Page 55 of Watch Me

I stay backstage, stretch, and do a few simple walkthroughs of my number while simultaneously visualizing every step of the numbers on stage as the familiar music pulses throughout the club.

My life has had so many ups and downs in the past year, but this show is my triumph. When I found out that I had not passed my audition for the Regency Ballet Company, the news was a destabilizing punch to the gut. Training for that audition had been my life for months. No matter how late I worked at the Paradise Lounge, I still woke up at the crack of dawn every day to get to my early morning ballet classes and to do my strength training exercises in the gym. I counted every calorie, repeatedly broke toes, and spent my free time in the physiotherapist’s office rehabilitating three different injuries.

However, when David accepted my proposal to trial our show, he gave me license to explore my own unique brand of dance, and the results show that my instincts were spot-on. Our show gets acclaimed reviews and draws crowds of all kinds of people out—to a sex club, of all places. I was right about how to put on a good show, and now I hope that I am right about my new number, too. That people are ready to see something slower, heavier, and even a little sad.

When Rachel, Andre, and Tomas crowd backstage to the sound of applause on the other side of the curtain, I position myself in the wings, take a deep breath, and then step forward onto the stage en pointe with the first strains of the music.

Dancing at the Paradise Lounge, or here in our show, is usually a specific style for me—contemporary, modern, a little bit rock, a lot of strip tease. I’ve never brought my ballet experience to the stage like this, but as I stretch up onto my toes and tip forward into a deep arabesque the expression feels pure—taut like a strung bow, but elegant, a perfect representation of how I’ve felt stepping into love. The audience is silent, and the bright light blinds me to the darkness around the stage. I could be utterly alone as I melt into the adagio sequence of my movements with raw and vivid honesty, yet I know a sea of eyes surrounds me. I am seen and held, and in this moment, I speak for all of us who have loved and mourned its loss.

Stripping and, as I recently learned, exhibitionism is more than aphrodisiac for me. It’s a cleansing, a vulnerability that verges on ritual and leaves me feeling open, breathless, and hopeful, like a fire has burned off all of life’s rough, ugly edges—self-doubt and recrimination, guilt and shame. But dancing does the same thing. A deeply expressive movement leaves me feeling like I’ve bared it all, and when I slide down onto the stage at the end of my song, that’s exactly the feeling I have. Like my wounds have breathed, like I am lighter.

I’m breathless as I look out to the crowd, suddenly visible to me at this angle as the spotlight dims—a sea of transported faces, suspended looks of awe that tell me they felt what I wanted them to feel, and then right in front of me a sight so shocking I almost faint on the spot.

It’s Nick, sitting front and center, clapping and looking right at me. Even though we were unknowingly intimate just a few days ago, seeing his face and knowing it’s him feels like a reunion after all these months. The tension, the hope, the despair I’ve felt every day as I check my phone, wondering if he would reach out, evaporates into relief. He’s here. He came for me.

I’m supposed to stand up, run off stage, and let Rachel come out for her solo piece, but I can’t. I can’t let Nick out of my sight. My need for him feels so great I’d just as soon grab onto him and refuse to let go, even if he pushed me away. Even if he told me he hated me.

But he looks at me the same way. A desperate kind of relief in his eyes. When I jump off the stage and throw my arms around his neck, he pulls me in and wraps me up with all his strength, and I breathe in his incredible smell. How could I not have noticed this smell the other night? On some level, I must have. It’s so distinctive and delicious, and my knees get weak from just smelling it.

“Hi, Bean,” he murmurs in my ear. “Can we go somewhere to talk?”

I will go anywhere with him, just as long as I don’t have to let go. I don’t care that all my belongings are backstage. I don’t care that I’m in pointe shoes.

“Yes,” I whisper. “Can we go home?”

And as if he doesn’t want to let me go either, he takes my hand, leads me a few steps forward until he sees that I am skipping in my inflexible slippers, and then he swoops a hand under my knees and lifts me up, carrying me all the way through the foyer and out the door.

NICK

FOUR MONTHS LATER

The “after-wedding,” as David termed it, has some surprising similarities to today’s formal event. Zoë is whisked off by her friend Rachel, and once again, I’m not allowed to see her until the ceremony begins. David has set up an altar in the club and stands at it in a latex priest’s outfit, reviewing his notes and looking very serious. Even the music is the same, the sound technician announcing Zoë's imminent arrival by cranking up the song “Here Comes the Bride.”

