The Backline

I'm twenty-eight, my name is Inez, and I had exactly one job that night, which was holding Malik's spare water bottle near the stage so he could grab it mid-set like some kind of hydrated rock star. I'm not a crowd person. I'm a personal trainer who tells other people to be brave for a living, and then I stand in the wings of a grimy warehouse venue called the Guttersnipe counting fire exits like a paranoid little accountant.

Malik plays lead guitar in a band called Houndstooth, and they were two songs into their set, and he was up there doing his thing, all lean fingers and sweat, when I leaned past the curtain to watch him and made eye contact with the last face I ever expected to see in that pit.

Curtis.

Curtis Xavier, thirty-one years old now, my ex, the man who dumped me two years ago when I was twenty-six because, and I quote, I was too timid in bed and in life. He stood near the bar in a leather jacket that cost more than my car, and he was already smirking, like he'd known all night that I would eventually look his way.

I froze with the water bottle halfway to the stage and almost clocked my boyfriend in the back of the head with it. Malik caught it, gave me a what the hell was that look, and I just shook my head and retreated behind the curtain like the church mouse I apparently still was, because my first instinct was to hide.

Some things don't change, apparently. Two years of deadlifts and squats and telling clients to take up space, and one smirk from Curtis turned me back into a girl who apologizes to furniture.

* * *

During the break between sets, I made the mistake of going to the bathroom alone. The backstage hallway back there is a narrow little gauntlet of peeling paint and exposed pipes, and the dressing room is basically storage for broken amps and old merch boxes, and I was speed-walking past all of it with my head down like that would make me invisible.

"Inez Tupa," Curtis said, stepping out from the shadow of the amp pile, and my stomach did that horrible drop it used to do. "Still doing the water bottle thing, huh? Still fetching things for guitar players?"

"I was holding a water bottle for my boyfriend, Curtis, that's not a personality."

"Could've fooled me." He leaned against the pipe wall, arms crossed, taking his sweet time looking me up and down in a way that made my skin crawl and, annoyingly, made something else wake up too, because my brain is a traitor. "You look the same. Little church mouse. Same hunched shoulders, same rabbit energy. I remember that."

"I remember you too," I said, which was supposed to be withering and came out strangled.

"You know what I remember?" He pushed off the wall and stepped closer, and the hallway smelled like beer and old carpet. "I remember telling you, right to your face, that you'd never let anyone see you want anything. And you just nodded. That was the whole relationship, basically. You nodding."

"Okay, well, it was really nice catching up," I said, and I walked away at a pace that was absolutely not running, and behind me he laughed, that easy laugh he had, the one that always meant you lose.

* * *

Malik was in the dressing room toweling off his hair when I came in and shut the door behind me, and he read my face in about two seconds because he's had three years of practice.

"What happened?"

"Curtis is here. He's playing bass for the opener. I saw him in the crowd and then he cornered me by the bathrooms and told me I still look like a church mouse."

Malik's jaw did something. "Curtis Curtis? The one who said you were too safe? At your show?"

"At our show. Watching me be exactly as safe as he predicted, and enjoying it, and I hate him so much right now, Malik, I hate that he's right."

"You're not safe."

"Malik." I pulled my shirt over my head and threw it on the amp pile, standing there in my black bra with my heart hammering, and he went very still in that way he does. "I'm about to do something insane and I need you to either go along with it or stop me, and I'd honestly take either one."

"Those are wildly different options, Inez."

"I know." I took a breath. "I want to prove something. To him, to myself, to whoever's dumb enough to be watching. He said I'd never let anyone see me want anything." I crossed the little room, reached past him, and pulled the door open a few inches, so that the hallway, the pipes, the whole gossipy backstage world, was technically right there. "So I want you to touch me. Right here, with the door like this, where anybody walking by could see. That's the dare. Touch me like you mean it and don't be quiet about it."

Malik looked at the crack in the door, then at me, and I watched him decide, and God bless him, it did not take long. "You're sure? You're not drunk, you're not just angry, you actually want this?"

"I have never wanted anything this badly in my whole timid life."

"Okay then." He set the towel down. "For the record, my friend Mo runs the soundboard out there and she's going to have a field day."

"That's part of the dare, Mo included."

He came over slow, like he was giving me one last second to change my mind, and I didn't take it, so he hooked one finger into the waistband of my jeans and turned me gently so I faced the open crack of the door, and then he pressed up behind me, warm and solid, and kissed the side of my neck.

"Look at that," he said quietly, against my ear. "Church mouse learned to leave the door open."

"Don't ruin it with a theme," I whispered, and then his hand slid around flat against my stomach and up under the wire of my bra, and I made a noise, an actual audible noise, the kind of noise that carries down a narrow hallway, and I heard footsteps stop somewhere just out of sight beyond the door.

Someone was standing there. I could feel it, the specific silence of a person trying not to breathe.

"Malik," I breathed, meaning are you hearing this too.

