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ACT 1 — The Setup
The saxophonist asked the room a question and the blue light hummed, as if the club itself were holding its breath. At that moment the world narrowed to a single note that lingered in my bones, then unfurled into the hush that follows—like a held breath released as speech. That hush is my favorite sound, the small, sacred silence where anything might begin.
I was alone at the bar, my notebook closed beside my whiskey, hair still smelling faintly of the stage—sweat and cedar and cigarette smoke. I come to the Blue Note for nights like this: late, velvet-dark, full of bodies that move like memory. The room has a patience, the kind that lets strangers become conspirators over the course of a set, over the slow unriddling of a song. Tonight I was supposed to be writing, gathering a poem, but you know how it goes; the club has its own plans.
She slid into those plans like a practiced line.
I first knew Maya in the way you know a chorus that haunts you—the first time it appears you don't ask for it, but you recognize it immediately. She walked in wearing a coat that smelled of rain and orange blossom, her hair pinned back like a careless promise. The room responded before I did: a pair of eyes tracked her path, a hand reached for their drink without looking down. When she smiled—small, rueful, exactly the way a saxophone bends a note—my name lit somewhere behind my ribs.
We had been a shape once, a thing precarious and thrilling. There are people who carve a place inside you; you can’t explain why the shape fits until it doesn’t. Maya had been the scar and the map that came with it. We were twenty-five the last time we touched like this: a summer of borrowed rooms and borrowed time, the kind of relationship that lived loud and fierce in the hours when the city was softer, quieter, more dangerous. I left, for reasons that at the time felt like muscle and necessity. She stayed, or rather, she moved somewhere else in ways I had never bothered to understand because I thought goodbye was the final chord.
And here she was, at the bar, older by a few years and shaped by things I hadn't been party to: a vertical line between her brows I remembered from nights when she’d laugh so hard it hurt, a softer steadiness in the tilt of her chin. She wore a black dress that acknowledged the night without laying herself bare. I'd seen her at parties and on postcards in my head, but I had not expected the way seeing her would feel like catching the tail of an old song and finding it still warm under your skin.
She caught my look and didn't look away. Instead she made a game of it, turning her glass slowly as if that movement were a metronome keeping beat for the two of us. Her name looked small on my tongue like a secret I was savoring.
"Levi Hargrove," she said when she crossed to the bar, voice low enough to be private in a room built for whispers. "You look like you stole the last line from a poem and hid it in your jacket." There was a smile around the edges of the comment, the sort that invited a retort and a confession in equal measure.
"I would say I stole it from you, but that would be presumptuous." I hooked my elbow over the back of the stool so my shoulder brushed hers. The contact was casual—intentional as a plucked string.
Her laugh was quick. "Presumptuous suits you better than a turtleneck." She looked at me with the familiarity of someone who remembers your faults as tenderly as your virtues. "What are you doing here? Playing, spying on poor saxophonists, or writing about me with a vengeance?"
"A little of all three," I admitted. "I play on Thursdays sometimes. But tonight I'm here to be a good audience. Or at least a distracted one." I tapped the closed notebook. "I thought I might write something about the way the light folds over the musicians. Turns out it's folding over you instead."
"Is that a jealousy poem or a regret poem?" She cocked an eyebrow.
"Depends on whether it wants to sleep alone or not." I felt the old, comfortable tug of banter between us—the cat-and-mouse that had always been our language when the world felt like too much and we needed to trim it down to something deliciously small.
But there was more now than the old choreography. Maya's hands had a steadier grace, like someone who'd learned to carry weight without spilling herself. She told me, between finishing her drink and ordering another, that she'd been in town for a few months—an exhibition here, a commission there—work that kept her up at odd hours and sharpens the edges of her patience. She'd grown into a career that liked her mind and did not necessarily need her aligning to anyone else's rhythm. That pleased me; I liked the idea of her self-possession. It made her dangerous in a new way.
"You always had the worst timing," she said softly, almost tenderly. "And the best excuses."
"Every artist has to have a signature failing," I said. "It's a trade for the good lines."
Her eyes softened. "And what are you giving up these days for your good lines?" she asked.
"Sleep, stability, and sometimes meals that don't come from a plate with a paper wrapper. The usual poetly things." I smiled, but there was an undercurrent—regret wrapped in wryness—that she saw and didn't comment on until later, when it mattered.
We talked like people in possession of shared history do: shorthand, jokes that landed because they'd been honorary currency between us before. But every so often, when the musicians stepped into a quieter bridge, there would be a silence between us that stretched like a string wound taut. In that silence I could feel the old map: how things had once fit, and how the map had been folded and tucked away.
She mentioned, almost casually, an art opening she had just curated downtown, a soupçon of her life that didn't include me. I mentioned an upcoming set at a café, and she asked for the date as if she might attend. The offer was a bridge; the acceptance was a test. She did not commit, and I didn't push.
It felt like a reconnection with rules neither of us had consented to make. We had both made lives in the time since, and the reunion was trying on different clothes—some nostalgic, some new. We were playing at chance like two old players who remembered the rhythm of the table.
As the set wound down and the saxophonist exchanged a private smile with the pianist, the lights dimmed further and the room seemed to huddle. The bartender set down a neat glass of something amber and lit a candle at the edge of the bar like punctuation.
"Do you—" Maya began. Her voice was velvet over gravel. "Do you still write those poems that make me want to hurt and laugh and feel like stealing a convertible for the night?"
I considered the question and decided honesty was a good trick tonight. "Yes. And sometimes those poems get jealous." I leaned closer. Our shoulders touched. Her perfume—bergamot and something green—was a low chord against my skin.
"Jealous of what?" she asked.
"Of the life you spent without me in it," I said. It came out softer than I planned, but the truth has a way of arriving with its own gravity. Her hand, resting on the bar, tightened just a fraction; a small motion, but I saw it.
"I needed space," she replied. "And I think you needed fear. Different things make different people run."
"And what makes you stop running?" I asked, not sure I wanted the answer.
She smiled—half admiring, half resigned. "Maybe a good song. Or a better joke. Or someone who doesn't make me defend myself for being alive."
"Then consider me under all those categories," I said, because charm is a ladder and I seemed to be climbing.
She hissed air through her teeth, a sound that might have been impatience or delight. "You're insufferable."
"But endlessly entertaining," I countered.
It was a dance we both knew, but there was a new edge: the knowledge that there could be consequences to finishing this refrain. People in the room began shifting toward the exits; the night had a way of thinning its numbers like breath leaving a room. We both felt it—the clock, the culmination of longings that had been simmering for years.
When the band took an intermission, a man from the piano's band approached the stage with a case. I noticed his hand for reasons that had nothing to do with music—he seemed like a presence that could interrupt, and that thought tightened my chest. But he was only a courier for instruments and a polite smile. The real interruption came from within: a busboy who slipped by with a tray and clipped my knee, a micro-accident that sent a ripple of laughter through the club and severed the thread that bound me to Maya for a bright moment.
A near miss. A near kiss. That's the thing about reunions: they are built from a series of almosts. I wanted to thread those almosts into something whole, but every time I reached for it, the world offered another interruption—an obliging reminder that life is a public affair and desire often happens in private.
She stayed until closing, though, and when the last chord finally faded, she rose with an elegance that made the room apologize for its rudeness. At the door she paused and looked back at me as if choosing whether to throw caution to the wind or keep it safely folded in her coat pocket. She chose—after a moment—to walk out toward the night. I followed.