The musicians who came through the venue no longer gave me any thrills. Whether their drum kits, amps and guitars were cherished and protected or banged up and tossed in splintering cases, I handled the stuff with equal care, but I no longer looked at the girls themselves.
The Tuesday of the Shrinking Violet show didn’t start out any differently. As a perk of the job, I could have watched the acts and had a couple of free drinks, but I planned to hang out backstage, plug my ears anytime I could get away with it and try to study for an upcoming network certification exam.
Violet sought me out personally to talk to me about her guitar before relinquishing it to my supervision. I made notes about how she wanted it treated and didn’t bother to get more than impressionistic glimpses of a shimmery minidress, ripped tights, and boots that were probably more expensive than their scuffs and stains suggested. She asked for my name, but I didn’t let the show of courtesy trick me into any belief in intimacy or friendship. It didn’t seem worthwhile to pay attention to her face.
I did my job, and I managed to get through a few of my note cards while the warm-up bands played. Maybe it should have bothered me that I’d lost interest so completely in the creative fire that used to fuel my life, but I was too busy dreaming of a future working in offices where I wouldn’t have to worry about eventual hearing loss.
One of the other techs nudged me, too hard for the gesture to feel friendly. “What the hell, Nikki? You’re not going to listen to her?” The audience seemed unusually passionate. It produced cheers that sounded more Thursday than Tuesday to me. The first chords of Violet’s show bubbled up from beneath the screaming.
I’d written them.
Violet repeated the riff, building it slowly toward a glory I had once known. She was working the crowd to greater heights as she flirted with flinging her set wide open, her voice lifting above static and raucous shouts. I shoved the note cards messily into the space between a stray amp and the wall, ignoring the few that fluttered free.
I couldn’t help humming the notes that came next as I burst out of the spot where I’d been holed up and into view of the stage. This time, I looked right at Violet. Standard rock-star uniform, a well-cared-for but unremarkable guitar, that sort of pretty that’s easy to Photoshop into the appearance of flawlessness. All that was what I expected—they don’t send girls on tour anymore unless they look like that. But this time I saw how she relaxed when our eyes met, as if she’d been waiting for me. I saw the flare of her wide nostrils, the unusually big hands that made it look easy to form tricky chords on the neck of her guitar and the way she’d already begun to sweat.
She looked so young, but I’d been even younger during the wild six months I traveled the country forming those very same chords, singing to crowds that screamed just like this one.
Violet signaled her band, and the song started in earnest while the crowd quieted. I was ready to cringe, to hear amateurish mistakes in the songwriting that I wouldn’t have noticed when I used to play this, but now the song seemed beyond my abilities, as if I’d discovered a trunk full of journals I’d written in a language I no longer spoke.
She was a great performer. In her throat, my song became hers. The air between us thickened with strange chemistry. The shape of the notes was mine, but the tone of them hers. A song that had slept for a decade roared awake, stretched its jaws wide and tore the breath from my lungs.
Fuck, I’d been angry when I was young. And unafraid of being sexy. Or maybe that part was her.
With each beat of the song and my pulse, I warmed with life, until the whole venue’s heat pounded in my temples.
I remembered what it felt like to stare up at a woman and see her as a goddess. Before I learned to play, I watched women onstage—handling their guitars with effortless strength, kissing their microphones as they snarled or purred their songs, kicking cables out of the way as they strutted back and forth— and dreamed of serving them any way I could, even for a few moments. Did they want me to scream their names? To bow? To fall to my knees and dip my head between their legs?
Funny that when I was the one onstage, I still never felt like I was taking. I only knew how to give. I brought lovely groupies into motel beds and smiled at their jaded, clever talk when what I needed was sincerity. And when I let them eat me, it didn’t matter how they looked up wide-eyed from the curls of my pubic hair, longing for approval. Whether they pleased me or not, they consumed me.
All that had ended for me a decade ago.
Before Violet could finish performing my song, I shut her out with my earplugs. Backstage, one of my note cards was missing and another had been crushed by several shoes. My hands shook as I tried to smooth it out and put my deck in order.
* * *
“You didn’t like the way I played it?”
Even if the voice hadn’t sent shivers of recognition and desire up my spine, only one person could have asked that question. I didn’t look up. “You made it sound better than it ever did.”
“Well, that’s not true.”
I sighed. False modesty never looked good on anyone. If the song hadn’t sounded good when I played it, I’d never have been almost famous. I coiled the cable in my hands more rapidly, twitching it with impatient jerks when it hung up on uneven spots on the stage. “Shouldn’t you be at an after-party? Or, if you’re the responsible type, resting up in your motel?”
