I cross the floor to my stage. Little riser, scuffed black paint, the pole I’m not touching tonight because tonight isn’t that dance. I step up barefoot. The old wood takes my weight with the creak I’d know deaf, and seven years of muscle memory stand up inside me to ask what we’re doing.
First, before any of it, I do something I’ve wanted to do for years. I bring him up onto the stage with me.
“Stand here.” I put him on my mark, dead center, facing the empty room. “This is the view. Seven years. Go ahead, look.”
He looks. I watch him do it, the most observant man I know taking in the geography of my whole adult life, the booths, the rail, the long bar, the door where trouble comes in. From up here you can see everything, that’s the trick of it. The room thinks it’s watching you. You’re the one watching the room.
“You can see every hand in the house,” he says, slowly, a casino man doing the math.
“Every hand, every drink, every man’s wedding ring. You learn the room or you learn it the hard way.” I take his arm, turn him toward the corner. “That booth’s the blind spot. Worst sightline in the building.”
“That’s why I chose it.”
“I know it is. Took me three songs to get a read on you, and I never missed a read in this room.” I step off the mark. “It made me furious. Now get off my stage. There’s one show left, and you’re not in it.”
He steps down. He takes his old booth like a man being seated at his own trial, and I will treasure that, too.
“Last time you sat in that booth,” I say, into the dark, toward the ember of him, “you told me to dance for you.”
“I remember.”
“It cost you a brick of cash and your whole reputation as a reasonable man.” I find the remote behind the rail where it has lived since the Bush administration and thumb the volume two clicks up. Something slow climbs into the room, bass first. “Ask me again. Ask me right.”
A silence with the size of him in it. When his voice comes, it’s lower than the bass.
“Dance for me.” A beat, and then the whole book of him opens to one page. “Please.”
So I dance for the only audience I’ve ever wanted, in the dark, for free.
There’s no rhinestone version of this. No tip-light angles, no smile aimed over anyone’s head. I dance the way I used to dance in a studio at fifteen with everything still ahead of me, the way the wreck was supposed to have taken off the table forever. Slow, full out, the knee holding, the body remembering. The only light is the red of the exit signs, the amber eye of the sound system, and the only judge ever scored me this high in his life. I hear his breathing change from across the room. Good. Mine changed first.
When I come off the stage he’s already standing.
We meet in the middle of the floor, and what happens first isn’t what I expect. He takes my hand, sets his other at my waist,ballroom-formal in the red dark, and just like that we’re slow dancing on a sticky dive bar floor, the most feared man in the state keeping time quietly in Russian under his breath like he’s back in whatever cold room taught him.
“You waltz,” I say.
“I was given a choice between dancing lessons and my father.” His hand flexes at my waist. “I chose the lessons. Best decision of a bad decade.”
“You’re leading.”
“I’m always leading.”
“Not tonight.” I take his count away from him, slow it, pull his hips into mine until the waltz dies of natural causes, and what’s left is two people swaying in the dark with one purpose between them. Across the room, a soft laugh that isn’t ours floats up from the far booth, then hushes itself. We pretend we hear nothing. The room notarizes nothing.
“Cynthia.” His mouth is at my temple. The name comes out the soft way, the way that ruins me. “What happens after close?”
“Whatever the staff wants.” I back up a step, take his hand, and put it on the zipper at my spine. “Staff wants this off.”
He pulls the zipper down slow, like he’s opening something he intends to keep the wrapping from. The costume drops with its little rhinestone whisper, the last time it will ever do that, and his breath comes out of him rough. Calloused palms travel up my back, around, find the weight of my tits in the dark, and the dark turns out to be the whole trick of it. I can barely see him. So every other channel is wide open, his thumbs dragging across my nipples, the wool of his trousers against my bare thighs, thebass coming up through the floorboards and into my heels, his mouth coming down hot on my shoulder, my throat, the back of my ear.
“Booth or stage,” he says against my cheek, a man reading a menu with limited time.
“Stage.” I bite his lip. “It’s my last night. I’m taking a memory.”
He walks me backward to the riser, lays me down on warm scuffed wood with my knees at the edge. Then the scariest man in Nevada kneels at the foot of my stage like the front row of a show no one else will ever see, hooks my legs over his shoulders, and puts his mouth on me.
The first pass of his tongue takes my hearing. The second takes the room. He eats me slow, total, two fingers curling inside, my heels drumming his back without my permission. Where every other man this stage has known paid in singles, this one pays in patience, in low filthy Russian against my pussy, in the grip of his hands keeping my hips exactly where he wants them, and I come apart on seven years of scuffed paint with both fists in his hair. I’m not quiet. The sound system covers what it covers. The far booth politely covers the rest, in that they are audibly not listening, in that a muffled giggle and a thump from the dark says the ankle conversation has also progressed.
