Late Set

*This one's for everyone who ever wondered what would've happened if you'd said yes to that late-night invitation. Hope it feels as warm and real as the coffee shop where I dreamed it up. Thanks for reading.*

The Low End was sold out that night, which for our band was somewhere between a miracle and a clerical error. We'd been playing together for nine years and had never filled the room past the bar stools. But the local paper had run a piece about us two weeks earlier, some writer who remembered Ren from his old jazz-fusion phase, and suddenly everyone in town with a Thursday free had decided to come see what the fuss was. So there I was, thirty-four years old, standing on a stage the size of a decent kitchen, playing the opening riff of our last song while my wife ran the soundboard ten feet away and about two hundred people pretended we were famous.

I'd like to say I was cool about all of it. I was a barista with a Fender, after all. Cool was never really on the table.

We were about three-quarters through the last number when I saw her. The crowd was packed tight up front, all of them lit blue by the stage wash, and at first she was just one more face. Then the face resolved. Esmeralda. Standing in the front row like she'd been there the whole time, which knowing her she probably had, arriving early and saying nothing until the exact moment saying nothing stopped being fun for her.

I missed a chord. Not a big one, a little transition on the turn into the bridge, the kind of thing only Lori would have heard on the board and only Ren would have glared at me for. He did glare. Ren has been keeping me honest since I was twenty-five and he has a look for every crime, and that one meant sloppy. I found the next chord and the bridge happened and nobody in the crowd knew the difference. But I knew, and she knew, because she was smiling about it. Ten years since I'd seen her in person and her first act upon entering my life again was to make me flub a change in front of two hundred people. It figured.

Some background, since I'm telling it like this. I met Esmeralda at an open mic when I was twenty-two. She was twenty-four and already doing real touring, small rooms, van tours, the whole scrappy circuit, and she had this habit of watching every act like she was taking attendance. I played three songs of mostly my own material and she told me afterward, in the parking lot of a coffee shop that smelled like burnt espresso, that I could actually play and that somebody should probably sign me before I figured out how to ask. She was the first person who ever said that to me and I did what any twenty-two-year-old would do, which was fall head over heels immediately and embarrassingly. We spent two years circling each other, the kind of friends everybody assumes about and who never do anything. We kissed exactly once, backstage at a dive bar called the Bluebird when I was twenty-four and she was twenty-six, and two weeks later she left town for a tour and never really came back. That kiss has lived rent-free in my head for a decade, which is a humiliating thing to admit at my age, but there it is.

Anyway. Song ended. Crowd clapped at a volume I'd describe as generous. Lori gave me a thumbs up from the board, that little professional nod she does when the mix sat right, and I felt that good clean tired feeling you get at the end of a set that went fine. Ren started breaking down his kit with the efficiency of a man who wanted a beer in his hand within ten minutes. And I looked at the front row and she was gone, which was so classically her that I almost laughed.

I should back up and mention Lori properly. She's thirty-three, she's been a sound engineer at The Low End for five years, and she met me at a studio session when I was twenty-eight and laying down guitar tracks for a friend's record. She married me two years later, which she claims was a paperwork error she never got around to fixing. She knows about Esmeralda. Of course she does. I told her the story early on, back when it was a funny bit, the almost-famous girl and the one kiss, and she has teased me about it periodically ever since. She knows exactly what that one kiss cost me in sleep over the years, and she's never once treated it like a threat, which is either the most secure marriage move in history or the setup to something. With Lori it's genuinely hard to tell.

So. Green room. Ours was the size of a walk-in closet, cinder block walls, a couch with a mysterious stain, a mirror ringed with dead bulbs that had never once lit. I had my guitar off and was wiping down the strings when the door opened without a knock and there she was.

"Hey, chords," she said, because she still called me that. She'd called me chords since the first night, on the theory that I was mostly a set of them.

"Hey, Esme." My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. "You look good."

"I look tired. I look like a woman who's been in a van for six weeks." She dropped onto the couch and looked around the room like she was rating it, which she was. "One night. I'm in town one night, and then it's Nashville, and then Europe, and don't ask me how long Europe is because I've stopped keeping track."

