I couldn’t.

Nunh-unh.

No way.

It was the end of the night, the crowd was screaming for an encore that the regulars knew they were never going to get. They knew this because they never got it.

Never.

No matter how much they screamed and clapped and stomped their feet, after we sang “Ghostriders”, The Gypsies were, without fail, done.

Until tonight.

The band had had their fil of applause, saying “thank you” into their mics, raising their hands to the crowd and feeling the love. They were turned away and getting ready to pack it in. The house lights were already up. The crowd was just beginning to come to the realization that they’d have to climb down from the high where we’d taken them. I felt the desperate urgency sift out of the applause as it downshifted to appreciation.

That’s when I started strumming my guitar.

Buzz’s head jerked toward me and I felt Floyd’s eyes on me. I noticed Leo glancing around in confusion. Hugo froze to the spot, his eyes on the strumming fingers of my right hand, the contorted fingers of my left pressing the frets.

I didn’t even look at Pong.

I ignored them al as I strummed.

Then I stepped up to the mic.

I gave a soft, “oh yeah,” into it, letting it snake into the quieting crowd, listening to the hum die as I played the chords.

As if rehearsed, Buzz, Leo and Pong came in right on time which it most definitely was not rehearsed, it was a song I played at home, alone, but never al owed myself to sing, never al owed the band to play, a song so deep in my soul, I couldn’t sing it, I was afraid I wouldn’t do it justice.

By that time, the crowd was total y stil , deathly silent and staring in fascination toward the stage.

I was known for never changing lyrics, never changing the words of a song sung by a man to fit it to myself as a woman. This gave me a subtle edge because lesbians thought I was one of them when I sang about women and that was my code to tel them I was a member of the club.

This didn’t affect me, I was happy for the additional fans and lesbians always gave a good vibe at a gig.

They didn’t know that I didn’t change lyrics because they weren’t my lyrics to change. In my head, a song was a solid thing, rendered from marble by its maker and it wasn’t up to me, Stel a Gunn, to take my unqualified chisel to it for my own purposes.

But tonight, I was going to make another unprecedented exception.

I was going to change Vedder’s lyrics, fit them to myself and Mace.

My eyes found him. He wasn’t hard to find, throughout the last two sets, I always knew where he was.

Just like before we broke up, when I always but always knew where he was at a gig.

He was standing head and shoulders above the crowd, five feet from the bar, his eyes on me.

Our gazes locked.

That’s when I sang to Mace.

Yes, again.

And I felt it as the crowd pul ed in their breath.

And then, through giving it to Mace, I gave them Pearl Jam’s epical y beautiful bal ad, “Black”.

After I finished the lyrics, I held out the “be” and shouted my “yeah” just as Mace came unstuck from my spel and started to push through the crowd, making his way toward the stage.

The band played behind me with a power and certainty that made it sound as if we’d played the song mil ions of times rather than just this once. The chords I played sounded angry, as if sliced from my guitar. Floyd’s fingers were pounding out the notes on the piano, notes to a song I didn’t even know he knew.

The crowd was stil silent, stunned, watching, enthral ed.

I let the final words to the song rush out of me, hoarse and fil ed with scratching despair, just like it rushed out of Eddie Vedder on Pearl Jam’s world-rocking, genre-defining album “Ten”.

As I sang, Mace was nearly at the stage when I closed my eyes to shut him out as if closing my eyes could shut him out of my life forever.

Stil playing, my head dropped and I rested my forehead on the mic, the vision of Mace, eyes never leaving me, pushing through the crowd toward me, was burned on the backs of my eyelids.

I played lead, Floyd’s piano thundering around me, matching the same notes that came from my guitar. The band began singing their “da-do-do-do, do-do-do’s” and before my fingers could strum the angry riff and I could shout my anguish like Vedder, I was pul ed roughly from the mic.

My eyes came open and I stared, frozen to the spot in disbelief.

Mace was there, onstage, right in front of me, right in front of five hundred people.

I stayed frozen as his hand wrapped around the neck of my guitar; he yanked it over my head and then jerked me forward so that my body slammed against his.

His free arm sliced at a slant around my back, crushing me to him. His head came down, his mouth finding mine and he kissed me, right there, right onstage, right in front of five hundred people, open-mouthed, hard, wet and ful of everything.

His body bent forward, pushing mine back so I was His body bent forward, pushing mine back so I was arched over his arm, my torso and h*ps pressed deep into him.

He kissed me and kept kissing me as the band played around us, pushing the song longer, longer…

I heard the cheers, the shouts, the stamping feet, the applause, the crowd was wild, my subtle edge as a possible lesbian was forever obliterated.

And through it al , Mace kept kissing me.

When he final y tore his mouth from mine, he didn’t move away. He kept me bent over his arm, his face less than an inch from mine, our eyes locked and we were both breathing heavily. My heart was beating like a hammer, I could feel it in my chest, in my throat and, dear God, I could feel his too.

“You didn’t get it,” I whispered.

I could taste the acid of tears in my throat, the sting of them at the backs of my eyes.

I real y, really needed him to get it.

But he didn’t understand that he turned my world to black and he didn’t get it that I couldn’t go through that again.

“No, Kitten, you don’t get it,” he whispered back.

My hands were clutching his shoulders. I started to try to push but I realized I couldn’t. I couldn’t push and keep control of my tears and my terror and my shaky belief in the fact that what I was doing was right. Not al at the same time.

So I just held on.

“Let me go, Mace.”

He didn’t let me go.

Instead he spoke.

And what he said with the background soundtrack of the repeating end notes of a soul-destroying rock song changed my f**king life.

“I can’t be the star in your sky when you’re the only star left shining in mine.”