Drum Room Touch

The session had been going sideways since about eight that night. The drummer's click track kept bleeding into his overheads, and the singer wanted to redo a take we'd already spent an hour on. I sat in the control booth with my guitar across my lap and waited for everybody to agree on something. Nobody agreed on anything. By eleven I told the engineer I was packing it in and we'd pick it up Thursday.

I'm thirty-six years old and I've been playing session guitar for twelve years. Most nights that's fine. Tonight my shoulder was bugging me from hunching over the amp all evening, and my back had that dull ache you get from sitting in a cheap chair for four hours. I rubbed the shoulder on my way down the hall toward the lounge, which is really just a back room with a couch, a mini fridge, and a coffee maker nobody cleans.

The hallway light was off but the lounge wasn't dark. Somebody was in there. I stopped in the doorway and a woman was sitting on the arm of the couch, looking at her phone with her arms crossed.

"Sorry," I said. "Didn't know anybody was still here."

She looked up. "You the guitar guy from next door? I heard you through the wall all night."

"That was me. Sorry about that."

"It's fine. I'm Amelie." She stuck her hand out without getting up. "I run the training studio two doors down. I've been stuck here since ten."

"Stuck how?"

"My car died in the parking lot around ten. Dead battery, I left the dome light on like a genius. The tow company says earliest tomorrow morning, and now I'm just... here." She waved at the room. "Waiting for a tow that isn't coming."

I sat down on the couch, more because my back wanted me to than because of manners. "My car won't start either. Clicks and nothing. I've been out there twice and I think it's the starter, which is something worse."

"So we're both stranded."

"Looks like it."

"How's your cell reception?"

"Half a bar if I stand on one leg by the window."

She laughed at that, a real laugh, and put her phone face down on the couch. "Same. I called a rideshare an hour ago and it never came. Then I called another one and it said forty minutes and that was forty minutes ago." She leaned her head back against the wall. "Great building. Terrible location after nine at night."

"It's got character," I said. "That's what the landlord says anyway. Character means the heat works in half the rooms."

She asked what I'd been recording all night and I told her, a little, some local band, singer-songwriter stuff, nothing I could get excited about after a night like this one. She told me about her training business, thirty-three years old, four years on her own after working at one of the big gyms, mostly one-on-one clients now. She talked about it the way people talk when they're good at their work and tired of explaining it. I liked that. We split the last of the coffee from the pot in the corner, which tasted like it had been made around noon, and we both drank it anyway.

After a while she nodded at my arm. "You keep working that shoulder."

"Huh? Yeah. It's nothing. I've been sitting wrong all night."

"What kind of wrong?"

"Leaned over a guitar, hunched at the mix desk. The usual."

"Give me a second with it if you want. There's a stretch that helps, takes about a minute. No charge, since we're both stuck here anyway."

I hesitated. She noticed and rolled her eyes a little.

"I do this for a living," she said. "It's a shoulder, not a marriage proposal."

"Fair enough. Yeah, go ahead."

She stood and had me sit sideways on the couch. She told me to drop my right arm and relax it, then she stood behind me and put her thumb into the muscle along the top of my shoulder blade. She found the spot faster than I would have believed. It hurt in a good way, that deep ache that makes your whole arm go loose.

"Breathe out," she said. "Don't hold it."

"I'm not."

"You're holding it."

I let the breath out and the muscle let go under her thumb. She worked across it slow, then had me rotate the arm a couple of times while she pressed. Something in my back popped that had been stuck since Tuesday. I may have made a noise about it.

"Feel that?"

"God, yeah. That's been jammed since Tuesday."

"You carry all your tension up here," she said, pressing again. "Guitar players do. Everything goes into the neck and the shoulder."

She kept working it and I started talking, the way you do when somebody's hands are on your back and you can't see their face. "You know I keep thinking I'm getting old and soft. Thirty-six and I look at photos from when I was twenty-six and the guy in those photos had a whole different body. I keep meaning to get back to the gym and then a session runs long and I eat pizza at midnight instead."