“I was going to invite you onstage. See if you wanted to join me for the last chorus.”
“Why would you do that?”
The stage creaked under her boots as she squatted. Now that she was eye-level with me, I had to drop my head to the point of neck strain to avoid her gaze. “You don’t know anything about me, do you?”
I cleared my throat. “A lot of musicians come through, you know.”
“Yeah, different band every night. I get it.” She sounded brave and angry, but there was a wobble underneath that finally tricked me into lifting my eyes to hers. Violet looked impossibly young and impossibly old at the same time, and the stage seemed to shift beneath me. I didn’t want to see her as a goddess, but she was making me feel outside of time and uncertain of everything.
I whispered a little bit of the truth. “I sort of lost interest a while ago.”
“No.” She shook her head and tumbled easily out of the squat and onto the bare stage, catching herself on her palms and crossing her legs mid-movement. My eyes dropped without my permission. She made no effort at modesty. Through one of the rips in her tights, I could see a patch of lacy purple underwear. It was hard not to look, especially when I knew her face would affect me even more.
Seeking refuge, I crawled halfway behind an amp and started on another cable. “You’re saying I didn’t actually lose interest?”
“People who lose interest are indifferent. That’s not you. You’re scared.”
It felt satisfying to rip a piece of black duct tape off the stage. She wasn’t exactly telling me things I didn’t know. But she was trying to make me talk about things I didn’t like to talk about. For a second, I fantasized about my future job in IT so hard it just about brought tears to my eyes. No more late nights in this beer-sour building. No more unpredictable encounters and loud noises. No more bitterness, and no more constant reminders of why I was bitter. No more jealousy.
No more gorgeous twenty-two-year-old rock stars who had for some reason taken the time to learn to play a song that only barely remained within the grasp of my own muscle memory.
“Why did you learn it? When did you learn it? Hell, how did you even know it exists?”
She coughed, the sound strange coming from the throat of someone so perfect looking. “That’s one of my things. When Shrinking Violet tours, I call ahead to every venue, ask if they have any musicians in the house. I pick stuff to learn as a tribute. You’d be surprised—well, maybe you wouldn’t be… I was surprised how many former and current musicians are working as techs and ticket-takers and bartenders and whatever.”
I wasn’t sure if the explanation made me feel more or less special about her having chosen my song. “How big of you,” I said. The sarcasm in my voice made me wince.
“I’m not trying to be high and mighty… I’m just.aware.”
“That in ten years you could be in my position.”
“I didn’t mean that in an insulting way.”
“No, I get it.”
“I don’t think you do,” she said, rising and walking into my line of vision. I found myself staring at a patch of pale pink knee through another rip in her tights.
The idea of her walking away now made me feel cold, as if her presence had been warming me even while I resisted it. “Hang on,” I said. “How do people react to this thing you do?”
“Some of them are really happy and excited. Flattered.”
“But not everybody.”
“Some people are embarrassed of their songs. They tell me later that they don’t agree anymore with the lyrics they wrote.”
“And are some people assholes about it?”
“Oh yeah. Some people criticize everything about my performance.”
“I’m not criticizing you.”
“I didn’t call you an asshole.”
“I’m something, though, aren’t I?”
“I already told you. Scared.”
I wanted to prove I was brave. I wanted to stand up, grab a guitar and show her. Or maybe just skip ahead and grab her by both upper arms and kiss her until she knew how fierce I could be.
I did something even braver. I apologized. “I should have listened to your whole cover. Your whole set. I’m sorry.”
The coldness went away in a rush. Violet returned to me, closer this time, sitting beside me. I relinquished what had become a death grip on my latest cable. Her thigh brushed the side of my knee. She smelled of sweat, but it was just salty, not sour. “Do you still play?”
“No.”
“Why?”
The thing I liked talking about least of all. “I had a contract for a second album. I tried to work on it while I was touring. That song—the one you played—it was all I could do.”
“It’s a good song. That’s why I chose it.”
“It was the end, though.”
“What do you mean? The end?”
“I ran out after that. I didn’t have anything left to say.”
“I don’t believe that’s possible.”
“I wish it hadn’t been.”
We were quiet a long time. Her hand crept to mine. My stomach wouldn’t stop churning. I’d never been more uncomfortable in my life, and I couldn’t imagine this moment felt any better from her perspective.
“I see why you’re scared,” she said.
I shook my head. “I don’t think you do. Not unless you know what it’s like to feel completely and totally emptied out.”
