Read One Last Thing Before I Go for Free Online

an offbeat fill that throws Scott, who misses his mark. Scott turns to glare at Silver, who smiles vacantly, playing dumb. Baptiste laughs. We are all losers, Silver thinks, each in his own way.
    * * *
    Once in a while, after a gig, he can get laid. If he hasn’t sweated too much, if he is wearing the larger tux, the one that manages to streamline his gut, if they’ve played a good set and the energy is up and there has been ample time for bar breaks, so that everyone in the band is feeling happier than their personal realities would normally dictate, if all of that has happened, then there are backup singers, dance motivators, waitresses. It all turns on a complex sliding scale of how badly everyone doesn’t want to go home.
    Dana is one of the backup singers. It takes Silver three trips to load his drums into the back of Jack’s car, and when he’s done, Dana is still smoking in the parking lot. She is thirty-five or so, and a knockout at fifty feet; slender, with great legs and a luxurious mane of auburn hair. Only up close do you see how tired her eyes are, and a hardness in her features that has set in over time as life failed to live up to her expectations. One of life’s unassailable truths is that no one sets out to be a backup singer.
    She takes off her shoes in his car. She’s been standing and swaying in six-inch heels for six hours. As he wordlessly steers them to the Versailles, she puts her feet up on the dash and cracks the window, her hair fluttering wildly around her. He can see in her profile the cheerleader she once was, the homecoming queen. There was a time when she had the world on a string; friends, the quarterback, and whatnot. Now she is going home with the fat marching-band geek just to feel alive, or at least less lonely. Maybe she doesn’t see it that way though, because if she did, she’d wait until the car had gathered enough speed, then throw open the door and hurl herself onto the thundering blacktop.
    Once in his apartment, Silver rejoices invisibly. He has not had sex in quite some time, and getting them through the door is half the battle. He takes a quick shower, tending to his nethers with a bit more care than usual. Once out, he overapplies his deodorant and attempts to make sense of his untamable mess of hair. When he emerges, in boxers and T-shirt, she is lying on his bed, still in her short black dress, aimlessly channel surfing. She takes slow sips of the whiskey she’s poured herself, absently sucking the lone ice cube into her mouth then dropping it back into her drink again. In the blue light of the television she is beautiful again, and he experiences a surge of affection that has no place in these utilitarian proceedings. Although he’s known her for a while, he knows nothing about her. For instance, he made up the part about her being a cheerleader. For all he knows, she wore a scoliosis brace and stuttered.
    She rolls into him as he lies down beside her, either voluntarily or because the mattress has shifted under his weight, and rests her head on his shoulder, her hair tickling his chin. He closes his eyes to inhale her shampoo, falling briefly but deeply in love even as he knows that tomorrow, in the light of day, he will have trouble making eye contact with her.
    “You smell nice,” she says, her sung-out voice just above a whisper. “Like autumn.”
    “Irish Spring.”
    He watches her chest rise and fall with her breath, the soft roundness of her breasts gathering at the top of her dress, and he can feel things starting to stir down below. Then she turns her head to look up at him, and he could cry from the desolation in her eyes.
    “Is it okay if we just lie here for a bit?” she says.
    Not really, no
. “Sure.”
    Teenage vampires skulk on cable. Outside, a truck horn blares. He watches Dana’s toes as they curl against his comforter and experiences what might be best described as homesickness, but he’ll be damned if he knows what or where it is that