamics and painting images in the silence.
And yet, the conductor will be reminded of this later on: he and the soloist both have contrasting ideas as to what tempo this movement should be at.
For everyone else’s ears, the concerto isn’t falling apart just yet—but. The orchestra’s tempo holds Brett’s within the wrong bounds, and his playing presses against it, restrained, like things could blow up at any measure, any note, in this sphere he hadn’t practiced for.
And yet, somewhere in the first violins section, Eddy follows Brett instead of the conductor.
It sets the pacing for his best friend a little bit better, the conductor immediately hears it in Brett’s playing; the two revolve around a sort of where you go, I follow motif within the music, unheard by anyone else, overtones of understanding only they can hear. Brett’s concerto seems to relax into the familiarity of something he’s known since forever.
The piece ends with thunderous applause a movement and a half later, clapping from the audience and waving bows in the string sections as Brett smiles and bows. Meanwhile, another violinist leans over to talk to Eddy—beneath the audience, the conductor catches “always follow the conductor, even if the conductor is wrong.”
(Eddy’s too busy beaming with pride for his best friend onstage before the orchestra and audience to even respond to that.)
Like the infinite and universal language it is, the two communicate even through music—in this moment now, they share eachother’s light, and the harmony they have with eachother slow-dances the same way music and silence do—inseparable.
It takes a lifetime’s worth of music to learn how to communicate through it—but sometimes it’s something you’ve been doing for as long as you can remember.
• • •
They’re linked through music, linked through easy smiles and loud laughter, linked through love.
When Cadence sees Brett and Eddy she hears the word “love” as a silhouette that follows closely behind, one soft syllable dancing within the two of them and their universe. To them, four letters means so many different types of love: love for their lives, for their other friends around them, for the very thing that brought them together—music, for eachother.
It’s a friendship to envy, really—finding eachother in an unlikely place and choosing to stay together through one common passion, glued at the hip for years and years to come—inseparable, even with all the other people around them. They’d all met at the conservatory, but Brett and Eddy had been close since long before.
It spells out the whole sixteen years they’ve been friends, as eachother’s point of gravity wherever they go: searching for eachother before anyone else in a crowd, leaning towards eachother in discussions, one draping his arm around the other’s shoulders as they talk and laugh with their whole friend group. It’s the way one says something funny and while everyone else laughs, he looks to the other just to see his smile.
(It’s a friendship to envy, really.)
Sometimes Cadence just imagines things and looks too deep into it: a breath of something unrequited, unspoken, a slight pressing against the tempo of the music and against what they already have. Maybe she’s simply imagining the way one’s eyes follow the other’s hands as he speaks, the way Eddy watches the creases at the corners of Brett’s eyes when he smiles.
It’s a friendship to envy—but.
Inwardly they’re going insane—possibly—when a stranger innocently asks, “how long have you two bene together?” and they awkwardly laugh off the suggestion of something completely different. When time slows and hugs and glances last a little longer than they do, when their gazes flicker away from one other but later find their way home—they’re longing even though they have this.
And yet. When they talk about love, the axis of the universe shifts a little. Something quietens in the air, like they’ve taken a moment to search for something that’ll never be, or to search for something that’s always been here. When they hear love in the form of music, of Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto or Elgar’s Salut d’amour—Cadence wants to ask.
He means a lot to you, doesn’t he?
(Unrequited, unspoken.)
It’s love either way, whatever it is.
• • •
From Leo’s perspective on things, Eddy Chen is an open book.
Maybe it’s the things he’s picked up solely from being friends since conservatory days, maybe he just has an eye for these sort of things, he doesn’t know—but Eddy’s easy to read sometimes.
Like when there’s something inexplicably different from friendship whenever he looks at Brett, a question that dances around both of them the same way.
Look, maybe—whatever he feels—isn’t more than friendship, but different from friendship. Maybe their definition of the line between friendship and romance isn’t society’s definition of it. Maybe it’s a spectrum.
Because really, what could be more than a close bond of sixteen years like theirs?
So Eddy tries, apparently, even despite all that. He tries when Brett’s hand is there as he articulates his thoughts in that animated way of his, he reaches out and touches it, plays with it absently. He tries, when he’s walking closely behind him and reaches for his hand only a second too late.