“But you weren’t. You couldn’t have been.”
She wasn’t a goddess. She was a kid. She was giving me that same wide-eyed look—the one I’d seen on groupies, the one I hadn’t been able to recognize at first when I slept with aging rock stars. I couldn’t understand why the hell she’d want approval from me, but then I remembered. At a certain point, it didn’t matter where that came from as long as it came from somewhere.
I never did know how to take.
I brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. It was so heavily styled that hairspray crackled against my hand in resistance. She relaxed into the movement, resting the side of her head in my cupped palm. It was like I’d never even tried to be anyone else. I knew just what she needed from me and how to give it to her.
Her words had been so challenging, so confident, but Violet’s body melted into mine when I pulled her close. I could feel her trembling. I stroked the sweaty back of her head and glanced around the venue. Most people had gone home already, but there was always the chance someone in her entourage might come looking for her. As a musician, she needed discretion, even if she hadn’t learned that yet.
I let her go and told her where and when to meet me. She slipped off to wherever she’d come from. My chest had tightened, making it hard to draw a full breath. I didn’t know if I was excited or terrified, but I finished my work in record time.
She’d tried to make herself look ordinary before coming over to my apartment, but the effect was anything but. Fame and talent have an aura, and now that she was trying to conceal that, it poured out of her eyes and flowed from her hair. Her ragged T-shirt emphasized the unusual tone of her arms, and her big sunglasses drew attention to the expressive lips she used in her performances. Now I didn’t know how I’d managed to see her as part of a faceless line of acts parading through the venue. She clutched a guitar case against her side, as if this was a first band practice and she was nervous about it.
I let her in. The guitar case banged against the wall, and I took it from her and set it gently on the floor. I watched her look around the apartment, her eyes widening as she took in my schoolbooks and the walls bare of posters. She’d said she didn’t mean to insult me, but I knew she was thinking about how desperately she didn’t want to end up like me. She wanted music to be a part of her life forever. She wasn’t the type to understand how I could let it go.
As for me, seeing her in my living room—the glamour that clung to her made the place feel more alive than it had in years. I tried to think of hoarse throats and unwashed bodies, the creaky, sandy feeling of nights spent without enough sleep, but in truth I missed the colorful darkness of people like her. I hadn’t wanted to care whether she’d show up, but I’d been pacing for hours, watching videos of her songs on an app on my phone. If she left because of what I’d become…
I couldn’t bear it. I showed her what I still remembered.
The first time I kissed a rock star, I thought she would taste pampered and expensive. But musicians don’t get lives of luxury. Violet’s lips were rough. Her tongue carried hints of the flavors of roadside diners. Her muscles felt ropy when I gripped her upper arms.
She kissed me back with familiar desperation.
When I let up, Violet was looking at me like I had some kind of answer.
“Maybe you’ll be sorry about this in the morning,” I said.
“I won’t be.”
“How do you know?”
She bit her lip and didn’t say anything.
“Different venue every night,” I said. “I get it.” It was so stupid that this stung.
“You…”
I kissed her again before she could fumble for a compliment she didn’t quite mean. I carried Violet to my bed.
Our clothes came off so easily—so much easier than all the other means I used to hide my nakedness. She had no tan lines anywhere.
I reached into my nightstand for my lube and box of gloves. Violet blushed.
“You don’t have to use that.”
“I do. I learned some things when I was on the road.”
I spent a few minutes exploring her. It had been so long since I’d fucked like it didn’t matter that I couldn’t help touching her like I loved her. As I ran my palm lightly over her side and hip, then over the curve of her breast, just barely brushing the nipple, I glanced up at her face and noticed her chin trembling.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, and then kissed a path from her mouth to the corner of her eye, where I tasted a tear. “Tell me what you need.”
She shrugged against my pillow.
“I’ll wait.”
I teased her with a fingertip, traveling from her hip bone to the very beginning of her mons but going no lower. She had thick black pubic hair, which surprised me. I’d thought every body shaved these days. Maybe fashion had moved on while I wasn’t paying attention.
Her hips rocked toward me, but I didn’t take the subtle hint. Finally, she gave a little groan. “You’re not going to fuck me?”
“Is that what you need?”
She lifted her head, wild-eyed. “You think I know what I need?”
“Then tell me what you want.”
She grabbed a glove out of the box and pressed it into my palm. “I want to feel good.”
I smiled a little. “Don’t we all.”
She rolled her eyes, and my cockiness slipped. I snapped on the glove. “What do you like?”
“Touch me.”