"One night," I said. My mouth had gone dry and I was talking anyway, which is basically my biography.

"One night," she said it the way other people say checkmate.

Ren poked his head in at that point, drumsticks in hand, took one look at her, and said, "No," which was his entire contribution, and left. He'd seen the old photos on my phone years ago, back when we were drunk after a show and I was being an idiot, and he has never let it go. He knew exactly who was on our couch.

The timing couldn't have been worse, because about four seconds later Lori came in with a tray of waters, the way she does after every set, checking on the band like a den mother with a mixing console. She set the tray down, looked at Esmeralda, looked at me, and smiled.

"You must be the stories," Lori said.

Esmeralda lit up like that was the nicest thing anyone had said to her all year. "I've been called worse. You must be the wife he doesn't shut up about."

"He does shut up about me, actually, he's just bad at it." Lori stuck out her hand and they shook, and I stood there holding a guitar like an offering. I want it noted that my wife smiled the whole time and that the smile told me absolutely nothing, which I believe is a professional skill among sound engineers.

We did maybe two minutes of small talk, tour horror stories, how the paper article had happened, whether Ren still ate everything backstage that wasn't nailed down. And then Esmeralda turned to me, water bottle in hand, entirely casual, and dropped the real subject into the room.

"So, favor. There's a demo I want to cut before I fly out. Two songs, mine, and I want a real guitar player on them, not the session guys down there who charge by the hour and play like it." She pointed her chin at the floor. "That studio's still in the basement, right?"

"It is," I said. "I mean, yes!"

"You know it better than anyone, you practically lived in it. One song took me forty minutes to track in there back in the day because you kept insisting on doing it again." She was smiling but there was something under it, the way there always was with her, a second sentence living inside the first one. "Just the two of us. Ren can sit it out. It'd be like the old days."

"Just the two of us," Lori repeated, in a tone so neutral it could have been printed on the side of the mixing desk. She picked up the empty water tray. "Well. It's his night off. Technically."

"Technically," I said, and both of them looked at me, and the room got very small and very warm, and somewhere upstairs the bar was still open and two hundred people were telling each other they'd seen us play.

The thing you have to understand about the next thirty seconds is that they happened in slow motion for me and probably in real time for everyone else. Esmeralda was on the couch looking up at me with ten years of confidence that she'd get whatever she asked for. Lori was standing by the door with a tray under her arm, watching me the way she watches a gain knob she suspects someone else has touched. And I was doing arithmetic in my head, which is never a good sign, because arithmetic is what you do when you already know the answer and you're stalling.

I said something about being tired. I think I said the strings needed to settle, which is not even a real excuse, strings don't settle, that's not a thing, and Esmeralda laughed at me for it, kindly, the way you laugh at a dog that's hiding behind a chair that's too small for it.

Lori saved me from myself, or doomed me, the jury is still out. She looked at me, and I mean really looked, and there was a whole conversation in it that went roughly: go ahead, I dare you. Not angry. Not generous either. Just level, the way she is at the board when a feed is running hot and she wants to see if the engineer on stage notices before she has to fix it. She raised one eyebrow maybe a quarter inch and said, "It'd be nice for the demo. Two songs won't kill you."

Two songs won't kill you. I have replayed that sentence a hundred times since Thursday and I still can't tell you what was in it. On paper it was a wife being reasonable. In the room it had a weight to it, like a hand on the back of your neck steering you gently toward a door. And I, being a man who has never once made the smart call when a woman handed him a dare, heard myself say, "Sure. Yeah. For the demo."

Esmeralda made a little sound of triumph. Lori said she had to reset the board for the late open mic anyway, kissed my cheek, told me not to keep the basement too cold, and left. I want it noted that the kiss on the cheek was normal, our kiss, the Tuesday kiss, the one that means nothing is wrong, and that I stood there afterward feeling like I'd been frisked.

So we went downstairs. The studio is in the basement of The Low End, has