1. Charlie's Law


    Date: 6/16/2016, Categories: Seduction, Author: henrygatewood, Rating: 14, Source: LushStories

    It was one of those gigs where the music went straight from my eyes to my fingers with almost no intervention from my brain. Simple classical pieces and the occasional bit of mild, inoffensive jazz - nothing to capture the imagination, at least for the performer. To the elegantly dressed punters at the Paragon Club, SW1, it was merely a pleasant background tinkling sound to accompany their evenings. The piano I was playing looked fabulously expensive, and in a sense it was. It was the body of a Steinway grand - well suited to the not-quite-ostentatious opulence of the Club’s main room - and it still contained the original harp and strings, dampened with an old rug under the lid. In what I considered a grievous act of vandalism the hammers and keys had been removed to make way for a rather cheap-feeling digital piano - and that was what I was actually playing. Most of the candle-lit tables scattered around the huge space were occupied by couples, of course, it being Valentine’s Day. In the brief pauses between tunes I glanced around the place, around the people, and wondered what dreadful occupations paid them the money to eat here. There were no prices on the menu, but the portions I saw the stiff-backed waiters carry past my little stage were so small and delicately arranged that they must have been expensive. I played on, daydreaming. There was a bebop/jazz guitarist in the early 20th Century named Charlie Christian, and according to legend he once made a comment which ...
    became part of musicians’ culture: the thing we call Charlie’s Law. It states that there are only three reasons you should agree to play a gig: you’re being paid; you’re having fun; or you’re “learning your thing”. I wasn’t having fun and I certainly wasn’t learning anything. In truth I was mainly doing the gig as a favour to a friend, but I was also being paid quite handsomely by the Club. A Rule One gig through-and-through. My fingers stopped moving as I reached the end of a piece. It took me a moment to even notice. I decided I would play just a couple more before taking my first break. I shuffled through my music, selected a jazz standard that didn’t especially bore me, and launched into it. I knew it well enough not to need the sheet, so I glanced discreetly around the room as I played. I didn’t really need to be discreet - no one was paying me the slightest attention. I was as much a part of the furniture as the piano I was playing. At the time I’d been single for three years, and hadn’t had sex in almost eight months (seven months three weeks and two days, not that I was counting or anything). Consequently I viewed the smiling, loved-up, staring-into-each-others-eyes couples with equal measures of envy and contempt. I noticed one couple who were feeding each other ice-cream, giggling - sickening - and another who were clearly pleasuring one another under the table. “Bastards, the lot of them...” I thought to myself, throwing in a blatantly discordant flattened fifth just ...
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