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My heart skipped at the sight of THE CARELESS ONES, lit up on the marquee. Yes! Their music could not be a more perfect soundtrack for whatever this fantasy was going to be. So far, so right! Just breathe, I told myself.
The kind driver, sensing my nervousness, ushered me through the throng of fans, acting like we owned the place, like I was a VIP. Nearing the front of the stage, where the opening act was performing, I spotted two familiar-looking women holding out a chair for me.
“Dauphine! You’re here! You remember us? I’m Kit and this is Pauline,” Kit yelled over music. “We’re your dates until your date gets here. Have I mentioned just how much I love my job?”
“You look amazing!” Pauline enthused, sexy in her clear-skinned, short-haired way. She had on a black mini-dress downplayed with a denim jacket and banged-up black ankle boots. Kit was in cutoffs and a baggy white dress shirt, a dramatic grey streak highlighting her now-ebony hair.
“Thanks for being here,” I said. “It means a lot to me.” And it did. I wasn’t used to going out like this on my own, or going out at all, for that matter. “So … is he here?” I asked, sneaking a glance around the crowded room.
“He’s on his way,” Pauline said, exchanging looks with Kit.
“You’ll tell me when he gets here?” I asked, nervously patting down my straight hair. It felt like silk.
“You’ll know when he gets here,” Kit said. “Don’t worry.”
A glass of chilled Chablis appeared in front of me, my favorite, and after the opening band left the stage, the packed room went completely dark. Minutes later, when the Careless Ones fired up their instruments with a familiar riff, the hair stood up on my arms. It was him, Mark Drury, lit from behind at center stage. As Mark reached for the microphone and pulled it to his mouth, the floodlights hit his amazing face full force. For a few seconds the only sound in the cavernous room was his breath on the mesh of the mike. He had the body of a musician, all lank and sinew, bones seemingly hollowed out for music to move through them. Clothes hung on him perfectly, but they were incidental to his voice. Everything was. Why he didn’t do it for Cassie, I’ll never know, but a glance around the room at all the glassy-eyed women swaying in their seats confirmed he wouldn’t lack for attention for long.
For a few seconds he said nothing; he just stood there with his eyes closed. Then flash—lights exploded as he broke into the band’s best single, “Days from Here,” adding a honky-tonk edge, bringing the house to its feet. For the next forty-five minutes of their set, I forgot the fantasy, stopped searching for the man I’d soon be with, and simply marveled at Mark’s talent to pull emotions from his body and pour them over the crowd. That’s what the best live music does: it makes a whole room of people feel the same thing. There I was, up front, on my feet, clapping and grinning with two other women from S.E.C.R.E.T., my body filling to capacity with joy. Whoever my fantasy man was, he’d be getting the best of me tonight.
“We’re going to change up the temp a little bit. Get you cozy,” Mark said, pulling up a stool, perching his acoustic guitar on his knee. “This last song’s for my girl. She’s right over there,” he said, nodding to indicate a table near ours.
See? Of course he has a “girl.”
Instead of feeling bitter about his “girl,” I suddenly felt … magnanimous, like there was enough love, enough affection, enough of this joy to go around. Mark made his hand into a visor, peering into the dark crowd over my shoulder. I turned around to get a look at this lucky girl. I couldn’t tell which one he meant, so I turned back.
“There she is,” he said, looking right at our table, “the gorgeous redhead in the front. That’s my baby. You good?”
The hot white spotlight then centered over me and pulled in on my terror-stricken face. Me? I felt Pauline’s firm hand grab my forearm as though she were preventing me from fleeing, or floating to the ceiling.
“Her name’s Dauphine,” Mark announced to the crowd. “And I’m hoping y’all will help me get her to do something for me,” he said, plinking his guitar strings and smiling right at me. “I’m hoping she’ll … accept the Step.”
He started strumming the intro to a song, and I saw stars! Is this really happening? To me? His band members looked slightly confused, but when they recognized the riff, they joined the intro.
“I know y’all don’t know what the hell that means,” he said to the crowd, smiling, “but she knows. Don’t you, baby.”
That smile. The crowd began to urge me on. I heard, Accept the Step! Accept the Step! Even Kit and Pauline were chanting now, both of them laughing and clapping.
“So what do you say? After this song, maybe we can go somewhere,” he said, and now I laughed, my hands covering my mouth. Then I drew my hands away and yelled out, “Yes!” and when I did, the crowd erupted, and Mark launched into the most aching rendition of Margaret Lewis’s “Reconsider Me.” For the next three minutes, I forced my heart back down my throat and into its proper place behind my ribs. I felt flushed, and thrilled that he’d boldly shared our connection with the whole room—yet no one knew a thing about us except Kit and Pauline.
After the song, during a standing ovation, he placed his guitar on its stand and made his way directly towards me, the whole room in paroxysms as time stopped and he pulled me to my feet and into a lush kiss.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he whispered into my ear.
“Okay,” I said, unsure my jelly legs would hold me upright. I waved a goodbye to Kit and Pauline as Mark tugged me through the still-clapping crowd and backstage into the bustling green room. We swept past his sweaty, chatty band members, one changing his shirt, another standing with a wife or girlfriend, another hovering nearby, blowing smoke out the back door. We pinballed through the room, exiting through a narrow, dark hallway where we made a right, then a left, until we hit upon a small office with a metal desk and a bleak bulb swinging overhead.
“Wow, you take me to the nicest places,” I said, a little tipsy from the attention and from the wine.
He shut the door behind us, sending a yellowed calendar crashing to the floor. And then Mark Drury came at me slowly, hungrily. I moved back until I could feel the concrete wall behind me. Reaching me, he placed one arm, then the other on either side of me.
“So it is you,” he said, peering into my face.
“What do you mean?”
“They gave me a name and a picture. I thought I recognized you. But I didn’t believe it until I looked out into the crowd and saw you there. I’ve seen you at my shows,” he said, his perfect lips inches from mine.
“You have?”
“Yeah. And I always go to find you after and you’re always gone. Then I saw you on the patio of Ignatius’s a few months ago, but I got pulled into a conversation with someone else.”
