He had been drinking, and maybe that was part of it. He would get to go home with her tonight, and maybe that was part of it. All these other people, they would just gather up front, sit at the tables closest to the stage. They would clap and laugh at her jokes.

He stayed in the back, watching. Wishing for the time to go by quicker. Wanting the time to just stop as she played. He watched her fingers move, the way she closed her eyes, how she slipped her feet out of her shoes and onto the bottom rung of the stool. How she placed the ball of her foot on the floor for balance.

They watched, all of them watched, together, as this mass grew in him. This wanting and hunger and he already knew how her thighs felt out of those blue jeans, of how right above her left hip was a mole, of how she smelled faintly of peppermint and sometimes cinnamon and sometimes, if he smiled just right, fresh cookie dough.

He woke one day, he awoke and she was by the window looking out into the backyard, just a thin tshirt on, and she was playing her violin. She was working on a new song and the light came in, through that thin worn cotton, around her waist, creating a halo in her dark hair.

She plays and they clap and he wants to rush the stage, wants to rush and grab her and inhale her so deeply that she is in his blood, she is his blood, that music she creates and the rhythms and he sits, watches, waits until he can take her home.