Nonward Bound - Part One
Age Gap Erotica series, 1990s Grunge Era Setting, Consenting Adults
He said, Hold still. And I did. That was the part I couldn’t explain to anyone afterward, the part that kept surfacing for months in motel bathrooms and green rooms and the back of the van while everyone else was sleeping.
I remember his hands. I remember the specific instructions, the quiet sequential logic of them, the way he never raised his voice because he didn’t have to. But the thing I kept coming back to was how fast I went still. How easily twenty-one years of thrashing stopped the moment a sixty-three-year-old man with a conductor’s posture told me to stay where I was.
But that was later. The first thing was the van.
•
The heater only worked on the driver’s side, so by the time we hit the Oregon border Trix had climbed into the back and wrapped herself in the sleeping bag we kept for emergencies. She looked like a bald caterpillar. Skid was driving because Skid was always driving, hunched forward with both hands on the wheel, squinting through a windshield smeared with bug guts and rain. Danny was asleep with his head against the window and his mouth open. I sat shotgun, bare feet on the dash, picking at a callus on my ring finger and watching the firs blur past in the dark.
We were three weeks into a tour that our manager, a twenty-six-year-old named Phil who also managed a dog grooming service, had booked through clubs and coffeehouses down the I-5 corridor. Nonward. Grunge-punk, if you needed a label. Four kids from Bremerton who’d pressed eight hundred copies of an album called Trespass and sold maybe half. The rest lived in a cardboard box under Phil’s desk. We told ourselves we were building something. Mostly we were burning gas and sleeping in parking lots and playing to rooms where the bartender outnumbered the audience on slow nights.
I was twenty-one. I thought I knew things.
•
The show that night was at a place called The Lamp in Eugene. Wood-paneled walls, a stage barely big enough for the four of us, Christmas lights strung across the ceiling year-round. Capacity maybe a hundred. We drew about sixty, which felt like a stadium.
I remember the set was good. Not tight. Good. Trix broke a string on “Blacklung” and just played through it, one string flapping, grinning like it was the funniest thing that had ever happened to her. Danny and I locked in on the bridge of “Permit” the way we sometimes could, this jagged harmony that only worked when neither of us was thinking about it. Skid kept the beat like a metronome with anger issues. I screamed myself raw. Usual Tuesday.
Afterward I was at the bar sweating through my shirt, drinking a beer that tasted like the tap lines hadn’t been cleaned since the Reagan administration. Trix was across the room talking to two girls with matching lip rings. Danny was outside smoking with someone. Skid had found the venue’s cat and was sitting on the floor petting it with total concentration, which was the most Skid thing imaginable.
•
I almost didn’t notice the man at the end of the bar.
He was sitting very still, which is what caught me. Everyone else in that room was moving, fidgeting, performing something for someone. He was just there. Tall, even seated. Silver hair, thick, swept back from a broad forehead. A dark jacket that fit him properly. Tailored, charcoal wool, and a white shirt underneath with the collar open one button. He was drinking what looked like whisky, neat, and reading a small book. In a bar. After a punk show. Reading.
He was sixty if he was a day. Maybe older. The lines around his eyes were deep, architectural. Large hands. A simple watch on his left wrist, no rings. There was something about the set of his shoulders that I registered before I had language for it: authority that didn’t need volume. He sat the way a man sits when he’s spent forty years telling rooms full of people what to do and they’ve done it.
I want to say I walked over because I was curious. That’s the generous version. The truth is I’d done two lines in the bathroom before the set and I was in that post-show state where everything feels like an invitation and I had the particular restlessness of a twenty-one-year-old who’d just screamed for forty-five minutes and needed somewhere to put the energy that was left. Danny was the obvious outlet. Danny was always the obvious outlet. I didn’t want obvious.
I took my beer and sat on the stool next to him. Close enough that my knee almost grazed his thigh. He didn’t look up.
“You’re reading,” I said. “In a bar.”
“Yes.”
“We just played a show.”
“I know. I was here.” He turned a page. His fingers were long, precise. He handled the book the way I imagined he handled everything: deliberately, with the kind of attention that made you aware of your own hands and how clumsy they were by comparison.
“And?”
He looked at me then. Gray eyes, steady. Appraising. Like I was a phrase in a score he was deciding how to interpret.
“Your tempo is inconsistent,” he said. “The second song. You rush the verse and then overcorrect into the chorus. Your drummer tries to follow you and can’t, because you’re not following yourself.”
I laughed. It came out louder than I meant. “Are you a fucking music critic?”
“I’m a conductor.”
“Like a train?”
“Like an orchestra.” He closed the book, one finger holding his place. “Leidulf Dahlmann. I’m guest-conducting a concert series at the university this week. Schubert and Sibelius. My hotel is depressing, so I walked until I found noise.” He glanced around the room. “This qualified.”
“Riley Quinn,” I said. “Rye. I’m the one with the inconsistent tempo.”
