Excerpt from The Ensemble by Aja Gabel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I think if we do it now," Jana said, "he might. But that asshole might poach him."
"What asshole?"

"Ferrari," Jana said, and she got up, opened up her violin case, and snatched something stuck into the velvet lining. She held it out to Brit. It was a small girl with black hair and a few missing teeth, one of those school photos against a neon background. She smiled wildly at the camera, the way you do when you're a kid.

"Who's this?" Brit asked.

Jana shrugged and took it back from her. "I don't know," she said, and walked into the bathroom, where Brit saw her drop the picture in the toilet. She did not flush it.
Jana came out to answer the knock on the door, which turned out to be Henry and Daniel, both of whom seemed fairly liquored up themselves. Henry was sweaty and Daniel swayed a bit. He was carrying something under a tin, as though from room service.

"What are you guys doing here?" Brit asked.

"We live here," Henry said.

"No you don't," Jana said.

Daniel walked toward Brit, who sat up. Immediately the room swerved and the walls started a slow spin. She put a hand to her head.

"I got you this," he said, and lifted up the tin to reveal a multilayer vanilla cake that had fallen over, its ribbons of icing smeared all over the plate. "Oh, oops," Daniel muttered, seeing the mess.

She felt several things at once: First, she felt outrage. As though cake could make up for it, the dessert they'd never have. He probably thought he was being some kind of poet, doing this, but what he'd said, what he'd essentially said to her, was, I don't want you, no matter what. The cake he spent his hard-earned money on was just for him, to make himself feel better, not for her to actually take anything from him, or for him to give anything of value. Second, she felt drunk. More drunk than she had planned on being, and certainly more drunk than she'd felt in a while. She felt like something was stuck in her lungs, and she was suddenly hot and nauseated, and wanted to both move urgently and never move again. And third, she felt touched, and a tenderness for Daniel, like a wound that had worked its way into the essential tissue in the center of her heart, one she couldn't dig out if she tried the rest of her life. He was a person trying to be a great talent, flawed and self-hating, living in this perpetual state of suspended tragedy, though there was no real tragedy, and she felt sad for him, and saw also that this cake, this was what he could do.

"Thank you," Brit said, taking the plate into her hands. The only way to make a life with him in the quartet was to accept that she could not make a life with him privately. She saw now that if one thing was to continue, the other had to end. At that thought, a pang went through her chest, piercing her wish for his love. She would live above the pain. She would eat the cake.

He smiled gratefully as she took it, and sat next to her as she ate, saying nothing. She wanted to know if he knew what she was doing, accepting his shortcomings, but not asking him was part of the deal. She put the fork and the plate down on the side table, and he inched closer to her. He smelled like rosin and beer. Their legs were touching, but the electricity of the connection was draining away. Here were his legs, and here were hers, simple parts of two bodies they'd come to know more intimately than anyone else's, in more than one way.

"I'm such a failure," Daniel said in a whisper.

It wasn't exactly an apology. And what she said back to him wasn't exactly the truth: "You could never be."

Some hours later, when they'd all drunk everything in both minibars and then some, when Brit leaned over the toilet and vomited onto the picture of the small girl, when whatever emotion had been lodged in her chest came up (along with vanilla cake), she finally cried. Jana knocked lightly on the door and pushed it open. She was holding a compress.

Excerpted from The Ensemble by Aja Gabel. Copyright © 2018 by Aja Gabel. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.