“Wade.” His name came out broken. “Fuck. Please.”
His control snapped. He drove into me harder, faster, his grip on my hips tightening, and the wet sounds of our bodies filled the Saloon and I was beyond caring about anything except the pressure building low in my belly that was about to end me. I pulled him closer with my legs and he angled deeper and my back bowed off the stage.
“That’s it,” he said at my ear, rough and low. “Let me hear you.”
His hand slid between us and his thumb found my clit and I tightened around him so hard his rhythm faltered. He circled my clit with his thumb and fucked me deep and I was right there, right at the edge, every muscle drawn tight.
“Come for me,” he said. “I want to feel you come around my cock.”
I came so hard I saw stars. The orgasm crashed through me in waves and I cried out his name and my whole body clenchedaround him. He groaned into my throat and followed me over, his hips stuttering, burying himself to the hilt, my name ragged and broken in his mouth. I held him while his body shook and the Saloon hummed with silence and lamplight and the two of us breathing.
We stayed like that for a long time. His forehead pressed to mine, my legs still wrapped around him, both of us spent. His hand trailed up my spine, slow and warm, and his thumb brushed the back of my neck. The lights swayed overhead in the still air. My pulse was coming down from somewhere in the stratosphere. My legs were trembling. I was fairly certain I would never walk normally again, and I did not care.
Eventually he eased back, and the grin that broke across his face was just Wade. No stage, no charm, just him.
“So,” he said.
“So,” I said.
He glanced down at the Saloon floor. My floral scarf lay in a crumpled heap near his boot, next to my blouse, my bra, and what remained of my dignity. He bent down, scooped up the scarf, and draped it over my bare shoulder with the careful deliberation of a man accessorizing a woman who was sitting half-naked on his stage.
“This is a good look,” he said.
I laughed. The sound startled me. Bright and loose and free. Because forty minutes ago I had been terrified of being seen. Now I was sitting up there in a floral scarf and nothing else, and the laugh that came out of me felt like the first full breath after a long time underwater.
He kissed my forehead. Then he helped me find my clothes, which had distributed themselves across the floorboards with an ambition that suggested they’d been trying to escape. My bra had made it to the edge of the second stool. His t-shirt washanging from a mic stand. We dressed in the quiet, bumping into each other and not minding.
The Wednesday night show was three hours away. The Saloon I was standing in would be full of guests, noise, lights, and I would be up there with a guitar and my voice and nothing between me and sixty strangers.
The dread was still there. I could feel it at the edges, the old freeze crouching in the wings. But it was smaller now, sharing space with a new warmth that hadn’t been there yesterday.
He picked up his hat from the stool and set it back on his head, and just that fast, performer-Wade slid into place. He caught me watching the transformation and gave me a half-smile that belonged to the man underneath.
“See you out there tonight,” he said.
I picked up my camera. The strap settled across my chest, familiar weight, and for the first time it wasn’t a wall between me and the world. It was mine.
“See you out there,” I said.