“Keep trying, and you might actually get to hold his hand someday, you never know.”
Eddy looks up—from the Mendelssohn concerto score he’s poring over, annotating in all likelihood for Brett—like a deer caught in headlights. “Is it really that obvious?”
Leo bursts out laughing. “I wouldn’t say you’re exactly discreet, mate—at least to me. But I gotta say, your attempts are so bad that it’s actually funny.”
“Yeah yeah, I appreciate the encouragement.” Eddy flippantly rolls his eyes.
“So. You’re in love with him?”
Eddy pauses—the million-dollar question. “I don’t know, am I?”
“You tell me.” Leo opens the kitchen fridge and grabs a bottle of orange juice. “What d’you think you’d look for if you really did fall in love with someone?”
Just silence from behind him, as Eddy gathers his thoughts, and then. ”I think…someone who listens just as much as they speak. Someone whose hand I can hold in the dark and never get lost. My heart’s softer with them and I’m not afraid to show my love for what it entirely is.”
“Okay, poet.” Leo turns around. “You do realize that you just describe you and Brett’s entire dynamic, right?”
“Did I?”
“Yeah, I think you did, mate.”
Eddy freezes, Mendelssohn score forgotten, and the realization widens in his eyes like it’s been there all along and yet he never saw it. “Oh my god, I think I’m in love with Brett Yang.”
“Mhm.” Leo leans against the kitchen counter and takes a sip of his orange juice. “Congrats on being the last one to find out.” Then, at the sight of the turmoil in his friend’s eyes, “was it an accident? Falling in love with him?”
“I want to think it wasn’t—maybe. I dunno. Though I guess I just…kept choosing to stay in love with him, y’know?”
Leo nods, lost in thought. “Mhm. Seriously, though, don’t let it come back and bite you later.”
“Okay, counsellor,” Eddy says sarcastically and waves the sheet music at him, both of them laughing despite the picture at hand, and yet.
The moment that friendship turns into something like falling in love, the line in between, is theirs to define.
(From Leo’s perspective on things, Eddy Chen is an open book.)
• • •
“Maybe you could try talking with him through this whole thing you’re feeling?”
“I’m going to at some point, but…Eddy’s my best friend. I can’t risk anything for him, even if it’s as small—or as life-changing—as me falling in love with him.” Then Brett says quietly, so quietly as if he’s admitting what he’d always been afraid to admit, “he’s everything to me.”
“Listen, Brett. Eddy loves you—platonic and romantic and whatever love aside—he loves you. That much is clear to everyone, yeah? You’re his full-time commitment—you and the life you’ve both built together. He’ll listen to what you have to talk about.”
“I hope so. Thanks, Oliver.”
“Anytime, mate. See you in a few hours.” Oliver hangs up the phone.
Hours later, Oliver arrives at Brett and Eddy’s apartment to the heavenly smell of dinner prepping, cheerful greetings from all their friends—and don’t get him wrong, it’s great that everyone’s in good spirits—but. Through their warm welcomes, he almost fails to notice how distant Brett and Eddy suddenly are from eachother.
The pit of his stomach falls as he walks over to Brett, while everyone else heads to the living room—something’s definitely gone wrong.
“Brett, did something happen between you two?” Oliver asks, but he already knows the answer.
“He told me we need some time away from eachother,” Brett breathes out. “He looked so…disgusted, you have no idea.” He lets out a small laugh that doesn’t at all reach the look in his eyes, and Oliver’s heart wrenches. “It’s fine. I’ll get over it.”
“Will you?”
“I—no, I don’t think I ever will. And he’s free to feel whatever type of love he wants to feel for me, I can’t control that, but…I’ve loved him like this for a long time. It just…hurts now.”
(Sometimes love, whatever it is, isn’t an easy thing to get over.)
This evening they’re all spending in Brett and Eddy’s apartment feels normal—for the most part.
While they’re all lounging on the sofas in the living room, talking and laughing (it’s more like Oliver arguing with Cadence and Leo over music theory laws while Juliette watches, sipping her mug of tea—but still, Oliver knows he’s right), Brett and Eddy prepare later’s dessert together in the kitchen.
