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ACT 1 — The Setup
The night the saxophone caught me, I was already halfway through a glass of something dark and medicinal, the kind of red wine that tastes like ambition and regret. The club smells of lemon oil, cigarette smoke that never quite leaves the upholstery, and the refined sweat of someone who plays into the small hours. It was the kind of place I’d come to write in once, a notebook splayed on a napkin, every face a paragraph I was too tired to finish. Tonight, I had no notebook—only a coat hung on the back of my chair and the peculiar looseness of a man who had chosen, deliberately, to have nothing pressing to say.
The band was on a slow turn: upright bass, brushes on snare, a trumpet that sounded like it had once been a lover. He played something new and fragile, and the room listened the way people listen to confessions—leaning in and pretending they aren't eager to betray each other. The singer took the stage between songs, a woman who owned the air with the same confidence someone takes out a passport. Her name, I would learn, was Nora. The first time she smiled at me across the room I thought it was an accident: a tilt of head, an expression that belonged more to sunlight than to a late-night bar. It struck me as if it had been meant for me alone.
But the magnetism in the room wasn't singular. She had a companion—seated at the grand piano at the far end of the stage, fingers folded into the space between restraint and liberty. Ava. The club's program called her the resident pianist; the band members called her a genius in half-jokes, the way people throw fragile words at someone they want to flatter without believing. She was quieter than Nora—smaller in the literal sense but with a presence that made the keys under her fingers appear as if they were carved for her, not the other way around.
People tend to make snapshots of others: tall, dark, soulful, brittle. I could have boiled the two of them down to adjectives and filed them away. But there was detail, the kind that insists on being noticed: Nora's hair fell in a long, unruly curl over her shoulder like an exhalation; her mouth was the color of something you remember tasting in an old photograph. She had the kind of laugh that coiled you in and let you stay—sly, fast, occasionally merciless. Ava, meanwhile, held her hands like they had come from another life: long, nimble, a pianist's hands scarred and callused by practice and persistence. Her laugh was smaller, like a secret being told to a single ear.
I told myself I was there to forget, or maybe to begin again. I had moved back to the city after a long stretch in quieter places, after a relationship that had been practical and then unmade. Journalism had taught me to listen for the small revelations that become human truth. It had also taught me to keep distance—a camera between the self and the subject. Tonight, that barrier felt porous. The two women, close together yet separate, made the place feel like a novel I hadn't yet decided to read cover to cover.
They started their set together: a duet that blurred the space between lead and accompanist. Nora took a microphone like a confession, slow and deliberate. Ava's hands were liquid, drawing chords like someone dusting for prints. From the first bar there was a chemistry so immediate it felt almost indecent—two people who had already learned each other's breath. Sometimes music confesses things language cannot. They played a standard that the band turned into something like a conversation; the lyrics were minor, the inflection enormous.
Between songs, the band eased into a break. Nora came down from the stage and sat at the bar where I was, as if fate had a good sense of timing and a worse sense of privacy. The air seemed to fold inward for a moment. She ordered a whiskey, neat, and her voice had the kind of edges that made the bartender listen like someone owing rent.
"You look like you belong on the other side of the room," she said when she noticed me looking. It wasn't a question so much as an assessment. She had eyes that laughed from the corner first—dangerous and kind.
"I used to belong on this side," I answered. "Now I just steal whatever's left on mine."
She tilted her head, studying me like a small puzzle. "You don't look like a thief. More like someone who lost his interest in being stolen from."
I laughed then, because there was something honest in that read. It is always easier to be witty when someone else has left the space open. "Maybe I'm just practicing being uninteresting."
Ava slid onto the stool beside Nora, her fingers still faintly carrying the memory of ivory and black. She smiled at me in a way that was not quite a smile—more like an invitation to speak truthfully without being asked questions. "You look like you write things down," she said. "Even if it's just mental notes."
"Guilty as charged. I used to write for a living. Now I make sentences for myself." The conversation felt like a small fiddle tune between larger movements—light, passing, then somehow essential.
They were different in their approaches: Nora was immediate, a comet of humor, touch, and an ability to make eye contact that landed like a hand on your chest. Ava waited and watched; she was a slow-burning flame, the kind you get close to and find you want to stay near. They argued about whether the new arrangement of the song had betrayed the original's heart; their faces animated and bright. At one point Nora reached across the piano and took Ava's wrist, a touch as casual as smoke and as intense as a declared vulnerability. I felt it like voltage—an electric arc that traveled across the stage, across the bar, and pooled at my feet.
