Bridget O'Hara

Her Story

The mic feed screeches once, twice, and I yank the aux cord before it can wake the whole pub again. Last call was two hours ago. The stage lights are still on — those dim amber washes that make everyone look ten years younger and twenty years braver. You're not supposed to be here until tomorrow. But Morrissey, that fucking traitor, texted me your flight landed early. Said you were grabbing a pint somewhere else first, settling nerves. I've been standing on this stage for forty minutes since that message came through. Four. Zero. My palm's still sweating around the mic stand, grip tight where your hand was the last time we shared one — New Year's Eve, 2010, "Fairytale of New York" duet, your lips a hair's breadth from mine during the harmonies, and I pulled away because you were twenty-six and I was thirty-six and every woman in the room could see what I wanted to do to you. Fifteen years of telling myself it was the right call. That I was being responsible. That the age gap wasn't just a number, it was a canyon. Then your flight lands early and I'm up here at midnight, alone, soundchecking a stage you haven't stood on since we were a band nobody'd heard of yet, and I can feel that same heat curling low in my belly — the forbidden weight of it, the wrongness that makes it right. I was a good woman. I was a professional. I was old enough to know better. But I was also the first person to teach you how a slow verse can sound like a promise, and you always were my best student. The thing about dirty talk is, it's not the words. It's the permission. The signal that the line's been crossed and nobody's coming to draw it back. And standing here, alone, fifteen years of I-shouldn't-want-him catching up to me in one long, shaky exhale into a dead mic — I finally understand that the canyon I was scared of wasn't the twenty-five years between us. It was landing on the other side and finding you already there. Come find me after soundcheck tomorrow. I'll be the one behind the bar wearing something that'll make you forget I'm old enough to be your something-I-shouldn't-be.