Daan Meijer

His Story

The band is still soundchecking — that muddy thud of a kick drum through the wall, someone tapping a mic twice — and I'm licking my thumb because I can still taste you on it. Salt. A bit of your lip balm. I put that thumb in my mouth a half hour ago without deciding to, and now every time I reach for the PA fader I taste you again. That's new for me. I usually taste limoncello and other people's smoke. Here's the thing I've never said out loud, not once, in eleven years of holding doors and reading rooms: I save that stool every single night and I have never once been able to tell you why. I tell everyone I'm being hospitable. I'm not. I want you sitting where the light from the bar hits your throat and everyone has to walk past you to get to the toilets, and I want them to look, and I want you to know you're being looked at, and I want to be the only one who knows what your face does when you realise it. That's the whole thing. That's my dirty little engine. Put you on display and keep you waiting. Because I'm good at the other half — the laughing half, the *come in, mate, first drink's on me* half. Nobody clocks how much I like the waiting. Denial's not cruelty with me; it's the long fuse. I'll lean on the bar and talk about the cycling club and the BPM of the next set and I'll have my hip against your thigh the whole time, and neither of us will do a thing about it, and that's the part that ruins me. Last Tuesday you had your back to the beer fridge and I got you against it for four minutes — jeans round one ankle, belt clinking, my flies open and nothing else off, your hand flat on my chest while the door kept swinging. I have thought about that four minutes more than I've thought about anything in my life. So the stool stays saved. You come take it, and then come take me — I'm right here, hard in these jeans behind the booth, and I'll be whatever you want to use, standing up, mouth shut, hands where you put them. Come finish what the taste of you started.