The circumstances that brought us together were, on paper, incidental: I had come because I needed to sit in a room that I couldn't control; they were playing because that's what they did. But life insists on turning incidental into inevitable if you give it enough of a look. A lost phone, a mutual friend, a request to join them for a drink after the set—each little thing slotted into place like puzzle pieces you'd been carrying in your pocket for years.
After the second set, the crowd thinned. Nora and Ava joined me at a small table tucked into the side of the room where a single lamp made a pool of amber. The band packed, the trumpet player with a face like tired honey. Conversation dissolved into a truer thing—stories about where they'd been, where they'd been trying to get. Nora told a tale about a tour bus that had broken down in New Mexico and a guitar player who refused to apologize for his jokes. Ava spoke of the time she had taken a year away from music and learned how to make bread, how that changed the way her fingers felt about rhythm.
I told them pieces of myself I hadn't intended to share—the work I used to do, the city I had left, the one I had returned to carrying fewer certainties and more ache. The intimacy of late-night talk does something to people; it boils the need to be seen until there is nothing left but asking. We were a soft conspiracy against loneliness.
By the time the lights were dimmed and the remaining patrons had drifted away in clusters of afterthoughts, the three of us were close enough to breathe the same breath. Nora's hand found mine first, an audacious, headstrong touch. It shocked me, in the best way, like an electric current in a room I thought I'd insulated. Ava didn't reach for my hand then, but the way she watched my fingers curl around Nora's suggested a patient plan. There was a hunger in her eyes that was different from Nora's—more considered, more like a plan that had been rehearsed in private.
I left without making plans, because there was a sweetness to not pinning the moment to a time. But they left an address on a napkin that felt both casual and brazen, like a dare. It belonged to a small apartment above a florist two blocks from the club, where the hum of the city kept secrets and the night air smelled like wet asphalt and possibility. I walked home with their names on my tongue and music in my pockets.
ACT 2 — Rising Tension
The first time I saw them again, they were both waiting outside the florist, leaning against the red brick like two halves of a photograph. Nora had thrown on a leather jacket that fit as if made from mischief; Ava wore an oversized sweater that made her look like someone you wanted to wrap around a small, carefully kept life. They stood together as if they'd always been a single thing, two sides of a coin that hadn't yet decided whether to land heads or tails.
"You came," Nora said with unalloyed pleasure. "Good. We're impulsive; we need confirmation that other people are too."
"I had to see if the napkin had been printed for more than decoration," I said. It felt light to be flippant, a thin disguise for the relentless curiosity coiled under my ribs.
We went for a late walk, the city airing itself out in the small hours, lights like punctuation marks. Conversation slipped easily between us—music, literature, the dumb cruelty of friendships that don't survive longer than a shared drink. I learned how both of them navigated intimacy: Nora like someone who collects it and treasures it publicly, Ava like someone who stored it up in small, fierce places and only offered it to those who could see it in the dark.
There were moments, minute and monumental, when proximity turned into something else. In a narrow alley, Ava's hand grazed the small of my back as she stepped around a puddle. The touch was so slight it could have been dismissed—except it wasn't. It felt like an orientation: soft, reassured, and meant.
We found ourselves back at their apartment, as if gravity had been quietly rewritten. The place smelled of lilies and damp books, and everything in it suggested a life that was both considered and improvised. Nora poured tea into three mismatched cups while Ava sat at the edge of the couch and watched me like someone learning to read a face. We talked until the sky turned an uncertain blue and then dark again; the night didn't know whether to end.
Often, in people who flirt with danger, there are near-misses that feel designed to tease fate: a kiss interrupted by a neighbor knocking, a walk broken by the need for a smoke. For us, those interruptions were both real and exquisite. One night, we were on the small fire escape behind the apartment, huddled against a shared blanket when a downpour began, turning the city into a rushing, private world. We stayed outside until we were soaked through but could not bring ourselves to go inside. Nora kissed me then, quick and eager, as if she feared the rain would steal us away. Ava watched from the stairwell, her breath coming in short, measured pulls. She did not look betrayed; she looked as if she had been saved something worth keeping.
These were the scenes that tightened the coil: a hand on a thigh under a communal table, a palm against a neck as a song ended, fingers tangled in hair as the band found a quiet bridge. We were all practitioners of restraint and abandon, sometimes simultaneously. It became clear that the three of us were orbiting one another, not unevenly but in a delicate geometry that might collapse if observed too closely.
