Nuno R.F.C.R

“No. Stop. Stop… please.” Julian lifted one hand off the lid of the piano and the student at the keyboard lifted her hands from the keys. “It’s beautiful. That’s the problem. You’re playing it like it’s beautiful.” A ripple of something, not quite laughter, moved through the dozen students arranged on the chairs and the window ledges of the rehearsal room. They knew this mood. They came to his master class on Thursdays for this mood specifically, the way you come back to a particular weathe

I don't think that's how life works.

Afterward there was only the heat, and the heat had gone stale. That was the thing about the steam room when it was over, the same heat that had rolled out at Mark in the doorway hours ago, wet and gold and total, didn’t dissipate when the thing it had witnessed was done. It simply soured, hung there, thickened, the gold gone grey at the edges where the first dishwater light of the coming day was finding its way through the high fogged glass. The cigar was a cold stub on the tiled bench. Th

Julian is the quintessential golden boy. That's his whole condition in the early chapters, the deep-water sleeper who hands himself to unconsciousness "certain the world would still be there, arranged and safe and golden, when he came back." His goodness is real, but it's the goodness of someone who has never been made to pay for anything, never had to see the machinery under the gilding because the gilding was built for him. The "tragedy" the story is building toward is that the same dramatic irony that devastates the reader will, eventually, devastate Julian, and force him to grow out of the "golden cage" he was brought up in. This particular tale isn't only a love story and a tragedy. It's a bildungsroman wearing the costume of a romance...

There is a photograph, though no one knows where it is now, of the Ellisons at the height of them. It was taken at the house on Long Island in a summer Mark could not have been more than eight, and in it his father stands at the center of a long marble terrace with a glass in one hand and the other thrown wide, mid-gesture, mid-story, his head tipped back in a laugh that was less a response to anything funny than a thing he produced, generously, the way a fountain produces water, for the pl

I've always loved this quote. "All destruction, by violent revolution or however it be, is but new creation on a wider scale."

The bass came through the wall before anything else did. Through the tile and the partition and the door of the stall, a low four-count thud that he felt in the soles of his feet and the water of his body more than he heard, and Mark stood and finished and zipped and stood a moment longer in the small graffitied dark of the stall with his hand flat against the partition, feeling the music arrive through it. Then he flushed and slid the latch and came out. The men’s room was low-lit and

The music had ended a long time ago. Julian didn't know when. There had been a moment, somewhere in the dissolved middle of the night, when he had been aware of the playlist still going, the delicate fingerstyle guitar turning over and over in the corner of the room like a small machine that loved them, and then there had been a longer stretch in which he was aware of nothing but Mark, and when he surfaced from that stretch the music was gone and had been gone, he understood, for some time.

Dear @sandeman thank you for gifting my work with your time and imagination. I hope you enjoy the story.

Thank you all for being so patient with my self-imposed creative break.

Julian came down the stairs slowly. His body, which had been used the previous day with a thoroughness it had never previously experienced, moved through the descent like a body in negotiation with its own structure. Things ached. His thighs. The base of his spine. The small muscles at the corners of his jaw that he had not known were muscles until they had been used, repeatedly, for hours, in the service of something his mouth had never been asked to do. The aching was a private archive,

Mark pulled away. His mouth tore from Julian’s. The separation was a sound, wet, abrupt, two surfaces that have been sealed together being forced apart, and the air that rushed into the space between their lips was cold, shockingly cold, as though the kiss had generated its own climate and the world outside it was winter. Mark’s hands were on Julian’s chest, on his shoulders, pushing, but the push was uncoordinated, his fingers alternating between gripping and releasing, the motor conflict

I saw enough of it to know the show name should have been "Just Jack...and Karen" 😉

He woke before Mark, which almost never happened. Julian was the deeper sleeper, always had been, the one who sank into unconsciousness, completely and without resistance, and who surfaced only when the world became too bright or too loud to ignore. Mark was the opposite. Mark slept with some inner mechanism ticking even in the dark, so that he was usually up before Julian, already showered or reading or standing on whatever balcony was available, as though sleep were a country he visited b

The glimpses into what lies ahead, the emotional fractures, the quiet unraveling beneath the surface, are there by design. The narrator is not confined to Julian’s present awareness. He purposely operates with a broader, more omniscient lens, one that allows the reader to perceive what he cannot. Yet. This choice shifts the experience of the story. Rather than building tension purely through surprise, it leans into a sense of inevitability. The reader is invited to sit inside that contradiction: to witness joy while knowing it carries the seed of its own undoing. It’s less about 'what happens' and more about 'how it feels to watch it happen'. That quiet awareness is, by my own creative choice, central to the emotional architecture of this particular narrative. Thank you for taking the time to read the first chapter @peter rietbergen