Page 48 of Open Road

“Word travels everywhere.” She comes around the bar. “Come on.”

We walk it. The fire door at the back sticks in humidity, and the panic hardware needs servicing, two months past due. I make a note. The side exit is solid. I check the deadbolt on the dressing room. Good. She shows me the phone tree—Dani calls me, I call Creed, and the girls go out the fire exit. Two blocks north, there’s a nail salon, and the owner knows to open the back door without asking why.

“Anyone gives you trouble…” I tell her, “… this club goes dark. I don’t care what’s booked.”

She nods once. “I’ll brief them at five.” A beat. “They’ll listen.”

“They’ll listen to whoever Nova tells them to listen to.”

It comes out flat. A simple observation with no weight on it. Fact of the place.

Dani’s expression does the small, controlled thing it does when she’s filed something she’s choosing not to address. She turns back toward the bar. “Nova’s on at eight.”

“I know.”

The knowing is not something I decided to have.

Nova comes in at six thirty, and the room is already filling up. Early crowd at the small tables, the bartender running the first tickets, the stage lit. I’m at the bar with the week’s booking sheet and a water. A perfectly reasonable place to be. I manage this building, and reviewing the week’s bookings is exactly the sort of thing I should be doing.

She comes through the staff door in jeans and a jacket, bag over one shoulder, her eyes moving across the room the way she moves through everything, efficient with no performance. She finds Dani at the register, and they talk for thirty seconds. Dani says something, Nova nods, and she doesn’t look toward the bar.

She goes back through the staff door.

The booking sheet has not advanced in twenty minutes.

She comes out for the warm-up at seven with room half full. A warm-up set is different from the late set, less performance, more maintenance, the body running through its range before the weight of the evening comes down. The music is low, something with a deep register, the kind of track the room holds better before it’s packed. She moves the way she does everything, without waste or excess and with nothing decorative on it.

I watch her.

She knows.

Nova doesn’t make a production of knowing, though. She turns mid-movement, carried by the flow of the set, and looks across the room toward the bar. Toward me. It’s only a glance, but there’s nothing confrontational in it and no performance either. The look of a woman who has run an accurate inventory of a room and is reporting back what she found.

A man at the bar who has been there for forty-five minutes over a booking sheet he stopped reading.

Her eyes hold mine.

A beat.

Two.

Then she turns back to her set.

I put down the water.

Nova comes off stage at seven fifteen and disappears into the back.

The back hallway is not somewhere I need to be. The bar is where I’ve been for forty-five minutes, so there’s no reason to move.

She comes out of the dressing room at seven thirty in the jacket and jeans she arrived in, bag over her shoulder, and stops when she sees me at the end of the corridor. “Still here,” she says.

“Yes.”

She looks at me the way she looks at everything, taking information in, returning very little of it, running something behind those dark eyes, and not deciding whether to answer but how much of the answer to give.

Nova doesn’t say anything. She simply reaches out and places her hand in mine. There’s no explanation and no attempt to frame the gesture as anything more than it is. Her hand is warm, her grip light as she leaves it there between us, not holding on, not pulling away. It feels like a question asked without words, and she waits for my answer.

What I do is close my hand around hers. “Compound is eleven minutes,” I say.