throwaway because half the Columbus music scene knows my main and all of them know Malik.
ok so. context first or none of this makes sense.
I’m a stagehand at the Rialto on High. 24, stage left, usually in black cargo shorts, a black crop tee that says CREW on the back in white vinyl letters I cut myself, and knee socks, because the stage gets hot under the lights and I have good legs and I’m not going to apologize for either. Malik Freeman is house sound. He’s 31, six-two, a beard he keeps short so it doesn’t get caught in headphone cables, forearms like he’s been coiling XLR since birth. There’s a tattoo of a waveform on his left one that Wes at Needle & Anchor did. He wears the same gray Carhartt beanie every show, even in July.
Since June we have had A Thing.
The thing works like this. Soundcheck ends. He hands me a cable. He says “storage room.” I go.
The whole system, in three moves. He doesn’t ask anymore and I don’t make him. The first time, back in June, he asked me three separate times in three separate ways and then asked a fourth time with his hand already on the storage room door, and I finally said “Malik I swear to god” and pulled him in by his belt loop. After that it became two words. If I ever don’t want it I just say “already put it away” and go back to taping setlists. I’ve said that exactly once, the night of the heat wave when I had food poisoning, and he just nodded and brought me a Gatorade from the bar at load-out.
What we never do is after. He leaves at 1am in his Tacoma, I take the COTA home. Nobody’s been to anybody’s apartment. It’s a good arrangement.
This is about the night it stopped being the arrangement.
Thursday. Local shoegaze band opening for a touring band from Philly. Soundcheck ran long because Malik would not call it until the kick drum stopped eating the bass guitar. Soundcheck ended at 6:19. Doors at 7.
At 6:21 he walked past me in the wing and pressed a coil of XLR into my hands.
“Storage room.”
Normal voice. Didn’t even look at me. The Philly drummer was right there eating a banana.
I counted to ten so it wouldn’t be obvious and then I went.
The Rialto right before doors is the emptiest a room can feel with twelve people in it. House lights up. Bartenders cutting limes. Security doing the thing where they all stand in a circle and drink coffee and talk about their kids. Sunny was back at the merch table folding shirts into perfect little squares and gave me a look as I went by, the look, because Sunny knows. Sunny sold Malik a shirt in August and read him like a book in the thirty seconds it took to run his card.
Everybody busy. Everybody with exactly one job. The privacy isn’t that nobody’s there. It’s that everybody’s looking at their own thing.
Storage is behind the stage-left wing. No lock. The door’s a hollow-core thing with a Rialto sticker and a hole where somebody punched it in 2019. Inside it’s road cases, mic stands, a busted green room couch nobody’s allowed to sit on because of what happened to it at a hardcore show, and a folded moving blanket on top of a Pelican case that is technically for padding amps and is actually for my knees.
He was already in there. Leaning on the big road case marked MONITORS DO NOT STACK, beanie pushed back, radio clipped to his belt, the little earpiece cord running up to his collar.
He took the cable out of my hands and put it on the shelf. Then he pushed the door almost shut. Not all the way. You close it all the way and the latch sticks and you have to kick it and everybody hears.
I checked my phone. 6:23.
“Thirty-seven minutes,” I said.
“I can count.”
“You made soundcheck run nine minutes over.”
“It sounded bad.”
“It sounded fine.”
“Fine is bad.” He reached out and hooked two fingers in the waistband of my shorts, the way he does, and pulled me in until I was standing between his knees. His hand stayed there. Warm through the fabric, right on my hip bone. “Emery.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I ask you something inconvenient.”
That was new. He has never once asked me for something he could take. My stomach did a thing.
“Depends.”
“You going home with me after load-out?”
I looked at him. He looked back, completely serious, which is how Malik looks when he’s about to say something that matters and also how he looks when he’s deciding whether to high-pass a vocal. You learn the difference.
“That’s in six hours,” I said.
“I’m planning.”
“You’re planning.”
“I plan everything.” His thumb moved on my hip. “You know that about me. I don’t wing it. I’ve been planning this one since like August.”
I didn’t say anything for a second, because the honest thing was that I’d been riding the #2 home every night since June imagining his truck, and I didn’t want to say that with the Philly drummer’s banana still in my head.
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Yeah.”
He breathed out. Not quite relief. Close.
“Good.”
Then his radio went off.
“Malik, what’s your twenty?”
That’s Denise, the production manager. She has a voice like a school bus braking.
He thumbed the button on his chest without taking his eyes off me. “Storage. Grabbing a spare DI.”
“Copy. Doors at seven, I need you at FOH by six-fifty.”
