I laugh mid-aftershock, breathless, scandalized at all four of us. He lifts his head, dark shape against red light.
“Something funny?”
“Everything.” I pull him up my body by the collar. “Everything’s funny. Take your shirt off.”
The buttons take too long, so I help, and somewhere in this bar there is now one bespoke button I have no intention of finding. His belt. The weight of him. The wood under my back. The heat of him notching home. Then he’s inside me, thick, slow, both of us groaning low enough to be a secret, and the stage that held me up through seven years of other people’s wanting finally gets to hold the real thing.
He keeps the pace unhurried, long deep strokes timed to the bass, one hand planted by my head, the other roaming like he’s memorizing me for a sculpture. In the dark his voice never stops, quiet and wrecked, half English, half not. What I do to him. What he thought about, that first night, in that booth, watching me work, every specific thing, an itemized confession delivered into my throat while his cock drags exactly where I need it. I lock my ankles at his back and meet him stroke for stroke. The exit sign paints his shoulder red. Across the dark, the far booth has gone telltale silent, then telltale unsilent, and the four of us are suddenly a congregation, two pools of dark keeping one secret in the same key.
I look over once. I can’t help it. All the way across the room, in the red half-light, I catch the gleam of Stevie’s eyes over her paramedic’s shoulder, looking back.
We grin at each other like idiots, like sisters, one beat of pure stupid joy across a dark bar. Then we both go back to our own dark.
After that I stop being able to track anything but him. The pace comes up. The wood creaks its old creak under us, faster. He gets a hand under my hips, tilts me into an angle that whites out the exit signs, and I come with my face pressed into his neck to keep from bringing the law down on this address, my whole body cinching tight around him. He follows me inside a dozenstrokes, deep, his groan buried in my hair, his arms shaking, the most composed man in Nevada reduced to breath and weight on a dive bar stage.
For a while there’s just bass, sweat cooling, the red light.
“They’re going to find glitter on me for a week,” he says, finally, into my shoulder, with the resignation of a man reporting casualties.
“That’s the house cut. Everybody pays it.”
He’s quiet a moment, his hand moving slow up my spine, the bass changing records under us.
“Seven years on this stage,” he says. “If I’d walked in year one, I’d have been too late. You were already this. I just had the sense to come collect.”
“You walked in with a brick of money, sweetheart. The sense came later.”
“The brick was sense. It was the only language I knew you’d let me speak.” His mouth finds my shoulder once, unhurried. “You taught me the others.”
I keep that one. I put it away somewhere the lost-and-found will never get it.
We put ourselves together in the dark, mostly. I get his shirt closed minus one button. He zips me into my costume one last time, slower than the unzipping, which I didn’t know was possible. By the time we drift to the bar, the far booth has produced two upright humans. Stevie’s hair is in a state I will treasure forever. The paramedic, Nick, wears the expression of a man who came to wrap an ankle and is leaving in a different life.
Nobody says anything for a second. The four of us look at each other across the taps.
“So,” Stevie says.
“So,” I say.
Nick clears his throat. “Clinically speaking, this never happened.”
“This never happened,” we all agree, in chorus, instantly. Nobody can keep a straight face. Stevie laughs so hard she has to sit on the floor behind the bar. I pour four glasses of flat ginger ale from the gun because it’s the only thing I can reach, and we toast the Wet Sunset, the never-happening, Lacey’s ankle, Dale’s cake, in that order. Sevastian clinks glasses with the rest of us and drinks flat ginger ale at three in the morning, shirt missing a button. If his men out front draw any conclusions, they keep them.
Outside, in the lot, Nick walks Stevie to her car the long way, the way that takes four times the necessary minutes, and through the front glass we watch her put her number into his phone while both of them pretend the question was casual. Sevastian watches with his jacket over his shoulder, professionally unreadable.
“Five dollars says he texts before his shift ends,” I say.
“No bet. He drafted it an hour ago.” A pause. “I know the look.”
We lock both bolts. I leave Dale’s keys with the outside man Promise texted about. The box with seven years in it rides on my lap the whole way back to the ranch. Somewhere past the city line, with the desert running dark on both sides and his hand heavy on my knee, I figure out what I actually did tonight.
I didn’t lose the club. I graduated it.
The legend takes six days to reach me, which for the Wet Sunset is restraint. It comes through the group chat, via Joss, who got it from Marco, who got it from the morning cleaner, subject line in all caps. Somebody, the story goes, was in the bar after close on Cindy’s last night. The cleaner found evidence. The evidence is variously reported as glitter where glitter shouldn’t be, a candle that was never there before, which is fictional, and one bespoke suit button, blue-black, heavy, definitely a rich man’s, discovered behind the stage. It lives in the lost-and-found jar now, beside a single hoop earring from 2019, plus somebody’s retainer.
The theories run for two days. A whale. A movie star. A ghost-of-the-stage story that Lacey backs loudly because it raises her property value as a witness. The button stays in the jar, unclaimed, the most expensive object the Wet Sunset has ever owned, and Joss closes the thread with a final ruling for the ages.
whoever she was, queen behavior. the bar earned it.
