The Diva and the Demon

There was a beat, a thudding beat, one that you could feel make ripples in your ribs that end at your breastbone, whacking it hard so that you might think you’re having a heart attack, or falling in love, or there’s an earthquake, or you’re getting beaten up. But this beat was on purpose, to make the room around us seethe, to make us sweat enough to steam up the mirrors and each other, to ruin our clothes and make us want to take them off. The beat, something probably sampled from a jackhammer, a single hit with a jagged retreat, a bassline tracing a circle around it, up, down, up, down, and above it all a light tune, a happy zipping rubber band, accenting another layer, something taken up by a guitar and a keyboard, toyed with by a singer, a drone, a crackling effort to put into it what he was feeling when he wrote this.

This was followed, quickly and repeatedly, by a saccharine taste, bitten under by a medicinal, celebrational sack of flour to the head, vodka and Red Bull. Oliver can make fun of me for drinking it, but he forgets that he was the one who got me into it, one night after work, when we didn’t want to go home but couldn’t stay there. That there was a club in a strip mall of a small town down the coast of North Carolina, off Route One, under a canopy of kudzu and insects that snapped each other. You could forget that you were anywhere in particular until there was a break in the traffic behind you, and you, turning your car off, getting out and shutting the door, you heard a wrestlemania of insects, louder than the beat inside the club.

Oliver told me to drink a vodka and Red Bull, that it would keep me up, but I would still get drunk, drunk but alert. It did. I got over the taste after the first one and downed the second way too fast. Then I was there on the floor with Oliver, because he asked me to, a glimmer caused by a strobe in his eye showing the layers in it, black pupil, yellow ring like a tiny sunflower, thick brown, then an outline, a stroke of black again.

I was already sweating, the lines of it coming down around my neck and back, tickling me, but wiping did no good. The music slowed, got shaggier, messier, and the brave continued to dance, somehow knowing where the deejay was going, somehow knowing where he was going to mesh these beats per minute into the next and at what rate. Oliver knew, took it from his knees to his hips, slower, a roll of the body with no snap. A voice exploded over the music again, a woman’s, but a dark and broken nerve-rubber. She knew what the vodka was doing to my knees, and teased me for it, calling me a fool with that voice, and then walking back to her friends to make fun of me, her ass shaking with it. Oliver’s ass shook when the beat picked up again, the not-so-brave dancing again, listening to see if the next beat would be where they thought it was. The woman’s voice grew, became enormous, bigger than us all, and she sucked us into it, the tempo her heart, and it was breaking.

The vodka crawled up my legs, made them woozy and limp, but warm and delicious, fearless too. Arms came up in the air, hands open to take whatever joy they could from the woman’s pain, they waved, fingers spread, until she stopped wailing and lost herself somewhere in the tune and the thudding, the army of emotion coming to clean up her mess.

The lights got excited, began to twist and swoop, making Oliver purple, then pink, then blue. They flashed in his eyes for a second each time they passed, a reflection off of his retinae, a pupil-sized flashlight in my face, making contact with my pupils and then gone. He was sweating too, his shirt wrinkling and sticking to his chest and back, like a wet towel over the face of a sick man. It made his skin show through. Funny how water can do that, make white things translucent. He raised his arm and ran his fingers through his hair, to try to discipline it not to stick up in odd spots. His arm showed through the shirt, wet with his sweat, you could see the bicep, far too much force for this hair-arrangement business, but there all the same, an orange-sized bulge under his skin, creating different wrinkles on his sleeve. When he put his arm down, finger-sized comb-lines appeared in his haircut, the hair wet and twisted around them, a strand coming down to badger his ear, almost, but not quite touching it.

I’d been looking at him too much, and he noticed it, so I turned to look at someone else for a while, almost, but not quite missing his little smile at me. I decided that another vodka and possibly Red Bull was called for and abruptly stopped dancing, plotting the best route through the mob. A stream was forming to my left and I decided to join it, figuring it was at least headed in the right direction. I got to the service area, waited calmly for my turn and noticed in a quick sweep of the room just behind me and to the left that Oliver was there, that he was watching me but not saying anything. Probably because I’d never hear it. Probably because there was nothing to say. Or maybe he didn’t really notice that it was me in front of him.

I got up there, between two bent brass rails, a tall garbage can keeping me from leaning into the bar, the threat of a waste liquor pond trapped in a rubber mat on the bar enough to deter me anyway. The mat read “Orders Only.” Fingertips touched the small of my back and I knew they were Oliver’s when he appeared at my side. My mouth opened and I fought to breathe. The fingertips pressed in only slightly and slid away. Words, conjugation and purpose left me for about thirty seconds. I explained it away with a vodka and Red Bull, but my back, as if someone had sprayed fingernails of pollen, turned red and itchy where he was, and the heat spread, its fuzzy borders expanding. I finished the drink before I got my change and headed back to the dance floor, the brass rails apart just enough for me to get around Oliver without touching him. If I touched him again, I’d have another swath of blush to deal with, and if it covered more of my body, I’d do something about it.