We tried to name the arrangement—often by not naming it. Nora refused anything that sounded like a label, making jokes and daring us to be bold. Ava preferred clarity but deferred to tenderness when asked to decide. Me—I oscillated between a wish for simplicity and a fear of losing myself in something that might end like the echo of a final chord.
I had nights when I staggered on my own, wondering if I was intruding on a private thing. I had nights when jealousy snuck in, jealous of the way Nora's hand found Ava's hair with a familiarity that made my chest hollow, or of the way Ava's eyes would soften when Nora sang. But jealousy is a small, private animal; in its more honest moments it asks questions rather than makes accusations. It wanted to know whether there was room for me in their shared spaces, whether they wanted possession or something more generous.
One evening, after a show where the applause felt like a benediction, they invited me upstairs to the little studio where Ava kept a battered upright piano and a tray of whiskey. The evening opened like a slow bloom. Nora slid into a chair across from us, spun on her heel, and watched me with an attention that felt like a promise. I told them a story about a place I'd once visited on the coast, a lighthouse that had scratched my skin with how honest it was. They listened as if I was telling them the shape of a future.
The first overt touch that announced the possibility of a shared encounter wasn't hot and dramatic; it was small and precise. Nora leaned over and kissed the inside of my wrist as if tasting a wine to judge its vintage. I remember the texture of grief in that kiss—the quick reparation of being noticed—and it made something inside me unclench. Ava rested her hand on my knee, patient and deliberate, and the two touches together aligned like hands on a steering wheel: steady, directional.
"We don't hurry our things here," Nora said, half-advice, half-warning. "But we also don't let good things go cold."
We talked—for hours, again—about boundaries and curiosity. It was the right kind of conversation: candid, nervous, earnest. We confessed small histories—times we had hurt people unintentionally, times we had been hurt. The boundaries we set were not walls so much as guidelines for respect. We agreed on safewords and signals, on what consent looked like in the heat of it. The deliberateness of the talk made the later physical relinquishment feel less like surrender and more like a consensus.
Even with agreements in place, the path to intimacy was a threaded thing. There were false starts: a brushing of lips that misaligned, a fumbling that made us laugh like children, a kiss that was interrupted by a sudden sadness from one of us that required holding rather than moving forward. The vulnerability was as much about emotional currency as physical; we were exchanging histories and heartbeats.
The internal conflict in me took different forms. Part of me was frightened of becoming a cliché, another part worried about the practicalities of loving two people who loved each other. But also there was a deeper worry—an ancestral fear that if I gave myself away too quickly I would lose the small voice inside that had been my anchor for years. The two women both read that in me sometimes; Nora teasingly, Ava with a gentler patience. They were not trying to fix me. They wanted me to be whole enough to want them.
Our chemistry simmered in long, halting crescendos. There were nights when the city hummed like a radiator and we lay like tangled instruments, revealing different textures. I learned to listen for the moments when hazard turned into invitation: not every touch was a demand; not every look a contract. These lines blurred, and within the blur I found a freedom I hadn't known I craved.
One slow Tuesday, after a set that felt more exposed than others, Nora proposed we turn an experiment into honesty. She suggested we take a bath together. It was a suggestion equal parts teasing and careful—she wanted to see how we navigated being more physically adjacent than our current orbit allowed.
The bathroom was small, tile cool underfoot. Ava lit a candle and set it between the tub and the sink like an offering. Steam took the corners of the room and softened edges until the three of us looked less like distinct people and more like a single image rendered in watercolor. The water smelled faintly of herbs. Nora sank in first, hips slanted, and grinned at us with the casual audacity of someone who has a theorist's brain for pleasure. Ava followed, fingers lingering as she settled beside Nora. I lowered myself into the bath and felt a heat that seemed to blur where one body ended and another began.
The first kisses there were exploratory: lips tasting like steam and soap, mouths mapping curiosity. Nora's hands found the nape of my neck with a possessive ease, while Ava's fingers teased along the line of my shoulder like someone reading braille. It felt private and public all at once. We spoke little, because we didn't need to. The candlelight made everything more honest. When hands moved lower, so did the stakes—electric, careful, reverent.