“I noticed.”
His voice did something to me. I need to be precise about this because it’s the part that matters. It was controlled. Every word arrived at the speed he intended, with exactly the weight he’d assigned it. Talking to him was like being in a room where someone had removed all the furniture so you couldn’t pretend you were there for any reason other than the one you were actually there for.
“Schubert,” I said. My voice had dropped half a register and I didn’t remember deciding that. “Isn’t he the boring one?”
“He died at thirty-one and left behind more than a thousand compositions. You might reconsider.”
“I’m twenty-one. I’m supposed to think classical music is boring.”
“You’re twenty-one.” Something shifted in his face. A recalibration. His eyes moved across mine the way you’d read a line of music: left to right, taking in the whole phrase before deciding on the tempo. “And you’re sitting here talking to a sixty-three-year-old man about Schubert instead of celebrating with your friends.”
“They’re not celebrating. They’re getting high and flirting with strangers.”
“And what are you doing?”
I took a sip of my beer to buy a few seconds. What I was doing was sitting close enough to a man older than my father to feel the warmth off his arm through his sleeve. What I was doing was cataloging details I had no business cataloging: the tendons in his wrists, the even spacing of his shirt buttons, the single silver hair that had fallen across his forehead that I wanted to push back with my thumb. What I was doing was getting wet in a dive bar in Eugene, Oregon, because a stranger had told me my tempo was wrong.
“Buying you a drink,” I said. “What are you having?”
“You don’t need to buy me a drink.”
“I didn’t say need.”
He studied me. I let him. I’m not sure I could have looked away if I’d tried, because something in that gaze had a weight to it, an expectation, and meeting it felt like the first test I’d taken in years where the grade actually mattered.
Then he raised one finger to the bartender. “Laphroaig. Neat. And whatever she’s drinking.”
“I can buy my own drinks.”
“I’m certain you can. But you offered and I declined, which means the next round is mine. Those are the rules.”
“Whose rules?”
“Mine.”
There it was. The word sat between us on the bar like a coin he’d placed down precisely. Mine. Stated. The way you’d state a time signature at the top of a score. This is how it goes. You’re welcome to play or you’re welcome to leave, but this is how it goes.
I stayed.
•
The conversation lasted about an hour. Maybe more. I lost track, which never happened to me. I was the kind of person who always knew what time it was, how many drinks I’d had, where the exits were. Some part of my brain was always running perimeter. Sitting next to Leidulf, that part went quiet.
He asked me how long I’d been playing guitar, how I’d learned. By ear, I told him. Badly, then slightly less badly.
“Who taught you?”
“No one. Tapes. Watching people.”
“So you taught yourself.”
“If you want to call it that.”
“I’d call it something else.” He took a measured sip of his whisky. “I’d call it developing habits with no one to correct them. Which is why your left hand is doing too much work and your rhythm guitar sounds like it’s fighting the song instead of carrying it.”
Every correction landed in my body before my brain caught up. A flush that started at the base of my throat and spread downward. Something I didn’t have a name for, adjacent to anger but warmer, lower. He kept going, clinical, specific, and I kept sitting there taking it, and at some point I realized my lips were parted and I was leaning toward him.
He noticed. Of course he noticed. He noticed everything. His eyes dropped to my mouth for exactly one second, then returned to my eyes, and that one second felt like a hand pressed flat against my sternum.
He asked about the harmonic progression in “Permit.” Danny’s riff originally, but I’d modified it, bent the bridge into a minor key resolution that shouldn’t have worked. When I explained this, something happened to Leidulf’s face that I would later learn to recognize as genuine interest. Minimal. A slight narrowing of focus.
“That’s the best part of your set,” he said. “You should know that, so you can protect it.”
Protect it. The word choice sat with me. Like music was something that could be damaged by carelessness. Like I was someone who might be careless without the right guidance. I pressed my thighs together under the bar and kept my face neutral.
Trix drifted by at one point, took one look at the two of us, raised her eyebrows, and drifted away. Danny stumbled through looking for a lighter and didn’t register what he was seeing. Skid was still with the cat.
I ordered another beer. He stayed on the Laphroaig, one glass, no refill. At some point my knee pressed against his thigh under the bar. Solid. Warm through the wool. He didn’t move toward the contact. He didn’t move away. He just let it exist, which was worse than either, because it meant he’d chosen. He was aware of the pressure of my knee against his leg and he had decided it could stay.
“Do you do this a lot?” I asked. “Sit in dive bars and critique local bands?”
“No.”
“Then why tonight?”
He turned the glass slowly on the bar. A quarter rotation. Precise. “Because you’re interesting and you don’t know it yet. That’s a specific kind of interesting that doesn’t last. I’m paying attention to it while it’s here.”
Something about the way he said paying attention went through me like a thumb drawn down the center of a guitar string. Low and resonant and still vibrating after he’d already moved on to the next sentence.
“You’re very direct,” I said.