"I hear it," he murmured, and his thumb moved over my nipple through the fabric, slow, and my hips pushed back against him without my permission, and I thought, let them look. Let all of them look. Curtis, Maureen, the whole peeling hallway, everyone. Look at me wanting something.

"You're shaking," he said.

"I'm not, shut up, keep going."

He laughed, low, and obliged, both hands now, peeling the bra strap off my shoulder, and I heard the person in the hallway shift their weight, floorboard creaking, and instead of dying of shame the way any reasonable version of me would have, I reached up and back and grabbed a fistful of Malik's hair and said, loudly enough that I meant it for the hallway, "Don't you stop!"

The floorboard creaked again, closer this time, and then a voice I knew too well said, from three feet of open air away, "Well, well."

Curtis. Standing in the hallway in that stupid leather jacket, three feet from a door that was open maybe five inches, with me half out of my bra and Malik's hands still moving on me.

Here is the part I will be proud of until I die. I did not freeze. I turned around, unhooked the bra the rest of the way with one hand, and let it drop on top of the amp pile next to my shirt, and then I walked to the door and pulled it the rest of the way open, standing there topless in the doorway of the Guttersnipe dressing room with my chin up, looking my ex dead in the eye.

"Hey Curtis. Do you need something?"

I wish I had a photo of his face. I will be describing it to Maureen for years. His mouth opened, closed, opened again, and then he laughed, a short weird bark of a laugh that had no plan behind it, and he put one hand up like I was a gate he'd decided not to open, and he said, "Nah. Nah, I'm good," and he walked away down the hallway, boots clomping, not fast but not slow either, the walk of a man doing complicated math he was losing.

I turned back to Malik, who was sitting on the amp pile with the towel in his lap and an expression I had never seen on him before, some mix of awe and alarm and plain animal interest, and I said, "Okay. That worked better than I planned."

"Did it? Because from in here it looked like you just scared a grown man out of a building with your chest."

"I did, Malik. I did scare a grown man out of a building with my chest. Two years of therapy goals, achieved."

He laughed, and the laugh broke whatever was still standing between us and the insane thing, because I came back to him and he stood up and pulled me in and kissed me, a real kiss, no hallway audience required, and I was aware the whole time that I was topless and that the door was still open, and for the first time in my life that fact felt like a fact about the weather and not a verdict.

Then he reached down and pushed the door until it was cracked to that same few inches again, on purpose, and gave me a look that asked a question, and I nodded, and that was all the asking either of us needed.

* * *

What followed was, and I say this as a professional with a certificate in human movement, the least efficient makeout session of my adult life, and I loved every second of it. He sat me on the stack of merch boxes by the wall, which wobbled in a way that kept things interesting, and he stood in front of me and kissed me with his hands flat on my ribs, and my skin was doing that thing where every place he touched got loud. His fingers walked up my ribs one at a time, tracing, and I leaned back on my palms on a box that said HOUNDSTOOTH in peeling vinyl letters and let him.

"You're warm," he said, which is not poetry but hit me like poetry anyway, because his fingers were following my spine down and my whole back arched without asking me first.

"Somebody's gotta radiate in this relationship. You hide under towels."

"One towel. I hid under one towel once."

"It's a pattern, Malik. I keep records."

He laughed into my neck, and then the hallway outside did the thing hallways do, which was creak, and I heard a voice say, low and fake-casual, "Aw man, looks like there's a cable issue down here, I better take a look," and then there was the specific sound of a person crouching in a hallway directly outside a cracked door for no electrical reason whatsoever.

I knew the voice. Maureen. Malik's oldest friend, five years on the soundboard at the Guttersnipe, a woman who has forgotten exactly zero pieces of gossip in her life and who was now, by the sound of it, inspecting a cable that did not exist while looking through a gap at us.

"Mo," Malik called out, not lifting his mouth from my collarbone, "the cable's fine."

"I can see that!" she called back cheerfully, and I heard her settle in, the actual creak of her getting comfortable, like she'd pulled up a chair. "Take your time! Sound check isn't for forty minutes. I'm just gonna be here, doing cable stuff."

"Mo, oh my god."

"What. I'm working."

I should have been mortified. Two years ago, church mouse Inez would have died on that merch box. But here's what the last ten minutes had done to me: Curtis had walked away from my chest, and now Maureen was spectating, and instead of shrinking I felt about nine feet tall. So I did the boldest thing of the night, which was say, loudly, toward the door, "Hi Mo. It's Inez. Everything is fine and consensual and I'm having a great time."

There was a pause, and then Maureen's voice came back, delighted, "I KNOW, HONEY, I CAN TELL! GOOD FOR YOU!" and then, quieter, to someone else in the hallway, "Devin, come here, you gotta," and Malik and I both cracked up, foreheads together, laughing while the whole backstage universe eavesdropped, and honestly the laughing did not slow anything down. If anything it helped. It made the room warm and stupid and ours.

He got my jeans unbuttoned somewhere in there, between laughs, with a patience I did not know he had in him, and I kicked my boots off against the amp pile with two thuds that Maureen narrated for Devin's benefit, and