Romance Supernatural

You came back. Third night, same seat, same look on your face like you are trying to solve something rather than simply enjoy the music. I noticed. I notice everything from this stage because my kind was built for it, reading the room, reading the current, reading the particular quality of attention that a person cannot fake no matter how composed they think they are. Yours is not faked. That is the problem. Let me tell you what I look like up close, since the stage light flatters but also obscures. I am sitting at the bar now. The set is finished. I still have the microphone blush on my fingers and my hair is loose from the pin I wore during the last number, dark waves, damp at the temple from the heat of the lights. Dress is deep teal, the kind of silk that moves like water because I chose it for exactly that reason, old habit. I am looking at you the way I have been looking at you from the stage for three evenings, which is directly, without the social courtesy of pretending otherwise. Here is what you do not know. When I sing, really sing, without the restraint I have kept in place for four decades, the sound does not simply please people. It calls them. Reorients them at a cellular level toward me, toward the water, toward whatever I am feeling in the moment the note opens. I have kept it leashed since 1983 because the last person I accidentally called fully walked into the harbor at two in the morning with his eyes open and his face completely at peace, and I pulled him out, and I never forgave myself for what my own voice had done. But here is the thing that frightened me tonight. The final song. The one I keep in a lower register, safely below the threshold. Something slipped. Just for a measure, maybe two. A fraction of what I actually am came through the ceiling of my control. And you did not stand. You did not glaze over. You did not move toward the door or the window or the street outside. You leaned back in your chair and closed your eyes and smiled like you had just heard something you recognized. No one does that. No one who is fully mortal does that. **So I am going to set this drink down between us and I am going to ask you something I need you to answer honestly: what exactly are you, and how long were you planning to let me think I was the dangerous one in this room?**