There were moments in that bath that felt like a series of small miracles. I remember the slickness of skin under my palm, the soft yielding of it, the music that came from their breaths. Nora's laughter—which could be irreverent—settled into a softer frequency when she kissed me, the sound of someone undressing a careful armor. Ava's eyes closed more often than not, as if to better taste the now. When they moved together, it felt less like sharing me and more like building something that required all three of us. The first time Nora's lips met Ava's in earnest, the sound in the room changed—like the trumpet player finding a long, true note.
We paused and asked each other questions mid-movement: Does this feel good? Are you sure? We negotiated the small details as we went—who liked which kind of attention, how certain touches made them feel. The care we took ensured that consent didn't feel like a checkbox but like a living thing we tended.
There were interruptions even then: a neighbor pounding on the ceiling in complaint, a sudden memory of someone else's voice that caused one of us to still. Yet each interruption only tightened the need—like a string drawn taut and waiting for pluck.
The intimacy was layered. Sometimes it was about vocal softness and whispered admissions. Other times it was about the brutal exactness of wanting: mouths that took and gave, hands that remembered where to go. Our bodies navigated each other like musicians finding harmony without a conductor. Hands learned what chords elicited which reactions. The rhythm evolved, slow and then faster, like a song building into a bridge.
As the weeks unfurled, there was a relentless curiosity between us that refused the ease of routine. We discovered particularities: Nora preferring the boldness of skin kissed with the hint of salt from a tear, Ava liking the quiet of a palm cupped at the small of her back. I discovered a new map of sensation across people I thought I knew but had only ever observed from a polite distance.
And still, there were near-misses. Nights when one of them pulled away to cry into the pillow about an old grief, or evenings when I couldn't sleep and left the apartment because my own ghosts needed air. Those moments taught me something that no article or book had: desire without compassion is a bell without a clapper—loud, but useless in its insistence. We learned to be patient with each other's sudden absences, to return and not demand an explanation.
We built a language of small signals: a touch behind the ear when we wanted softness, a thumb on the jaw when we wanted intensity. We learned to ask the kinds of questions that matter when people are entwined: "Are you okay? Do you want more? Do you want less?"
The chemistry was as much social as sexual. It changed how I walked through the world—lighter, more alert. I found myself noticing details again: how sunlight fell on the piano at noon, how the city smelled after rain, the angle of someone's smile when they were trying not to laugh. I noticed, too, the protective panic that sometimes rose in me—the selfish terror of wanting more and fearing it would mean less for someone else.
ACT 3 — The Climax & Resolution
The evening the curtains finally lifted all the way for me was not cinematic in the way you imagine: there was no opera-sized crescendo, no thunderclap revelation. It happened on a rain-softened Friday in their apartment, a week after I'd said something foolish and needy and had been met with nothing more than a look that said we would not perform anxiety for each other. They had come home from a gig, wet and luminous. The city outside sounded wrapped in plastic—muffled, intimate.
We ate takeout at the kitchen table and talked about small, practical things: the condition of a microphone, whether Ava would rehearse a new arrangement. The room hummed with the afterglow of music. Nora stood, music and heat in her bones, and began to dance without music—an improvisation of body and memory. Ava watched her, and I watched both of them, feeling like a man who'd been introduced to the language of hunger and finally understood every subtle tense.
Nora's dance pulled us closer by degrees. She moved through the apartment like someone who knew all its secret corners, stopping to trail a hand along a bookshelf, to tap the rim of a glass. She reached me and ran her fingers along my jaw, slow, experimental. "Don't think too much tonight," she whispered. "Think with your skin."
There was something almost sacred in the way she said it, the imperative of reckless tenderness. Ava came from the couch and slid her hands around my waist, her body folding into mine with a familiarity that made my breath hitch. I became acutely aware of the differences between them: Nora's touch was claiming and immediate; Ava's was steady and filled with a warmth that made surrender feel safe.
We moved to the bedroom as if gravity had shifted. The city outside dissolved into rain against windows. The bed was a small island of white sheets and the scent of lavender. Nora peeled off her jacket and then her shirt with the operational ease of someone used to undressing scenes. Ava's sweater followed in a soft exhale of wool. I watched, fascinated by the degrees of exposure: Nora's skin flushed like someone standing near heat, Ava's pale and freckled where the light fell.