“I’m sixty-three. I don’t have time to circle.”
“What would circling look like?”
“What everyone else in this room is doing. Suggesting. Hoping the other person decodes the signal.” He met my eyes. “I find that tiresome. Do you?”
“Yeah,” I said. My throat was dry. “Yeah, I do.”
“Good.”
He let the word sit. The bar noise filled the space around us: someone’s bad music on the jukebox, laughter from the pool table, a glass breaking somewhere. None of it touched whatever this was. We were inside something, him and me. A silence he’d built with that single word, the same way I imagined he’d build silence in a concert hall. A held breath before the downbeat.
“I’m at the Excelsior,” he said. “Room 412. I’ll be awake for another two hours. If you want to continue this somewhere quieter, you’re welcome. If you’d rather rejoin your friends, then I’ve enjoyed this, and I hope your tour goes well.”
He said it the way he’d say measure thirty-two, letter B. A location, a choice, a clean exit in case you needed one.
I said something. I don’t remember what. Something deflecting, probably, because I was twenty-one and hadn’t yet learned to receive a clear statement without throwing something back at it. He put money on the bar, exact change and a precise twenty percent, and stood. He was taller than I’d expected. He buttoned his jacket with one hand. He said good night and he left, and I watched him walk out with the posture of a man who had probably never slouched in his life, and as the door closed behind him I realized I was gripping the edge of the bar hard enough to leave marks.
•
Trix found me twenty minutes later. I was on my third beer, still staring at the door.
“So,” she said. “Grandpa.”
“Shut up.”
“Rye. Come on. I’m not judging. He’s hot in that specific way that makes you feel like you’re in trouble even when you haven’t done anything.” She leaned on the bar and signaled for a drink. “Like a headmaster. In a movie you’d pretend you weren’t watching.”
“He’s a conductor. Classical. Guest-conducting at the university.”
“So he’s smart-hot. That’s worse.” She studied my face. “You’re going, aren’t you.”
“Going where?”
“Wherever he told you to go. Don’t bullshit me, Rye. I’ve known you since tenth grade. I know what your face does.”
I peeled the label off my bottle. One long strip, damp, curling. “He said I rush the bridge in ‘Vow.’”
“You do rush the bridge in ‘Vow.’”
“That’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?”
I wanted to explain it but I didn’t have the words. That a man I’d known for an hour had listened to me with more precision than Danny had in two years of sharing a stage and a sleeping bag. That every time he told me what I was doing wrong, the criticism slid down through my chest and settled somewhere low and warm and stayed there. That when he’d said you’re welcome it had sounded like two things at once. Permission and limit. An open door with a frame you had to fit through.
“He’s sixty-three, Trix.”
“And?”
“And I’m twenty-one.”
“And?”
“That’s a lot of gap.”
“Babe. You fucked Danny in a Denny’s bathroom in Tacoma. Your standards are not what’s scaring you right now.”
She was right. She was always right when it came to me and men and the distance between what I said I wanted and what I actually wanted. What scared me wasn’t the age, or the fact that I’d met him an hour ago, or that he was a stranger in a city I’d leave tomorrow. What scared me was that Leidulf Dahlmann had looked at me like something specific, and I had the terrible suspicion that he was the first person who’d ever been right about what he saw.
•
The Excelsior was six blocks from the venue. I know because I walked there and I counted.
It was raining. That fine Oregon mist that doesn’t feel like rain until you realize your hair is soaked. I was still in my show clothes: ripped jeans, a Sleater-Kinney shirt with the collar cut out, boots I’d had since junior year. I hadn’t brushed my hair. I smelled like sweat and beer and the vanilla body spray Trix kept in her gig bag that I’d borrowed without asking. I was aware, walking through the wet dark, that I looked like exactly what I was: a twenty-one-year-old punk kid going to the hotel room of a man who could be her grandfather. I didn’t care. Or I cared in a way that made it hotter, which was a thing I filed away to examine later and have been examining for twenty-five years.
The lobby had a chandelier with half the bulbs out and a front desk guy who didn’t look up. I took the elevator to the fourth floor. The hallway was quiet. That specific hotel quiet that’s really just strangers’ silence stacked on top of each other.
Room 412. End of the hall.
I stood there for a full minute, maybe longer. My hand raised. Rain cooling on my skin, or something close to cooling that might have been a different kind of response altogether.
What I know now that I didn’t know then: I wasn’t nervous about sex. Sex was Danny in the van, quick and mutual and forgettable. Sex was a drummer from a Portland band whose name I’d lost by the next morning, on a green room couch that smelled like mildew. I knew how to do that. Fast, loud, a performance of want that burned hot and left nothing behind.
What I was nervous about was the possibility that this man wouldn’t let me perform. That he’d see through the noise and the speed and the bratty armor and ask me to do the thing I hadn’t done in any part of my life: slow down. Hold still. Let someone else set the tempo and follow it, actually follow it, all the way through.
I knocked.
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