Page 27 of Into Pitch

I stand on unsteady legs and tug my jacket into place, sensing this session is over and I can scuttle back to the bar and my bus. As I reach for the door, his voice follows me, calm and clinical.

“Same time next week.”

Right, of course.

I leave, and the whole way home I can’t stop thinking about the letters I never plan to send and the ugly truths I’m going to have to write anyway.

I tell myself that what I’m doing tonight is clinical.

That the desire to observe her outside of my office is strictly professional curiosity, nothing more. An extension of assessment, per se. A way to confirm whether the patterns she speaks about in session manifest the way I suspect they do in her natural environment.

It’s an altogether reasonable rationale.

Anyone would agree.

It is also, if I am honest, a convenient one.

Two nights have passed since our last session and since she sat on my couch and said the word abandoned. Does my little fox know that she’ll never have to worry about such a thing again? Probably not. It will take time for her to understand, and it’s a damn good thing she has a decent therapist to help her realize it is true.

Valentine’s Day is the easiest cover too.

Not because I need one—no one in a crowded bar is looking for a man like me—but because the density of bodies provides anonymity. Noise becomes camouflage and movement becomes concealment. A busy night is a blind night, and I am all for it.

If she sees me, if she registers my face in the sea of them as familiar, it will complicate things too early and I have no intention of making them yet. Not when I’m still compiling her life into my boxes and figuring out how to dismantle each one of them in due time.

Is it fair to build her up to tear her down? To make her eventually dependent on my presence? No, but I’ve never really cared before when wrecking someone’s life, and I don’t see why I should start now.

The bar is exactly as she described it. A dive in the truest sense, and not the stylized kind with curated grit and ironic neon. This place wears its history right at the surface. The parking lot is uneven. The exterior signage buzzes as if it’s dying. The door sticks when I pull it open, and I’m met immediately by heat, sound, and the thick smell of alcohol soaked into old wood.

It’s the noise that hits me first though. Laughter. Shouting. A base line thumping through cheap speakers. Glass clinking. The sharp crack of a pool break somewhere deeper inside. Every table is full and bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder. Someone brushes past me carrying a tray of drinks and doesn't bother to apologize when some of it sloshes over the sleeve of my jacket. Sighing, I wipe my finger to the beer and flick it to the floor where the rest of it has gone to call home.

I move instinctively to the darker corner near the back wall where the lighting is weaker and the sightlines are broken by people standing, leaning, and swaying drunkenly. Somewhere I can disappear and watch without being actively watched in return.

I’m carving a path to the spot I’ve set my eyes on when I nearly walk into a damn wall. Not a literal one, but her.

Sadie is on a small stage near the center of the room and the sight stops me more effectively than any physical barrier. She stands beneath a single warm spotlight that turns her pale skin into something almost luminous against the dark. The bar is packed so tightly that people spill into aisles and cluster in front of the stage, drinks raised, and faces turned toward her like they’re waiting for a miracle or a joke.

I shift on my feet to get a better look at her as she holds her microphone in one hand, elbow bent loosely as if she belongs there. What is she doing up there? She had never mentioned in our sessions that she might have some act that would draw a crowd like this.

I don’t know why the thought jars me.

In my office she is restrained, compact even. A woman who sits on the edge of the couch as if comfort is something she hasn’t earned. Here, on a stage in front of a crowd that could swallow her, she looks… steady. Not fearless from the slight gleam in her eyes, but certainly awake in ways I had only seen in that mirrored room.

Her hair tonight is messy; the kind that says she either just rolled out of bed or has thoroughly been fucked. The wild golden strands shoved back over one shoulder and highlighting the dark clothes she always wears. Her practical lines softened by something that reads as choice rather than necessity. She scans the room once with those expressive green eyes and smiles.

Fuck me.

Maybe coming wasn’t the best idea.

Because her smile isn’t sharp or defensive, but real. The kind that knocks the wind from my lungs and yanks on something inside of my head that I’ve never given credit to. From the immediate reaction of the crowd, I’m not the only one feeling a certain kind of way. Men whistle and women cheer, someone shouts her name like it’s an honor to know it. She laughs, tipping her chin down briefly, almost shy, then speaks into the mic.

“I take song requests,” she drawls in that smoky, sinful voice. “Within reason.”

The room erupts with noise and I stand very still, half-hidden at the edge of the crowd, as something else not to be named takes hold of my chest.

I did not know she could sing.

I did not know she did any of this, and the immediate thought that follows is worse: What else don’t I know?