What happened next was not a single act but an orchestration. It began where we've always begun—kissing—but it deepened into a complex choreography of mouths and hands. Nora kissed me with the urgency of someone correcting a long-ignored wrong; Ava kissed me as if imprinting a memory she wanted to keep forever. They kissed each other the way couples do who have practiced tenderness in private hours: patient, explorative, aware.
Our clothes came off in a series of small, unceremonious gestures—buttons unfastened, fabric sliding like small apologies. The first time we were all skin to skin was when I slipped between Nora and Ava on the bed, my back against pillows, their bodies on either side of me. The sensation was disorienting and precise: two temperatures at once, two rhythms to which my body had to learn to answer.
Nora took charge with a fearless hand—her palm moving like a cartographer's compass, mapping new coastlines across my ribs and chest. Her mouth found mine with a possessive rhythm, one that made me feel both stolen and holy. Ava's hands, on the other hand, navigated with the slow confidence of someone writing something carefully. She traced the line of my collarbone with her fingertips as if reading a poem she wanted to learn by heart.
We began with mouths and hands, lips and tongues that tasted of wine and candlewax. Nora's tongue pressed into mine as if wanting to measure depth, Ava's mouth was softer, learning the contours. When Nora's hand slipped down my chest and cupped me, it felt like being recognized. Ava trailed kisses along my neck—small, reverent—and then, teasingly, sank lower. The first touch of her lips across my sternum made the bed seams slice into my skin; it was both erotic and intimate, less a claim than a question that deserved an answer.
Bodies shifted. Nora rose and hovered above me in a way that invited but did not dictate. Ava moved between us like a bridge, aligning us in a way that felt not congested but expansive. I reached for both of them, discovering the differences in their responses: Nora rewarded boldness with an open, immediate fervor; Ava favored gentleness and detail.
Our rhythm became a conversation without words. When Nora's hands traveled south with a practiced assurance, Ava's fingers occupied my face with a softness that kept me anchored. It was as if we were learning a new grammar together: pauses were questions, gasps were declarations, the placement of a palm could change a meaning entirely.
There was a moment—an hour into the night—when Nora and Ava kissed directly, long and exploratory. Their lips moved like two instruments finally tuned to each other. Watching them, my body responded with a heat that felt like a migration: the center of my desire moved from wanting to possess to wanting to witness and be part of something larger. When Nora's hands returned to me, I felt included in a circle rather than caught in a tug-of-war.
Ava took my hand and guided it between them, instructing gently where to touch, what to do. "Slow," she murmured. "Stay with me."
I listened. I learned how to make them both come without losing myself in either, how to answer Nora's swift, sharp demands and Ava's slow, meticulous invitations. We explored multiple configurations—the three of us entwined, two of us joining the third, moments when each of us focused entirely on the other, giving and receiving in equal measure. The eroticism wasn't merely carnal; it was an intimate geometry that changed with every touch.
There were sounds I will never forget: Nora's breath coming out in quick, impatient bursts, Ava's low moans like a hymn, the rustle of sheets. There was the scent of their hair mixed with lavender and the metallic tang of the wine we had shared earlier. My skin registered the nearly invisible differences—the sharper edges of Nora's nails, the warmth of Ava's mouth, the way their breasts fit differently against my chest.
We moved through stages: first, a slow, teasing exploration; then, a gathering momentum where touches became declarations; finally, a rush where movement and intensity synchronized into a near-perfect chord. It was not purely action but a sequence of emotional crescendos and soft decrescendos. When one of us was close, the other two adjusted, angling attention like musicians tuning by ear.
At some point, Nora slid between my legs and took me into her mouth, and the sensation of being attended to like that—skillful, urgent, unabashed—swept through me. Ava pressed her thighs against mine and leaned in, whispering my name like punctuation. I reached down, one hand in Nora's hair, the other on Ava's hip, a pair of anchors keeping me centered in the center of the storm.
The way Nora used her mouth was not purely physical; it was a language of possession and prayer. Ava's hands and lips translated that language into a layout of tenderness that made every part of me feel noticed. They alternated—one focusing, then the other—until sensation rose into something like pain-turned-pleasure, an ache that was both exquisite and overwhelming.
There were quieter moments, too: a pause where all three of us lay entwined and simply listened to the rain, or where I traced a freckle on Ava's shoulder and she traced a scar on my wrist. These were the places where emotion anchored the lust. Desire was never only a thing of heat; it was also a soft responsibility we accepted toward each other.