"You're not soft the way you think you are," she said. She had both thumbs in now, working down toward the shoulder blade. "I can feel what's under there. There's plenty of muscle. It's just carrying some padding on top and it's tight as hell. Tight muscle reads as thick, not soft. Big difference."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said something dumb. "You're just being nice because your tow truck isn't coming."

"I'm not nice," she said, flat, like it was a fact about the weather. "I'm a trainer. I can tell what's under there by feel, and I'm telling you there's muscle under the padding. You've got a base. You'd build on it fine if you ever actually came to a gym instead of just eating pizza about one."

"You couldn't even see it through the shirt."

"I don't need to see. I've got my hands on it." She pressed the spot one more time and let go. "There. Roll the shoulder."

I rolled it. It moved like a different shoulder. I sat there feeling stupidly pleased about the muscle comment and trying not to show it. It had been a long time since anybody said anything like that to me. The fling I had two years ago, a singer, sweet woman, she'd been kind about my body but kind in a way that felt like politeness. This was different. This was a professional opinion delivered while her thumbs were in my back.

"Better?" she asked, coming around the couch and sitting back on the arm where she'd been.

"Way better. Thank you. Seriously."

"You want the second half of it? There's a chest opener that finishes the job. Ten seconds and it's ugly but it works."

"Ugly how?"

"You'll look like you're being frisked. It doesn't matter, nobody's here."

"Fine. Show me."

She had me clasp my hands behind my back and squeeze the shoulder blades together while she stood at my side and pressed my elbows toward each other. My chest opened up and something in my upper back cracked loud enough that we both heard it.

"Oh, that was big," she said.

"Yeah, I heard it."

"That's years of guitar posture coming out. You should come by the studio sometime. I'd fix you up in three sessions."

"You'd charge me?"

"Of course I'd charge you. I'm running a business, not a charity." But she was smiling when she said it, and she sat back down and looked at her phone like she was checking the time, which she wasn't, since she'd checked it five minutes before.

Outside the little window over the couch the parking lot was empty except for my dead car and her dead one. Rain had started, the light kind that doesn't make noise but fogs the glass. The heat vent under the window ticked. I thought about how the tow truck wasn't coming and the rideshare wasn't coming and my phone had half a bar, and how the couch was worn but clean, and how her shoulder had felt against mine when she reached past me to demonstrate the stretch. My back felt better than it had in a month. My chest was still open from the stretch and I could breathe deep without that usual pinch.

"So," she said. "We're here till morning. Unless you plan on sleeping in your car, which I wouldn't recommend, the seats in those things..."

"No, the couch is fine. Or the floor. Whatever you want."

"It's a big couch," she said. "It's not two people big, but it's a big couch."

"It's not, no," I said. "I'll take the floor. I've slept on worse."

"You have not slept on a floor since college," she said. "You've got session hands. Nobody with session hands sleeps on floors on purpose."

"How do you know I've got session hands?"

"Because you cracked like a glow stick when I stretched you. That's a decade of hunching. So here's what happens. You take the couch. I take the floor. I lay people out on floors for a living, I know exactly what's down there and you don't."

I laughed. "That's not how I'd have argued it."

"It's not an argument, it's a schedule. I'm going to bed at midnight, I've got a seven AM client if that tow ever shows." She yawned then, like her body was backing her up. "God. Sorry. That's the coffee!"

"That coffee was made around noon, you know."

"I know. I drank it anyway. I have no discipline when it comes to coffee and everybody thinks a trainer does."

We sat there a while. The rain kept fogging the window and the heat kept ticking. I picked at the seam of the couch cushion because my hands needed something to do.

"So you've been doing this four years," I said. "The training thing."

"Four years on my own, six total. Big gym before that. I liked the work, hated the gym. You've been playing twelve years, you said."

"Twelve. Started at twenty-four, which is late, everybody tells me."

"Late for what? You're working."

"Fair."

She shifted on the arm of the couch and got more comfortable, which meant she was staying. "Can I ask you something kind of weird?"

"Sure."