Karaoke Lessons

Katya is thirty-three years old, and she has decided, on this particular Tuesday evening in October, that her life has become a series of receipts she keeps meaning to file. She is standing in the hallway of her building with a bag of takeout in one hand and her mail in the other, and the mail is all bills, and the takeout is the same noodle dish she has ordered eleven Tuesdays in a row, and she is pretty sure that if she died right there between the elevators nobody would notice for at least three days.

That is when Stuart comes down the stairs.

Stuart lives four doors down from her, thirty-nine years old, works from home doing graphic design, and is the kind of man who hums in the elevator, actual melodies, not the absent-minded mumbling most people do. He is wearing a leather jacket tonight and has his hair pushed back, and he stops on the last step and looks at her like she is a problem he has been meaning to solve.

"Katya," he says. "It's Tuesday. You're holding noodles. Let me guess, the same noodles."

"They're good noodles," she says, and immediately hates how defensive she sounds.

"Sure they are. Hey, real question. I've lived four doors down from you for two years and I have never once seen you leave this building for anything except work and those noodles. Do you go out? Like, out out?"

"I go out." She shifts the mail to the other hand. "I go to work. That's out."

"That's not out, that's a commute with extra steps." He leans against the banister, and he has this way of looking at her, patient, like he has all night and knows she has nowhere to be, which is the depressing part, because he is right. "When's the last time you did something on a weeknight that wasn't takeout or laundry?"

Katya opens her mouth to say something and then actually thinks about it, and the honest answer is so embarrassing that she just laughs instead. "Okay, wow. I don't know. A while. I used to be fun, you know. I used to have friends with names and everything. Then the dating apps ate two years of my life and somewhere in there I forgot how to just, be somewhere. With people. Doing something dumb."

"Dumb is my specialty," Stuart says. "Okay, Thursday. I go to this karaoke place, the Silver Note, it's two blocks from here, you've probably walked past it a hundred times. Worn red stage, mirrored walls, the guy at the snack bar does dumplings after ten. I go most Thursdays and I would genuinely like it if you came. One night. If you hate it, you never have to come back and I will never bring it up again, I promise, I'm very good at letting things go."

"You're literally still teasing me about the microwave fire from last spring."

"That was a gift that keeps giving, that's different." He grins at her, and Katya stands there in the hallway with her noodles cooling and her useless mail and thinks about how long it has been since anyone asked her to be anywhere, just plainly asked, no agenda, and how strange and nice it feels.

"Thursday," she says. "But if I'm terrible, you have to lie to me."

"Oh, you'll be terrible," he says cheerfully. "Everybody's terrible the first time. That's the whole fun of it."

* * *

The Silver Note on a Thursday is about half full, which Stuart tells her is the sweet spot, enough people to make noise, not enough to make you nervous. The stage really is worn, the red carpet gone thin in the middle where everyone stands, and the mirrored walls make the room feel bigger and more forgiving somehow, like there are more places to look than at you. Katya sits at a small table near the stage with a drink she asked the bartender to make weak, and she watches a woman in her fifties absolutely demolish a power ballad and get a standing ovation from six people, and something in her chest loosens a little.

"Okay," Stuart says, sliding the laminated songbook across the table. "Lesson one. Do not pick a song you love. Pick a song that lives where your voice lives. Everybody picks songs they love and then the key kicks their teeth in. What do you actually sing? In the car. In the shower. Be honest."

She is quiet for a second, a little embarrassed, because she has never said this out loud to anyone. "There's this one old soul song I play on Sundays while I clean. I've been singing it for years. I know every breath in it."

"Perfect. Show me."

She points at it in the book and his eyebrows go up, pleased, like she has passed a test she did not know she was taking. "That's a great pick for a first timer. It sits right in the middle, no screaming. Listen, when you're up there, don't look at the crowd, look at me, I'll be right at that table with the terrible lamp. And hold the mic about an inch away, not glued to your mouth, everyone glues it to their mouth."

"Is that a real lesson or are you just making me feel like there's a system?"

"There's absolutely a system," he says, and then the DJ calls her name, because apparently he signed her up while she was at the bar, the sneak, and her stomach drops through the floor.

The first verse is rough. She can hear it herself, her voice coming out thin and careful, like she is apologizing for taking up air. But Stuart is at the table with the terrible lamp, exactly where he said, and he gives her this little nod, steady, unhurried, and she finds the second verse and stops fighting it. By the chorus she is actually looking up, out at the half empty room, and there is a moment, one clean moment in the bridge, where she nails a run she has only ever done alone in her kitchen with dish soap on her hands, and the room makes a noise, small but real, and something in her lights up that has been off for a long time.

