Birthday Girl on Tour

I sat on the worn leather couch in The Crypt with a plastic cup of whiskey that had gone warm in my hand. The after-party was basically dead by then. Some guy from the label had left around midnight, taking two women from the merch table with him, and now it was just us. The hallway outside the control room smelled like spilled beer and old carpet, the way it always did, and I had been smelling it for eleven weeks straight because this was the last night of the tour.

Tomorrow I would be forty-four.

I took a sip of the warm whiskey and did the math in my head, the same math I always did. I had spent something like nine birthdays in a row either alone or working. One year I spent it in an airport in Phoenix. One year I spent it on the phone with my sister for twenty minutes and then watched a movie by myself in a hotel room in Tulsa. That was the whole list, more or less. A person can tell you a lot about themselves with their birthday list, I think. Mine said stay home, nobody's waiting.

My name is Staci, and I answer phones and book hotel rooms for a band called Hollow Fence. It's not a glamorous job but it keeps me on the road and off my couch at home, which is a whole other kind of alone. Maeve is the lead guitar player. She's thirty-eight and she treats me like a person, which is rarer than you'd think in this business. Pierre runs sound. He's thirty-three and quiet, and I catch him looking at me sometimes and then he looks away, and I don't know what to do with that. And Peyton is the new drummer, twenty-nine, built like a swimmer, still excited about everything.

So there I was, doing my birthday math, feeling sorry for myself with a warm drink, when Maeve came out of the control room and sat down right next to me. She smelled like cigarettes and stage sweat. She put her hand on my knee, just rested it there, as if it were nothing.

"You're not spending another one moping, Stace. Trust me."

"I'm not moping," I said, which was a lie, and we both knew it.

"You are. You've got the moping face on. I've seen it three tours running." She squeezed my knee. "Tomorrow you turn forty-four and you're sitting here like it's a funeral."

"It's not a funeral, it's just a number."

"It's a number you're scared of." Maeve was always like that. Blunt. She didn't do the dance where you pretend you didn't see the thing. "And I get it, okay? I do. But I've had enough of watching you fade into the wallpaper, honey. This is your last night of the tour and you're going to remember it."

"Remember what?" I asked. "It's an empty studio, Maeve."

"Not for long." She grinned at me, and that grin should have warned me, because Maeve does not grin like that for nothing. She grinned like that right before she smashed a guitar in Tulsa.

From the back of the room I heard the drum kit stop. Peyton came around the partition with his shirt off, wiping his face with a towel, sweat all down his chest. He's got one of those bodies that makes you resent your own gym membership. He's twenty-nine, I reminded myself, like that was going to matter for some reason.

"Sound dead out there?" Maeve asked him.

"Dead as hell," Peyton said. "You want me to run the fills again or..."

"No. Stay." She pointed at the couch. "Sit down. Staci's birthday present is about to start."

Peyton looked at me and then at her and then at me again. "Her birthday's tomorrow."

"That's the point, genius. We're early." She looked at me. "Stace. You told me what you wanted. You said you were terrified of turning invisible. That nobody was ever going to look at you like that again. Remember saying that? Back in Columbus, in the van?"

I did remember saying that. I had been three whiskeys in on the drive from Columbus to somewhere else and I had said it to the window, mostly, and Maeve had been in the seat behind me. I figured she'd forget it. People forget the drunk sad stuff.

"I remember," I said.

"So this is me not forgetting." She stood up and pulled me up off the couch by both hands. She's strong for a small woman. Years of hauling amps. "No romance, no speeches. You don't have to perform. You just have to let people want you. That's the whole present. Can you handle that?"

My heart was pounding as if I'd run up stairs. I looked at Peyton, who was standing there shirtless and actually blushing, which I did not expect from a twenty-nine-year-old drummer. And I looked down the hall where Pierre had appeared, leaning against the door frame of the control room with a beer he wasn't drinking, watching us the way he always watched, except now he wasn't pretending not to.

"Everyone's okay with this?" I asked. "Nobody's doing this out of pity?"

"God, Staci." Maeve laughed. "Shut up about pity."

"If I wanted to leave I'd have left," Pierre said from the doorway. That was the most words he'd said to me all tour.

Peyton sat down on the couch arm and said, "I mean, yeah, I'm in, obviously," and Maeve swatted him and said obviously wasn't the word for it, and I laughed, and that broke something loose in me.

So okay. Here's the part I'll tell straight, because Maeve was right, nobody wanted a speech.

Maeve kissed me first. Right there on the couch, her hand coming up into my hair, and I hadn't been kissed in over a year and my entire body reacted like a struck match. She tasted like cigarettes and she kissed like she played, confident, no wasted motion. Her hand went down to my waist and pulled my shirt up and I heard Peyton say "oh, wow" under his breath like a kid at a fireworks show.

"Come on then," Maeve said to him, pulling back. "She's not going to undress herself."

He came over and got on his knees in front of me, which felt strange for about four seconds, and then his hands were on my thighs and it didn't feel strange anymore. Between the two of them I was out of my shirt and bra in under a minute, and Peyton bent his head and took one of my nipples in his mouth, and I grabbed the back of his head and heard myself make a noise I hadn't made in years. He was eager, maybe too eager, but eager was fine. Eager was exactly the point.

Maeve worked my jeans down over my hips while I held onto Peyton's shoulders. Somebody had turned the room lights lower at some point, or maybe I just stopped noticing them. My jeans ended up on the floor with the rest of the tour's history, and I was sitting there in nothing on a leather couch that had seen a thousand worse things, with a drummer's mouth on my chest and a guitar player's fingers sliding up the inside of my thigh.

"Last chance to tap out," Maeve said, and her fingers were right there, not touching, just waiting.

"Don't you dare stop," I said.

She didn't. She pressed two fingers into me and I tipped my head back against the couch and closed my eyes, and for the first time in a long time I wasn't doing birthday math. I wasn't counting anything. Peyton moved up beside me so I could reach him, and I wrapped my hand around his cock through his shorts and he groaned into my neck, and Maeve said "there you go, Stace, there you go," like she was coaching me through the good part of a set.

Down the hall, Pierre had come off the door frame. He was standing closer now, beer finally set down on an amp, watching. I looked at him over Peyton's shoulder and I didn't look away this time, and neither did he.

"Get over here," I said. "You've been wanting to all tour. Don't think I haven't noticed."

He smiled, just a little, and started walking over.

Pierre walked over slow, like he was still giving himself an exit, and then he was standing in front of me and there was no exit for either of us. He smelled like the hallway, spilled beer and old carpet, and his hands hovered like he didn't know where they were allowed to go. Maeve solved that for him.

"You too, nerd," she said. "She's got enough for all of us."

He put one hand on my jaw and kissed me, and it was different from Maeve's kiss, careful at first and then not careful at all. He'd been waiting. You could tell. His stubble scratched my chin and I grabbed his shirt and held on. Peyton was still working at my neck, and Maeve's fingers were still inside me, moving slow, and I was being kissed by two people at once pretty much for the first time in my forty-four years. So that was happening on the night before my birthday. Fine by me.

"Floor," Maeve said, pulling back and patting the rug in front of the couch. "I want to see you on your knees, birthday girl. You good with that?"

"Yeah," I said. My voice came out rough. "Yeah, I'm good."

So I got down on the studio floor on my knees, on that ugly rug everybody complains about, and it was softer than I expected, which was a nice bonus. Maeve knelt down facing me and started pulling her own shirt off