“350 mL of flour!” Oliver hears Brett say incredulously in between fits of laughter from the kitchen. “Where the hell did you see 350 mL of flour in the recipe?”
He looks over at them, and the way Eddy buries his face in Brett’s shoulder for a few moments, as his shoulders shake with laughter, makes everything between them look so soft and carefree again, not strained like their interactions before—it doesn’t even look like something had changed between them earlier and maybe, maybe there’s hope.
Oliver can’t help but smile to himself; it’s something he envies, how they’re easing into the familiarity of eachother like it’s even still easier than breathing.
Brett sighs and shakes his head, not annoyed, no, but undeniably fond—he reaches over and playfully messes up Eddy’s hair, Eddy’s softened eyes on him all throughout their loud silence, even when Brett turns to the counter and continues blending the ingredients.
“You’re such an idiot, hey.” Brett’s voice is no annoyance and all fondness, barely there beneath the whirring of the electric mixer in his hand.
“You love me for it,” Eddy teases back without missing a beat.
But Brett’s unexpectedly quiet at that, and the rest of their baking passes in sudden silence: as their little moment dims in a bitter rallentando, as something greys in Eddy’s bright eyes, as he’s leaning against the counter and clearly wondering what went wrong?
Later, when the homely aroma of chocolate cake baking in the oven drifts slowly into the living room, the warmth of earlier laughter isn’t there anymore.
(And yet—and yet. Sometimes love, whatever it is, isn’t an easy thing.)
When the table’s set and dinner’s finally served, it’s like something has long shifted in gravity—something has long shifted in their gravity, Oliver sees the most of it now. As everyone else eagerly fills their plates with food, Brett and Eddy take seats at opposite sides of the table, looking and chatting to anyone but eachother, and.
They look so darn awkward that it’s amazing, how they’ve been able to hold up this facade of normal together to everyone else.
From Oliver’s eyes, Eddy’s evening today goes like this: if he isn’t talking animatedly about impressionism in classical music or making everyone laugh with his jokes, he’s unusually quiet and motionless, chin propped on his hand—and yet. Beneath all of that, every time his gaze finds its way home to Brett, it’s not disgusted, it’s pained. Longing.
(Maybe, maybe there’s hope.)
Brett gets up to put his plate in the kitchen sink, and suddenly Eddy’s doing the same. A small clattering of plates set in the sink, and then nothing, silence, from the kitchen—they linger there by the counter, facing eachother without a word spoken between them like they hadn’t been laughing together right there an hour ago.
A whispered catching around Brett’s name beneath the conversation and laughter from the other room, but Brett’s already heading back to his seat before Eddy can say another word.
• • •
Juliette’s sitting on the couch with her dessert plate when Eddy wordlessly plops down next to her. He doesn’t start eating, though—he simply stares pensively into his cake slice for a few long moments.
“What’s on your mind?” she asks him between bites of cake.
“If the person you loved more than anyone else in the world confessed to you, and you accidentally rejected them when you didn’t mean to, and now they probably hate you for the rest of their life—how would you make things right?”
“I can’t tell if I’m more concerned about the fact that something possibly happened between you and Brett, or about the fact that you somehow managed to accidentally reject someone.” Juliette sighs and shoots a half-hearted glare at Eddy, “What happened?”
“I screwed up, that’s what happened! Brett told me he’s in love with me and I freaked out because I needed time to gather my thoughts, so I told him we need some time away from eachother—yes, I know I should’ve worded that better,” Eddy says indignantly when she gives him a death glare, “and now he won’t even look at me.”
How do two people who understand eachother more than anyone else—like Brett and Eddy—find their way into a mess like that?
“Now that, is the absolute nail in the coffin for me. I don’t believe in love anymore.” Juliette sets down her fork with a clatter and throws her hands up—but then she pauses, remembering the laughter from the kitchen earlier. She tilts her head. “You two seemed happy when you were baking together, though.”
“He’s easy to love,” Eddy says simply.
At that, evocations of the word love over the years, fond smiles and carefree laughter, come to Juliette’s mind, and she smiles for only a moment until she’s brought back to the problem at hand. “Then why’d you tell him you guys need time apart when you do, in fact, feel the same?”