She comes off the stage flushed and breathing hard, and Stuart is right there, and his palm lands warm on her lower back, guiding her through the little cluster of chairs, and she is so startled by how good it feels, just that, a hand, steady and warm, that she almost forgets to be proud of herself.

"See?" he says, steering her back to the table. "Terrible. Absolutely unlistenable. I'm going to need a minute to recover."

"Shut up." She is laughing, actually laughing, and she sits down and takes a long drink and realizes her hands are shaking a little, the good kind of shaking. "Okay. Fine. You were right. That felt, huh. That felt like being a person."

"You want to know a secret? That's why I go every week. It's not the singing. It's that for three and a half minutes nothing in your life is being graded." He says it lightly but she catches something underneath it, and she wonders, not for the first time, what his Tuesday nights look like when she is not around to bump into.

* * *

A week later they are at the corner stall after closing, standing under the string of yellow bulbs, sharing a cardboard box of dumplings because Stuart insisted that is the ritual, you sing, you eat dumplings, you dissect the night, in that order, no exceptions. Katya has flour on her face. She does not know this. There is a drift of it on the counter of the stall and she has been leaning on it with her elbow while she argues with him about whether her second song of the night was a good choice, and somewhere in the argument he reaches over, casual as anything, and brushes the flour off her cheek with his thumb.

He does not make it a moment. That is the strange part. His hand just goes back to the dumplings, and he keeps talking about song selection like nothing happened, but Katya has stopped hearing whatever he is saying, because her cheek is still warm where his thumb was, and she is standing there in the yellow light doing math she has not done in a very long time. The last man who touched her face touched it like he was verifying a box. This man touched it like he was just, taking care of something small.

"You've gone quiet," Stuart says, glancing at her. "That either means I won the argument or I said something dumb."

"You won the argument," she says, which is not true, and he knows it, and he smiles down at the dumplings instead of at her, which is somehow worse, better, she cannot decide. She picks up a dumpling and eats it and thinks, with an unfamiliar little thrill, that next Thursday is only seven days away, and that for the first time in two years she is looking forward to a day that has nothing to do with work or noodles.

"So," she says, before she can talk herself out of it. "Same time next week?"

The next Thursday, Katya signs herself up before Stuart can get to the clipboard, and she picks a slow one, an old soul ballad that she has only ever sung into a hairbrush, and she does not tell him what it is. She just waits for her name, one hip against the bar, watching him argue with the DJ about key changes, and when it comes she walks up onto the worn red stage and the mirrored walls catch a dozen little copies of her, all of them looking terrified.

Then the music starts and the terror goes somewhere else.

Her voice comes out lower than she expects, husky, like the song has been sitting in her chest all week waiting for room, and she stops thinking about the crowd by the second line. She is just singing it, the way she sings it on Sundays, except there are people now, and one of them is Stuart, and he is not arguing with anyone anymore. He is turned on his stool toward the stage, both elbows on the table, and his eyes stay on her the whole way through, not wandering, not checking his phone, just fixed, and the dim light catches something in them that she can read even from up there, even with her heart doing what it is doing.

She finishes the last note and lets it fall off soft instead of pushing it, the way he taught her, and the room does the noise again, the small real one, and she comes off the stage with her face burning.

"Okay," Stuart says when she sits down, and his voice is not quite level. "Okay, that was. Huh."

"Huh good or huh bad?"

"Do not fish. You know it was good." He turns his glass a slow circle on the coaster. "The thing is, when you sing like that, people look at you. You noticed that, right? People looked at you."

"People looked at you too," she says, because she saw it, the way his head never turned once, and he laughs and does not deny it, and they drink their drinks with the lamp between them and neither of them mentions the dumpling stall until they are walking out.

But the stall is closed tonight. Yellow bulbs off, shutter down, and Katya feels a small ridiculous disappointment and then Stuart says, "Well, I guess we're ritual-less," and she says, "We could walk," and they walk.

* * *

The streets are quiet at that hour, wet leaves down from the weekend still stuck to the sidewalks, and their shoulders bump a couple of times before his hand finds hers. He does not ask, he just takes it, fingers sliding in like it is a thing they have done for weeks, and she thinks about pulling hers free to make a point about asking and then very deliberately does not, and her grip tightens instead.

"That okay?" he says anyway, a few steps later, like the question just caught up with his hand.

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah, it's okay."

It is ten minutes to her building and they use almost all of them, walking slow, talking about nothing, the DJ's terrible key changes and the microwave fire from last spring, which he brings up purely to be hated, and then they are at her door and the ten minutes are gone and neither one of them moves to end the night.

