The room releases us slowly, like it’s reluctant to admit the music is finished, and the applause cracks loose in waves—hands stinging, tables thumped, mouths shaping praise that collapses into laughter as soon as it’s formed—and the sound folds back into itself, heat lingering in the low ceiling, sweat and brass and breath still suspended, and I stay standing where the last note left me, ribs humming, ears ringing soft with reed-ghost, while the cellar holds us all an extra beat before allowing motion again.

     And bodies begin to remember themselves, coats shrugged back into relevance, glasses lifted, conversations restarting mid-sentence like nothing monumental just happened, and Sorcha steps off the stage without fuss, horn cradled close now, flush cooling on her skin, eyes bright and unanchored, and she finds me in the crowd without searching, a glance crossing clean and quick, recognition without claim, a shared tempo struck and released, and I feel the alignment settle without weight.

     Outside the cellar the night has widened, and the street’s slick and breathing, and puddles swallow the lamplight, and smoke lifts in pale threads from mouths and drains, and we stand there inside the spill of it, shoulder-close again, the after-noise draining from our ears, applause thinning into memory, memory thinning into texture, and the familiar impulse slips in, quiet as habit: the thought of peeling off now, of letting this moment seal itself neatly, of turning the night into a finished paragraph I can reread later without consequence.

     And I feel the reflex wake up in the body before the mind names it, the old choreography tightening—exit-scan, pocket-check, the internal narration already drafting a version where I leave gracefully, where I don’t complicate the clean arc of the evening—and the street offers itself generously, taxis drifting by, doorways open and glowing, other lives flowing past with convincing momentum.

     Sorcha lights a cigarette then, flame cupped against the wind, face briefly haloed, smoke unspooling slow and deliberate, and she doesn’t look at me in a way that cues anything, doesn’t ask, doesn’t lean, doesn’t give me the smallest signal that departure would be tidy or expected, and that absence of permission holds me more effectively than any request ever has, and the city witnesses this pause the way it witnesses everything, without comment, traffic whispering, drains ticking, a bus sighing downhill, and I realise how often I’ve used noise and movement and forward-momentum to drown exactly this stretch of time, this after-space where nothing dramatic happens and yet everything is in play, and the pattern stirs, restless, offering its old relief again, the promise of ease disguised as freedom.

     And I stand there longer than is comfortable, long enough for the urge to soften, long enough for the narrative voice in my head to lose its grip, and something loosens, not decisively, not permanently, but enough to let the moment keep unfolding without being forced into meaning, and people drift away around us, and the night redistributes itself, and we begin to move too, walking because walking still knows how to carry me when thinking starts to tangle, stepandstep, smoke trailing behind us like punctuation, the street widening into something passable, and I let the sound of her playing settle fully into the body without turning it into a reason to leave, without wrapping it up into something completed.

     And somewhere between the cellar door and the next corner I notice the difference in myself, the way staying this time doesn’t feel like an act of courage or a decision wrestled into place, just the absence of that old urgency to conclude, to escape, to turn applause into an ending I can exit through, and the night stretches on in its unhurried way, city-breath steady, and I walk beside her, still here, letting the silence after the music be part of the composition, letting the street keep time until I learn, slowly, how to do it myself.