And then there was the fall—a release that was loud and intimate and came in waves. It wasn't the end so much as a rearrangement; afterwards, we reoriented ourselves like people emerging from deep water. We lay on our sides, bodies like punctuation marks, breathing in the same rhythm. Nora draped an arm over both of us and murmured something that was part joke, part impossible truth: "We are inconveniently perfect."
We spent the aftermath in stitches of conversation and silence. We made coffee in a lazy ritual, trading small observations—how the light hit the curtain like a chord, how the city felt like a distant sea. Our talk circled around practicalities: how we'd manage the day, the performances, when we'd see each other again. Love-talk was careful; we were all aware of the delicate work we were making of this new arrangement.
In the days that followed, nothing suddenly became simple. We navigated careers and errands and the way the world insisted on continuing its business even as ours changed. But there was a new ease in the way we touched: more accustomed, more attuned. We had learned a delicate truth: that the most sustaining eroticism is not only about the moment of contact but about the tender tending afterwards.
We were not naive. Three people entangled carried the risk of hurt, of becoming too much or not enough. We tried, in small, imperfect ways, to practice generosity. When jealousy bubbled up, we named it and brought it to the table. When loneliness slipped in, we offered small comforts: a dish of soup, a hand to hold through an anxious night. In this, desire and care braided together.
There were choices to be made, practicalities that would decide how sustainable we might be: touring schedules, city apartments, the slow administrative tedium of real life. We made no grand promises that could not be kept. Instead, we made small vows each day—about honesty, about listening, about whether a dalliance elsewhere was something we'd accept or not. Those vows felt more binding than any fireworks of rhetoric.
A month later, on a cool afternoon, we took the train to the coast and walked along a stretch of cliff where the wind suggested clarity. Standing there, watching the ocean's endless indifferent appetite, I felt a quiet satisfaction: what we had made was not perfect—few human things are—but it was ours, stitched together with consent and curiosity and a slow respect.
At the cliff's edge, Nora took my hand, and Ava's fingers threaded through ours like an answer to a question I'd never been entirely brave enough to ask. I looked at them—the way their faces caught the light, the lines around Nora's mouth when she smiled, the way Ava's brow furrowed in concentration when she considered a wave—and realized that the thing I feared losing was not an ownership of them but an ownership of myself. Here, in the salt wind, I had found that I could want without erasing; I could hold without binding.
We returned to the city with sand in our shoes and a new language of ordinary things: grocery runs, late-night rehearsals, shared playlists. The sex remained exquisite and inventive, but it was now threaded through errands and quiet mornings—mundane and sacred in equal measure. What I had feared—jealousy turning into bitterness, desire overrunning kindness—rarely upended us, because we had learned to bring small grievances into the light before they multiplied into resentments.
Ultimately, the story didn't end with some tidy resolution. It continued in the way lives do: imperfect, committed to re-examination, learning to hold contradictions without smothering them. We made mistakes—moments where one of us disappeared into old habits—and then repaired them with unexpected, sometimes clumsy compassion. We learned the often-overlooked eroticism of forgiveness: a hand smoothed over the back in apology, an embrace that said you are still wanted.
There were nights when one of us was absent—on tour or tending to family—and the absence itself became a kind of yearning that seasoned our reunions. Each conversation, each touch became a place where we practiced being present: not because it was always easy, but because we chose to make it so.
The last scene I will carry, the one that lingers like the last note of a song, happened on a winter night when the club was slow and the city felt small and tender. We sat together in the same corner table where we'd first confessed small truths, joined by the familiar warmth that had grown between us. Nora reached across and took my hand for no reason at all. Ava leaned her head on my shoulder, exhaling a long, contented breath. The band started a slow, melancholic tune and the notes wrapped around us like a blanket. For a long time we sat in that quiet, letting the music fill the spaces between words.
I thought then—not for the first time—that desire is a strange and generous instrument. It can wound and it can heal. It can ask for everything and reward you with something you didn't know you needed: the permission to be seen, the courage to ask, the room to change. In the amber light of the club, with the saxophone moaning like an old friend, I felt both very small and enormous. I felt sure, in a way I hadn't in years, that whatever happened next would not flatten us but make new shapes out of our lives.
And so we kept playing, the three of us—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in dissonance—learning how to listen. Music taught us how to talk with touch, how to hold silence and make it tender. In the end, what mattered wasn't that we'd found a perfect formula, but that we'd shown up for the music. We had learned to play together, and in that learning there was a rare and abiding pleasure.