But she’s more than a bride this time, because, after the ceremony this afternoon with our families and all our friends, she’s now my wife, and my heart swells ten sizes every time I think of it.

Rachel steps out of the stage wings first, stepping carefully down the stairs to the main floor in skyscraper-high pink heels and a matching latex pink dress that barely covers her ass. She’s followed by Andre and Tomas, dressed in black pants with pink straps across their bare chests to match Rachel’s dress. But when Zoë steps out, my breath catches all over again, just like it did this afternoon when she walked down the church aisle in a layered white gown.

This time, she’s wearing the same tiny latex dress as Rachel but in white, her pert nipples and perfect curves completely visible through the semi-transparent fabric, and—just like I am every time I see her, in any kind of outfit—I’m completely blown away by how beautiful she is, this incredible woman who has me besotted in every possible way.

Rachel, Andre, and Tomas take their spots on either side of the altar while a small crowd of staff and regulars from the club watch Zoë as she walks down the carpet, her steps graceful and weightless, even in her six-inch heels, a smile curving her full lips. Her eyes are locked on mine, just like mine are locked on hers. In any room and in any crowd, we can always find each other like this. We can always tune out the entire world and be the only ones in it. At the end of the day, she’s the human I need the most, and I know I’m hers.

Today’s ceremony, the official one, was a union of our souls. I couldn’t have been more sincere when I uttered the promise “’til death do us part.” Claiming Zoë in front of everyone we know, putting the ring on her finger that would mark her as mine, and above all, knowing that my son, as accepting as he could be of this union, was sitting in the front row, giving us a blessing of sorts, meant everything.

This ceremony, in the club, is a union of our lives. Now, as a part owner, the club has become as much my baby as it is David’s, and working with my best friend has ended up being more harmonious than I would have guessed. David and I have the same vision and goals. And this club launched Zoë's career. On top of running the show here three times a week, she’s joined a modern dance company and is choreographing a performance for a local arts festival.

We don’t come to the club as patrons as much as we would like, with our busy schedules, but this club has still been a safe place for us to explore our proclivities and perversions—mostly in the viewing room, where I’ve discovered that I can enjoy being an exhibitionist as much as I usually enjoy being a voyeur.

In fact, that’s where we’re headed now as David wraps up his priestly duties, declaring us man and wife as officiously as he can before announcing, “Now please join us, friends, as we witness the consummation of this marriage.”

A cheer goes up from the crowd, and I take Zoë's hand and lead her through the door to the on-premise area of the club.

We’re the first ones in, but I know that behind us, the staff is unlocking the door and taking down the sign that says “Closed for private event” and that soon crowds will flock into the club as usual for a Saturday night. I lead my wife through the large room, right to the back, where the two viewing rooms are located, and hold the door open and let her walk in front of me into the largest one.

She’s stunning in her latex dress, her long blonde hair flowing down her back in long ringlets, her tanned legs looking a mile long in her white stripper heels. I walk up behind her, pressing my body against hers and flattening my palm against the latex-smooth plane of her stomach, my cock already getting hard in anticipation of fucking her here in front of an audience.

It took so much for us to get here. Wasted months of guilt and avoidance when I tried to fight this thing between us that could never be denied, dealing not only with Tate’s reaction to our relationship, but all kinds of people who couldn’t get over our age difference and her past relationship with my son. The night I went back to the Ball & Chain to watch her performance, every construct I’d built to keep us apart crumbled the moment she fell into my arms. After six months of trying to move on, we didn’t get out of bed for twenty-four hours, submerged in a timeless fever dream of sex, heartfelt confession, sleeping, eating, and starting it all over again. David drove her purse over the next day. A couple of days after that, he and I moved all of her things from his house back to mine. When I proposed a week later, Zoë was skeptical, but I told her the truth. “I don’t have to wait and see how I feel about spending eternity with you,” I told her. “I already know.”

Now, as I run a hand down over the front of her dress, then up under the hem, sliding my fingers between her silken folds, already wet with anticipation, I’m reminded of how certain I’ve always been about her, since the very first time I touched her like this, back on that first night in the Paradise Lounge. She’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met. She’s everything.

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