For a few seconds he said nothing; he just stood there with his eyes closed. Then flash—lights exploded as he broke into the band’s best single, “Days from Here,” adding a honky-tonk edge, bringing the house to its feet. For the next forty-five minutes of their set, I forgot the fantasy, stopped searching for the man I’d soon be with, and simply marveled at Mark’s talent to pull emotions from his body and pour them over the crowd. That’s what the best live music does: it makes a whole room of people feel the same thing. There I was, up front, on my feet, clapping and grinning with two other women from S.E.C.R.E.T., my body filling to capacity with joy. Whoever my fantasy man was, he’d be getting the best of me tonight.
“We’re going to change up the temp a little bit. Get you cozy,” Mark said, pulling up a stool, perching his acoustic guitar on his knee. “This last song’s for my girl. She’s right over there,” he said, nodding to indicate a table near ours.
See? Of course he has a “girl.”
Instead of feeling bitter about his “girl,” I suddenly felt … magnanimous, like there was enough love, enough affection, enough of this joy to go around. Mark made his hand into a visor, peering into the dark crowd over my shoulder. I turned around to get a look at this lucky girl. I couldn’t tell which one he meant, so I turned back.
“There she is,” he said, looking right at our table, “the gorgeous redhead in the front. That’s my baby. You good?”
The hot white spotlight then centered over me and pulled in on my terror-stricken face. Me? I felt Pauline’s firm hand grab my forearm as though she were preventing me from fleeing, or floating to the ceiling.
“Her name’s Dauphine,” Mark announced to the crowd. “And I’m hoping y’all will help me get her to do something for me,” he said, plinking his guitar strings and smiling right at me. “I’m hoping she’ll … accept the Step.”
He started strumming the intro to a song, and I saw stars! Is this really happening? To me? His band members looked slightly confused, but when they recognized the riff, they joined the intro.
“I know y’all don’t know what the hell that means,” he said to the crowd, smiling, “but she knows. Don’t you, baby.”
That smile. The crowd began to urge me on. I heard, Accept the Step! Accept the Step! Even Kit and Pauline were chanting now, both of them laughing and clapping.
“So what do you say? After this song, maybe we can go somewhere,” he said, and now I laughed, my hands covering my mouth. Then I drew my hands away and yelled out, “Yes!” and when I did, the crowd erupted, and Mark launched into the most aching rendition of Margaret Lewis’s “Reconsider Me.” For the next three minutes, I forced my heart back down my throat and into its proper place behind my ribs. I felt flushed, and thrilled that he’d boldly shared our connection with the whole room—yet no one knew a thing about us except Kit and Pauline.
After the song, during a standing ovation, he placed his guitar on its stand and made his way directly towards me, the whole room in paroxysms as time stopped and he pulled me to my feet and into a lush kiss.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he whispered into my ear.
“Okay,” I said, unsure my jelly legs would hold me upright. I waved a goodbye to Kit and Pauline as Mark tugged me through the still-clapping crowd and backstage into the bustling green room. We swept past his sweaty, chatty band members, one changing his shirt, another standing with a wife or girlfriend, another hovering nearby, blowing smoke out the back door. We pinballed through the room, exiting through a narrow, dark hallway where we made a right, then a left, until we hit upon a small office with a metal desk and a bleak bulb swinging overhead.
“Wow, you take me to the nicest places,” I said, a little tipsy from the attention and from the wine.
He shut the door behind us, sending a yellowed calendar crashing to the floor. And then Mark Drury came at me slowly, hungrily. I moved back until I could feel the concrete wall behind me. Reaching me, he placed one arm, then the other on either side of me.
“So it is you,” he said, peering into my face.
“What do you mean?”
“They gave me a name and a picture. I thought I recognized you. But I didn’t believe it until I looked out into the crowd and saw you there. I’ve seen you at my shows,” he said, his perfect lips inches from mine.
“You have?”
“Yeah. And I always go to find you after and you’re always gone. Then I saw you on the patio of Ignatius’s a few months ago, but I got pulled into a conversation with someone else.”
“You mean with Cassie?” I said. “She’s … she’s a friend of mine.”
“Mine too,” he said. “Life’s funny, how things sort themselves out, don’t ya think?”
He was right. He was totally right. And I nodded. We could hear the next band cueing up on the other side of the wall, their opening beats pulsing through my body and his hands.
“I’m supposed to take you to the Mansion,” he said, nuzzling my ear, smelling my hair. Oh god. “We have a car waiting for us out back. But I’ve been wanting you all night. Knowing you were in the crowd … knowing it was you. I don’t think I can wait.”
He smelled so good, a hint of apples, his breath warm, minty.
“May I?” He inched my jacket off my shoulders. “This too?”
I nodded as he began unbuttoning my blouse. As I stood there in my lavender camisole, he dragged a palm across my clavicle, circling a breast, the pad of his thumb waking up a nipple through the silk. He sweetly lifted the camisole up and over my head, then released my breasts from my bra.
“Fuck me,” he said, taking them both in his hands, kissing them and leaving a wet path from one tense nipple to the other. He slipped a hand down the front of my leather pants, looking astonished to discover how wet I was.
Sweet Jesus.
I couldn’t do anything but cover his mouth with a firm kiss that quickly turned ferocious. I melted into him, his whole body pressing me against the wall.
“I’m going to make you scream,” he said, as I sighed at the feel of his mouth making its way down the front of my body. On his knees before me, he peeled off my pants, and started with tender, tentative licks, along my hip bones and over my belly button, coaxing my legs apart with his beautiful face, his talented tongue. Lifting one of my thighs, he buried his face in my cleft, nearly toppling me over before I found footing on a nearby chair. I was pinned against the cool cement wall of Tipitina’s, by Mark Drury! I looked down as his tireless teasing found my clit and he swirled it inside his warm mouth like found treasure. My hips cocked forward as his tongue circled and flicked, his fingers darting in and out and taking me right to the edge of my senses, parting me more, and more, until his whole mouth owned the very center of me.
Then I felt it, the hot rush that pulled me under as I came—quickly, loudly, fully—heavy waves crashing over me, my fingers raking his hair. “Oh god, oh god, oh god, Mark” was all I could say, until I finally, completely, wilted over his body. He rose slowly and kissed his way back up to my face, cradled it with both his hands. But my legs were shot as I sank into the nearby busted office chair, my knees flung apart, my pants around one ankle like a black leather cuff.