Her cunt was so pretty, the palest pink under those dark curls. I wanted to make her swell and blush with arousal. I stroked her hooded clit, just saying hello, and stretched out beside her so I could kiss her while I did.
In no time, her hips were rocking again. I could feel her trying to direct my fingers to particular spots, but I resisted every time. I worked my other hand between our bodies so I could play with her nipples.
The position hurt my upper arm, but the discomfort was worth it because soon Violet was whimpering and sobbing into my mouth.
I grinned into our kiss. “You need something specific after all?”
“I need you to fuck me,” she whispered through clenched teeth.
I pulled back, feigning surprise. “Why didn’t you say so?” She shook her head and laughed. “Maybe I’ll call you an asshole after all.”
“Sorry.”
“Just do it, please.” Her grin softened the exchange.
She’d gotten very wet. With that plus the lube, my first finger slid into her with no trouble at all. I added another almost immediately, and I had to close my eyes a moment to savor her sweet gasp. Settling my thumb on her clit, I began to fuck her, watching the way her eyelashes fluttered and her body rocked as I moved.
My third finger made her head tilt back until I couldn’t see her face. Her neck, though, was so long and lovely that I pressed a kiss to the side of it, and then nibbled down to her shoulder. Above me, she gasped and cursed and begged and prayed. I rocked back onto my heels and witnessed it all. I wasn’t sure if she was with me or if her mind had taken her somewhere else, but I was with her.
Her cunt squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, and her clit hardened under my thumb.
My arm began to ache from the effort, but the moment I slowed, her head snapped up. “For fuck’s sake, don’t stop!”
I smirked and put more muscle into it.
Violet’s legs spread wider and wider. She gripped my pillow with both hands and grunted with the effort of working herself up to orgasm. I didn’t like that she was fighting so hard for it. I pulled my hand out of her with one smooth motion.
She flinched as if I’d slapped her. “What the—?” Her eyes were unfocused, searching the room as if she’d lost me along with her orgasm.
I waited. She scrabbled up to her elbows. “What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Then why did you…? That was mean!”
Gently, I returned my hand to her pussy, petting it. She whimpered and started grinding against it.
“I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just letting you know you’ve got plenty of time. I’m here all night. You don’t have to strain yourself.”
“I need—”
“Shh. I know you need something. But lie still. I want to try to give it to you.”
Her cunt sucked my first finger in. She quivered as I stretched her. And the moment I started fucking her again, she tensed up and started struggling again.
Violet moaned from deep in her chest when I removed my hand. “You asshole!”
“Relax,” I reminded her.
She was starting to figure out the game. She clutched her upper thighs with both hands but didn’t move her hips.
“There you go,” I crooned. “That’s what I want you to do.”
Her thighs shook. I fucked her harder than I had yet. My knuckles banged her entrance with each stroke.
“Please… I want you to… I want to…”
“Patience.”
Her toes pointed and her knees locked. Her back arched as if her breasts were being yanked toward the ceiling.
Violet tore her hands free of her legs, clutched at the air and then covered her face. The air between us had changed. She wasn’t trying to orgasm anymore; orgasm was starting to happen to her.
“Almost there, pretty girl.”
She sobbed and came with all her muscles. I bit my lip as my cunt squeezed in sympathy with hers. I curled my fingers to draw out her orgasm.
I got so caught up in watching her that it took me by surprise when she lunged at me, kissing clumsily, clawing my sides, grabbing for the box of gloves.
“You don’t have to…”
“Shut up.”
She’d obviously done this before, but she didn’t have finesse. Once inside me, her fingers searched blindly. Part of me wanted to resist her, to prove I knew her body better than she knew mine.
She was so eager, though, that I just surrendered to her. Amid her mess of kisses, there were lucky strokes here and there. Her hip brushed my clit as she fumbled, and I was coming, hard and unexpectedly, both of us laughing with disbelief. I drew her down for a slower kiss and realized there were tears in my eyes, too.
I never learned to take, but sometimes I’ve been given moments of strange, accidental grace.
The morning after I was with Violet, I woke up alone except for the smell of her hairspray and her sweat. Stumbling into the kitchen, mumbling to myself about coffee, I stubbed my toe against the guitar case she’d brought over the night before. I hopped and cursed, but then I sat on the floor and opened it up.
It turns out I wasn’t completely and totally emptied out, after all. My fingers followed trails left by her fingers.
I’ve written a handful of songs since the night Violet spent with me—though I also passed my network certification exam. I like to think it means I never actually lost the music, and that she won’t either. I like to think she left the guitar with me on purpose, to make up for the bit of my heart she took with her.