Chapter 15 - A Boundary Starting to Blur

The moment the test run at Studio Rongga wrapped up and the door slammed shut behind Bara and Jefri, who took off in a hurry toward the nearest coffee stall, the damp night air rushed in to greet them. The city's streetlights cast a dull orange glow across the wet asphalt, a sharp contrast to the sterile, controlled world of the conservatory Michi normally lived in. Somewhere down the block, a stray cat knocked over an empty can, the clatter loud enough in the quiet to make her flinch before she recognized the sound for what it was.

She stood beside the door of Rimba's old Jeep, pulling her cream cardigan tighter around herself, as if the knit fabric could somehow double as extra armor against the night wind. Her breathing hadn't quite settled yet, and not from physical exhaustion—it was the leftover adrenaline that refused to fully drain out of her system, a strange mix of relief at having made it through the test run, and the lingering unease of having watched, up close, exactly how close her secret had come to unraveling that night.

"Turns out you're not as fragile as you look, Arunika," Rimba's low voice broke the silence. He leaned back against the hood of the car, arms crossed, watching Michi with a barely contained flicker of amusement.

Michi turned, letting out a soft huff as she folded her own arms in front of her chest. "Don't underestimate me, Maestro. Back at the conservatory, I deal with perfectionist professors far more terrifying than your noisy band friends."

Rimba chuckled, opening the car door for her before circling around to the driver's side. "It's not underestimating. I'm genuinely impressed. Not many model students can click that fast with underground distortion without losing their classical edge in the process."

Michi climbed into the car, letting her head rest against the soft seat for a moment while Rimba started the engine. The car rolled slowly down the quiet city streets, lit only by streetlights spaced far apart from each other, pools of orange light passing over them again and again like a slow, steady pulse.

"That was... close, back there," Michi finally murmured, choosing to be honest in the darkness of the car, which somehow felt safer than facing him directly. "When Bara and Jefri were talking about Midnight Frequency."

Rimba glanced over briefly from behind the wheel, one eyebrow raised. "You caught that conversation too, huh? Weird, isn't it—a small indie band getting that much attention."

"Maybe it's because people get curious about things that are deliberately kept hidden," Michi answered carefully, staring straight ahead at the road. "People are always more drawn to a mystery than to something out in the open."

"True enough." Rimba nodded slowly, looking like he was turning something over in his head. "Actually had a strange thought back there, for a second."

Michi's stomach dropped. "Strange how?"

"Ah, it's nothing." Rimba let out a short laugh, shaking his head as if physically tossing the thought aside. "Just some ridiculous theory. Forget I said anything."

Michi let out a quiet breath, feeling relief and guilt in equal measure—guilt because the relief itself felt like a small betrayal, though she couldn't quite explain of what, or of whom.

"By the way," Rimba continued, shifting the topic, his voice turning lighter, "you looked different playing in front of them tonight. Looser. Usually you play like you're terrified one wrong note is going to end the world."

Michi turned to study the outline of Rimba's face, lit faintly by the glow of the dashboard. "Maybe it's because, for once, I wasn't playing to be evaluated. I was playing because I actually wanted to."

"Now that's what music's actually supposed to be." Rimba smiled faintly, his eyes flicking toward her occasionally before returning to the road. "Imagine if you could play like that all the time, instead of only when you're cornered into proving something to someone else."

The line struck something deep inside Michi—an unintentional confession, surfacing without warning, that she'd rarely, if ever, played for herself. It had always been for validation from somewhere outside her: from the dean's office, from her family, or even from some anonymous figure cheering in the dark for a set from Midnight Frequency on The Vault's stage. She wasn't even sure, anymore, whose approval she'd actually been chasing all these years, only that she'd been chasing it for as long as she could remember. It occurred to her, uncomfortably, that even her rebellion had been a kind of performance—a carefully rationed release valve rather than a life she'd actually chosen for herself.

"You theorize way too much about other people's lives, Rimba," Michi finally said, though her tone had lost all of its usual sharpness.

"One of my many hidden talents," Rimba replied lightly, turning the car onto the street that led toward Michi's house. "Right up there with making a mean guitar distortion, and apparently, corrupting a model pianist into playing messy."

Michi rolled her eyes, though the corner of her mouth curved upward despite her best efforts to stop it. For the first time, she realized that the ride home with Rimba no longer felt like a threat to the carefully guarded boundaries she'd maintained for so long. It felt, instead, like a brief pocket of time in which she was allowed to simply exist as herself—fully, without needing to perform either half of the two carefully separated versions of herself she'd spent years dividing her life between.

The car slowed as it approached the quiet street where her family's gate stood, porch light already glowing warm and yellow against the dark. Michi didn't reach for the door handle right away. She sat there a moment longer than she needed to, watching the light flicker faintly through the leaves of the old mango tree in the front yard, and found herself, for once, in no particular hurry to step back inside and put her mask back on.