Love to have your cake and eat it too

Their voices are a little off; I've gotten used to writing them as adults, and not as teenagers. But they are- Tyler is seventeen, Opal is sixteen. And in this version of the story, they've been dating for two years- since Opal's freshman year of highschool.

I would like to rewrite the whole story eventually. A lot of the original revolved around the changing dynamic between Opal and Tyler- but that original dynamic was based a lot in where I was, emotionally, in ninth grade, and I like them much better like this, even if the lack of awkwardness is, perhaps, unrealistic. I'm reasonably certain I've matured a bit since then- and if not, at least my writing has.

(That said, I hadn't quite realized the two of them were so...musically inclined.)

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"Hey, babe." Tyler lounged in the doorway, smirking.

Opal made a face at her boyfriend and tightened the tuning pegs on her cello. "What's up?" Her bow slid across the strings with an eerie shriek.

Tyler fliched at the noise and wiggled a finger in his ear. "You're sharp."

She stuck out her tongue at him. "So's your face." She fixed the string. "Seriously, what are you doing here? I thought you were leaving for Florida or Italy or somewhere ridiculous."

"And leave my favorite person in the whole wide world behind? You must think me a cad! Or something." He pushed off the doorway, closing and locking it behind him. Her bed squealed with protest when he flopped across it. "Plans got changed; dad's coming home for Christmas this year. Wanted to know if you wanna hang out or something- and you're invited for Christmas, of course, and New Years. Unless, of course, you have some other dashingly handsome man to spend it with."

"Well, there was this guy passing me notes in math." She raised an eyebrow. "I don't know that I would consider him dashingly handsome, but he's certainly not bad."

"Pshaw, you're not going to settle for "certainly not bad" when you could have me."

She rolled her eyes and opened the folio on her music stand. "Variety is the spice of life." She ran through a few quick arpeggios, fingers moving easily across the strings.

"Yeah, whatever. Are you going to play, or can we just skip straight to the sex?"

She glanced at him sharply; he was still sprawled across her bed, with his t-shirt rucked up above his navel. She bit her lip, eyes flickering from her music stand to the strip of exposed skin above his jeans. He grinned.

"I'm only teasing, babe. As music is the food of love, play on!" He made a grandiose gesture with one arm. "Not that I'm gonna object to the sex later. But right now, I'd like to hear you play. And you've got that audition coming up, so you should practice."

Opal could feel her face turning red. She still wasn't entirely used to Tyler's open appreciation of her, for all that he'd be doing it for years. "I was thinking I'd warm up with some Hindemith before moving on to the Paganini."

"Mmm, Hindemith. I love Hindemith." His voice had turned low and gravelly around the edges. Opal shivered slightly.

"That's because you're weird," she muttered, and did not look over to her bed. Instead, she began to play, and the rest of the world- the empty house below her attic bedroom, the boy lounging on her bed, the trees beyond her window- just faded away.

Outside, it began to snow.