“I…I don’t know. I was intimidated by the idea, I guess.” Eddy sighs, hunched over his untouched plate as he rakes his fingers through his hair. “I’ve always believed that platonic and romantic love were hugely different, so I wasn’t sure if we were…ready for it. Y’know, with our channel and all, with everything being the same over the last sixteen years that I’ve known him.”
Juliette doesn’t say anything to that, and Eddy continues.
“We’ve always understood eachother the exact same way—nothing about it was ever one-sided. And I’m looking at him today and I’m just like frick, I did that.” The lost, painful look in Eddy’s eyes is a knife to her heart. “I didn’t know I was capable of hurting him like that, with the same weight I love him with.”
Juliette finishes off her last bit of cake, nodding in thought. “Talk to him again. Seriously. It’s clear you love him, and it’s clear he loves you—if communication got you into this mess, it’ll get you out.”
“I hope so. I’ll do that, then—thanks, Juliette.”
“You’re very welcome.” Juliette grins, standing up to take her plate to the kitchen. “Now finish your dessert and go talk to the love of your life—I need this storyline’s happy ending.” She dodges a couch cushion Eddy chucks in her direction, cackling.
Eddy’s the last to finish his dessert and put his plate in the sink.
Everyone’s still seated around the dining table, still talking and laughing, before only empty dishes on the table waiting to be washed. Eddy walks over and joins everyone else, but he doesn’t sit down just yet.
His hand comes gently around Brett’s shoulder from where he stands behind Brett’s chair. “Can we talk?” he asks softly, and Brett stands up, following him into the other room and Eddy closes the door behind them.
Conversation carries on without missing a beat in their absence—for everyone else. Juliette, on the other hand, is practically at the edge of her seat and she’s going to explode from the suspense.
“You look unusually cheerful.”
Juliette shakes herself out of her reverie and shoots a half-hearted glare at Cadence, pulling what she hopes is a poker-faced expression, and Cadence laughs. “Nah. There’s nothing I hate more than people getting their happy endings, actually.”
“More than their—“ Cadence tilts her head with a grin, throws a glance towards the door Brett and Eddy had disappeared behind, “—unresolved romantic tension?”
“…There’s one thing I hate more.”
It’s like Juliette’s had to sit through all 106 of Haydn’s symphonies when finally, finally, the door opens and she hears their voices.
“We’ll talk more about this later, alright?”
She looks up again, to Brett and Eddy coming back to the table, but this time whatever had changed between them is a step ahead, heart-softening. It’s clearer than crystal here, bright eyes looking like tears had fallen, soft smiles and lips bruised just so.
Their hands find eachother, intertwine, a fraction of a second before disappearing beneath the table, Juliette notices—as the two sit down next to eachother this time.
It’s a subtle thing, love when they’re not alone, but it’s almost sickening, how in love they are, all soft eyes and loving smiles when Juliette looks hard enough. They’re no longer beating around the bush about it and they’re happy and Juliette’s so happy for them it’s almost sickening.
Eddy catches her eye beneath everyone’s conversation—thank you, he mouths, and Juliette smiles back.
Oliver leans over to her. “Seems like they’ve worked through whatever was happening between them, hey?”
“Yeah,” Juliette whispers back. “Only thing is, it’s made our third-wheeling problem a thousand times worse.”
• • •
“And after a short and sweet love confession right out of a drama—“
“The hell do you mean? You shut the door, kissed me, then burst into tears and said you were horrendously in love with my dreadful face!” Brett turns to everyone else. “It was the funniest thing ever, actually.”
(Everyone else can already tell, just through their bickering—Brett is not going to let Eddy live that down for the rest of their lives.)
“What, is that not how you confess love?”
“No?”
“Okay, well, I’m sorry I robbed you of your picture-perfect romance drama love confession,” Eddy says sarcastically between bites of his dessert, and everyone laughs.
“Aw. Dreadful face. How romantic.” Juliette grins at the two of them from across the table. “Seems like love isn’t dead after all.”
In the middle of laughter, the two smile at eachother, and no, the love has always been here.