"So," he says. "One more lesson. Free of charge. This is a breathing thing, it'll help with the long phrases." He stands facing her under the hallway light, close enough that she can smell beer and cold air on his jacket, and he demonstrates, a slow breath in through the nose, out through softly parted lips. "You try."

She tries. It comes out a little shaky and he says, good, again, and she does it again, and on the third one his hand comes up to rest light on her jaw, thumb along her cheekbone, guiding her chin down a fraction, and their faces are very close, and the exhale turns into something that is not an exercise.

"Katya," he says, quiet. "Can I kiss you?"

"God, finally, yes," she says, and he huffs a laugh and then his mouth is on hers, slow and careful, asking with his lips the same way he asked with words, and she answers by stepping in and fisting her hand in his jacket. The kiss opens up gradually, his tongue tracing her lower lip, her mouth parting for him, and it goes on long enough that her back finds the door and her keys dig into her palm and she does not care.

"Inside?" she manages against his mouth. "I mean, do you want to come in?"

"Very much, yes!"

* * *

They make it to the couch, mostly. She drops the keys in the bowl by the door without looking and then he is steering her back against the cushions, still kissing her, one hand cradling her jaw and the other flat on her hip like he is steadying a mic stand, and when he finally pulls back to breathe he is smiling at her like she nailed the run in the bridge.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi." She gets his jacket off one shoulder and then the other. "Okay, so, I have a question about the system. Is there a system for this too, or?"

"No system," he says, kissing the corner of her jaw. "This part's all improvisation."

Clothes come off in stages between murmured compliments, his shirt over his head and her hands flat on his chest, her sweater lifted and him saying, soft, "You're gorgeous, you know that, right," and her saying, "You keep saying things like that and I'm going to lose the ability to talk," and him saying, "That's fine, you mostly talk when you're arguing with me anyway." Her bra goes and he takes his time with her nipples, mouth and then fingers, until she is squirming under him and making sounds she would normally be embarrassed by, except he makes a low approving noise at every one of them, so she stops being embarrassed.

Her jeans and then everything else, and then his hand slides down her stomach and between her thighs, and she is already wet, embarrassingly, gloriously wet, and his fingers find her clit and move in slow easy circles that make her hips lift off the cushion.

"Oh, that's," she breathes. "That's good, don't stop!"

"Wasn't going to."

He works her with a patience that she recognizes, the same unhurried steadiness he brings to everything, two fingers sliding into her while his thumb keeps up the pressure on her clit, and she comes apart on his hand quicker than she means to, gasping, grabbing his forearm, riding it out while he watches her face like it is the only thing in the room. She is still catching her breath when he works his way down her body, kissing a line down her stomach, and pauses at her hip to look up at her.

"This okay?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says. "Please!"

He puts his mouth on her pussy like he is learning a song, slow at first, tongue tracing her folds, finding the rhythm of what makes her hips move, and then building on it, lips closing around her clit and sucking gentle until her hands are in his hair and her heels are pressing into his back. She comes again with her head tipped back against the armrest, his name coming out of her in a voice she has never used before.

Afterward he kisses back up her body and she pulls him up by the ears and kisses him too, tasting herself on his mouth, and then she reaches for his belt and he catches her wrist, not stopping her, just holding.

"Condom," he says. "I've got one, wallet."

"Okay, good, yes. Please." She watches him roll it on and thinks, distantly, that this is the most adult thing she has done in two years, asking and answering and both of them meaning it.

He takes her slow the first time, her legs hooked over his, him moving in long careful strokes while he keeps up this low murmured commentary, you feel so good, you're doing so good, that makes her laugh once in the middle of everything and then moan instead. He shifts her on top of him after a while, hands on her hips, guiding her, patient, showing her the pace until she finds it herself, and she rides him with her palms on his chest and he watches her the way he watched her from the stage-side table, fixed, unblinking, and she thinks, this, this is what it is supposed to feel like, being looked at like that. She comes a third time with her forehead dropped against his shoulder and he follows her with a low groan, hips pressing up, holding her down against him until they are both shaking.

* * *

Later they are tangled in her sheets, her window cracked to the October cold, his arm heavy across her ribs, and the radiator is doing its familiar complaint and she does not mind any of it.

"I've got a new song for you," Stuart says into her hair, half asleep. "Next week. It's got a hard bridge, you're going to fight me on it."

"Will I win the argument?"

"Absolutely not."

She laughs and pulls his arm tighter around herself. "Fine. Same time next week."