“Copy.”
He let go of the button.
“Six-fifty,” I said. “Twenty-seven minutes.”
“Then stop talking.”
I got down on the moving blanket. It smelled like dust and old beer and amp heat, which is to say it smelled like every good night I’ve had in this building. The floor’s concrete under it so you feel it in your knees after about five minutes no matter what, and I’ve made my peace with that.
He undid his belt himself. He always does. It’s this thing where he wants to be the one who decides, even when we both know I’m the one who walked back here. Work belt with the Leatherman on it, then his jeans, then he shoved his boxers down with one hand and his cock swung out heavy and already half hard.
I want to be accurate here because this is a confession and I’m not going to lie on the internet. Malik has a thick cock. Not porn long, but thick enough that the first time I had my hand around it I thought “oh, that’s going to be a jaw situation.” Cut, a little curve to the left, a vein down the top I have spent a humiliating amount of time thinking about on the bus. His balls sit low and heavy and he keeps everything trimmed short like he trims his beard, neat. He smelled like the venue does, sweat and warm electronics and the Irish Spring he showers with before every show.
He was hard all the way by the time I got my hand on him. Hot in my fist. The head flushed dark and there was already a bead at the slit.
“You been thinking about this during soundcheck,” I said.
“I’ve been thinking about the kick drum.”
“Your dick hasn’t.”
“Emery.”
“Mm?”
“Mouth.”
So I did what I was told.
I licked him from the base all the way up the underside, slow, the flat of my tongue dragging over that vein, and I felt his whole thigh go tight under my other hand. Then I took the head in and sucked, just the head, the salt of him on my tongue, and he let out a breath through his nose like he’d been holding it since 6:19.
Out in the room somebody dropped a case of Modelo and everybody cheered.
I took more. Opened my throat, pushed down until the thickness had my jaw stretched wide and my lips were tight around him and I could feel my pulse in them. My eyes started watering right away because they always do with him. That first push where it’s too much and you have to decide to keep going anyway, that’s my favorite part and I’ll never tell him.
His hand came down on the back of my head. Not pushing. Just resting. Heavy and warm through my hair.
“There you go,” he said, low. “That’s it.”
I hummed on him and his hips jumped.
I worked him the way I know he likes it, which I learned over like twenty of these. Slow, deep, all the way down until my nose hit his stomach and I gagged, back off, breathe, tongue swirling under the head, back down. Spit running out the corners of my mouth and down my chin onto my crew shirt. My knees already aching on the concrete. His cock got harder somehow, so hard it throbbed against my tongue every time I pulled up, and his hand in my hair started to close.
“Malik, you copy?”
Fucking Denise.
He didn’t pull out. He just thumbed the radio, with my mouth still full of him, and I looked up at him from the blanket with my eyes streaming, and he said in the most bored professional voice in the world:
“Go for Malik.”
“Philly’s tour manager wants to know if they can get more vocal in the wedges.”
“Tell him they can have whatever they want if their singer stops cupping the mic.”
I laughed and choked on him at the same time. He grabbed my hair properly then, a full fist of it, and held me down on his cock while he finished the sentence. I couldn’t breathe for three seconds. Four. My throat spasmed around him and he felt it and made a noise off-mic that I will be hearing when I die.
“Copy,” said Denise. “Ha.”
He let go of the button. Let go of my hair. I came off him gasping, a long string of spit still connecting my lip to the head of his cock before it broke across my chin.
“You’re insane,” I said. My voice was wrecked.
“You’re the one who laughed.”
“You said cupping.”
“Good?” he asked. Just that. He was looking at my face. He does that. Every single time, one look, one word.
“Don’t stop,” I said. “If you stop I’ll kill you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He looked at his phone on the road case. 6:36.
“Get up.”
He turned me around by the hips and bent me over the MONITORS DO NOT STACK case. The metal edge was cold through my shirt and the case lid had those little rivets that pressed into my stomach. He shoved my shorts and underwear down to my knees in one pull and just looked for a second. I could feel him looking. The air in there was cool on my ass and my cock was hard and trapped against the case, leaking onto the gaffer tape somebody had used to label it.
“Lube’s in my bag,” I said.
“Front pocket?”
“How do you know that.”
“I pay attention.” He had it out already. Travel bottle. I keep it next to my Sharpies and earplugs. He clicked it open, and I heard it, and then two slick fingers were pressing at my hole and I pushed back into them before he even asked.
“Fuck, you’re ready,” he said.
“I had eleven minutes of soundcheck to think about it.”