I unbuttoned my shirt one more button, another two and half inches exposed to the elements, just as the vodka took another whack at my legs and shoulders. I closed my eyes for a few moments and fought for the simplicity of the beat, and found it, the bassline in this one spiraling it down this time, each rotation a little lower than the last. My knees seemed to take this as a hint and bent a little lower with each orbit and I went slower, not snapping on this beat but the other. I opened my eyes and saw that the crowd was down here with me, that their seethe had turned to swish and slow rapture, that Oliver was there again, on my level too, his knees in between mine, the mesh of a new song, or the twist confession of the corporal.

The warm disease spread from my knees now and moved into my hips, and they met his on a downbeat, a syncopated delirium tremens, our arms around each other’s backs, each move of his fingers on me creating another wave of rush circling out from its epicenter. All of what had happened on my back earlier, mere warning shots. His fingers went into my sweaty hair and I felt them make the same ropes against my scalp, the same thick hashmarks. His sweat on his neck mixed with mine and itched more. I wiped, but it didn’t help. Our knees went lower, lower, as the beat slowed, the deejay taking us straight to hell, hot enough already, and we thrust against each other a couple of feet off the floor. Our faces released from where they had been, the balance between us fine now, being handled by our shoulders, our mouths opened to the side of each other and I couldn’t hear his breathing. I could only feel it, a concentration of the steam and sweat in a fragment.

Oliver, I breathed, um, Oliver.

The tempo picked up again, meeting with another that had started somewhere else, almost imperceptibly, then overtook like a passing car and made the new focus, a ticking, fluttery nervous system swell that was joined and abandoned and joined and abandoned. I was following Oliver through another stream, this one to the coat check, a skinny too-cool in charge of our belongings. Oliver opened the half-door in front of him, mentioned the name of someone or other and led me, tripping, down the stairs. It was a small room barely occupied by a few thin jackets and heavy shirts, a couple of purses and backpacks, some stools stacked in a corner, a few kegs, the caps still on them, waiting to be rotated into the coolers. He rolled one on its side and bent me over it, rolled it forward a bit, the giveless aluminum pressing my body weight into my hips.

I was about to protest, the cool metal absorbing my heat just as quickly as I could ooze it out, when he pushed me still further, pressing into the back of my thighs so I didn’t roll into the ground, but my fly reachable. He unfastened me and yanked the pants down. The air of the room on my ass and pussy gave me goosebumps. There were some sounds, liquid and rubber and a hand grasped a pipe in front of my head and to the right. He rolled me forward again, my face inches from the floor and I felt the tip of him, of his rhythm, begin its slow climb.

It was huge. It was painful. It was hell in heaven’s despite, the two agents of pleasure and pain fighting for my tingles. I wanted to yell loud, gutteral, but had left that option up on the dance floor, would be heard here, would be rescued like someone’s Coach purse. He rolled me under him, no weight on me, must have been tensed between pole and toe, and it was easier because the keg was doing it, even though it was Oliver, it was completely free of my input, and immune to my response.

He turned me over anyway, legs up and bent in the air, my head polishing the floor only to be rolled forward again. The exposed planks of the floor above blurred. I could hear every footstep, some with the beat over there, some just a trod to the bar over there, the streams, but mostly it was the friction of soles against rubber matting, the dust the only thing crackling, and the beat only a beat down here.

The pain, Oliver stretching my pussy like a battering ram, never went away, but simply turned unimportant, the demon from hell shrugging his shoulders as the angel filled me with fire. The ceiling was also redundant, the ruthless keg too. I closed my eyes and felt this strange rhythm, Oliver’s cock creating a new level of ecstasy, something adult and mean, but beautiful because of that. Every time I felt his hips make contact with my ass I knew how deep he was, and I gripped his cock tight with my pussy. I looked at his face. It showed.

That was what made me come. That look and what it meant sent the demon off to fuck the angel and somewhere deep inside of me, somewhere Oliver had been rubbing against turned huge and detonated, my back bending into the keg I let all of that out and rumbled, rumbled enough to make bells ring miles away. Oliver watched and his own neck tore back and forth, his arms full strength quivering on my thighs, the beat slowing down upstairs, chaos settling into order in my head and moving onto his. He let it out loud, a grit-swiped wail, a male version of the diva in the first song. I held my hands out to him, just short of his arms, the fingers spread, just to feel his skin through his shirt.