He opened me up fast because we didn’t have time, two fingers then three, scissoring and twisting, the burn of it sharp for about four breaths and then going warm and loose and good. He crooked his fingers and found that spot and I made a noise I would not want the Philly drummer to hear and slapped my own hand over my mouth.
“Quiet,” he said, like it was my fault.
“You’re doing it on purpose.”
“Yeah.”
He pulled his fingers out. I heard him slick himself, the wet sound of his hand working lube up and down that fat cock, and then the head was pressing against me, hot and blunt and much bigger than three fingers.
He stopped there.
Just held it. The head resting right against my hole, not pushing. His hand flat between my shoulder blades.
He does this. One beat. I know what it is. It’s him checking. I pushed back against him, half an inch, until the head started to open me, and said “yes” into my own arm, not loud, just so he’d hear it.
He pushed in.
God. Okay. The stretch of Malik going in is a whole thing. It burns at the rim and then the head pops past and there’s this huge fullness, like he’s taking up space in me that I didn’t know I had, and then he just kept sliding, slow, all the way in until his hips were against my ass and his balls were pressed against mine and I could feel him throbbing inside me. My mouth was open against my arm. I couldn’t make any sound at all.
“Breathe,” he said.
I breathed.
“Good. Hold on to the handles.”
The road case has those spring-loaded steel handles on the sides. I grabbed them. He started to fuck me.
Slow at first, long strokes that dragged all the way out to the head and all the way back in, the case rocking a little on the concrete every time he bottomed out. Then faster. Then his hand moved from my back to my hip and his other hand went to the back of my neck and he just held me there and went.
The case banged against the wall. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Anybody in the wing would have heard it and thought somebody was restacking gear, which is what everybody in a venue always thinks, which is why this has worked since June.
“Whose is it,” he said into my ear. His beard was scratching my neck.
“Yours.”
“Say it right.”
“It’s your ass, Malik. It’s yours. Every show.”
“Every show,” he agreed, and slammed in hard enough that I saw white.
My cock was rubbing against the tape on the case every time he thrust, hard and leaking and so sensitive I thought I was going to come from friction alone. His cock kept hitting that spot, over and over, deep and thick, and every time it did my whole body clenched down on him and he grunted like I’d punched him.
“Malik, FOH, six-fifty. That’s you in four.”
He didn’t even answer. He reached up and turned the radio down.
“You’re gonna get fired,” I gasped.
“Worth it.”
“Say that again.”
“Worth it. You’re worth it. Fuck, Emery.” His rhythm was breaking up. Short hard thrusts now, his fingers digging bruises into my hip. “I’m close.”
“Inside,” I said. “Do it inside. I want to walk around all night with it.”
That did it.
He shoved in all the way and held there, pinning me to the case, and I felt him go. His cock swelled and jerked inside me and his whole body locked against my back. A low broken sound came out of him into my hair. Another pulse. Another. Hot, flooding, filling me up so deep I could feel it spreading, and his hips kept making these small helpless jerks like he couldn’t stop. His hand slid off my neck and down to my cock and wrapped around it, and he only had to stroke me four times, four slick rough pulls while he was still throbbing in me, and I came all over the side of the MONITORS DO NOT STACK case with my face pressed into my arm to keep from screaming.
For a second neither of us moved. I could hear the bartenders laughing out front. Somebody was testing the fog machine.
He pulled out slow. I felt it leak out of me and down the back of my thigh.
“Shit,” he said, looking at the case. “That’s gonna be there forever.”
He wiped me up with the shop rag from his back pocket, which, hygiene, but it’s the thought. Pulled my shorts up for me. Kissed the back of my neck once, right where the crew shirt ends. Then he tore a strip of white gaff tape off the roll on his belt, wrote on it with the Sharpie from my bag, and stuck it on my laminate.
He was out the door at 6:49. I heard him on the radio a second later: “Malik at FOH.” Denise said “finally.”
I went back to stage left with my legs shaking and my ass full and a strip of gaff tape on my chest that said, in Malik’s awful block capitals:
LOAD-OUT. MY TRUCK. BRING A TOOTHBRUSH.
Sunny texted the night shift chat before the opener even finished their first song.
Sunny: emery just walked past merch with his whole laminate taped up and a face like he saw god
Rafi: Was it the storage room again
Sunny: it was the storage room again
Pip: WHAT DOES THE TAPE SAY
I didn’t answer. I still haven’t told them what the tape says.
It’s on my bathroom mirror now. Next to my toothbrush. Which lives at his place three nights a week.
edit: yes the case got cleaned. no I will not be telling you which show. yes he still says “storage room” before doors. he just also says “toothbrush?” at load-out now.
