-2-
I stand, held by his arms, until I can’t stand any more. He zips up my pants, does up the top button. Does up my belt. I put my hand to his clothed crotch, to rub him, and he says in my ear, “It’s OK.” Then he kisses me.
It sends chilled firebolts down my side.
I feel acutely aware of myself, as if nude, but not like it had been with...that other guy. With him, after he’d done the same thing—nominally, because what Declan and Tolek did are worlds apart!—I had felt...dirty. I’d felt...invaded even.
With Deck, I simply feel open. Bare.
And willingly so.
I’m here. And I’m open to you. And I’ve let down all my defenses. So do what you will with me. And if you hurt me, there’s nothing I can do about it. Because I’ve let you in. And I’m gonna keep letting you in for as long as you wanna stay...
We move to my sofa-bed and lie on it, lights now off, bright moonlight washing over my wooden floors, and over our linked bodies. He lies beside me, hand clasped around mine, stretched down below.
It’s a position I already feel I need more than that first breath of air in the morning.
It must be around one or two A.M. when he says to me, “Blaze, I think I should go.”
My stomach clenches. My hand tightens around his fingers. “No. Please don’t.” I pull him toward me.
He kisses me, and then again.
Soon, his hand’s inside me once more. Oh, yes.
He takes me to climax. But this time, when I rub him back, he doesn’t say no.
I push him over the edge.
And there’s something piercingly poetic about the way he shudders under my hand, his lips quivering under mine, while his arm holds me to him like a glass of water to a man in the desert.
-3-
I wake up to a kiss, soft and yearning.
With my eyes still closed, I wrap my arms around his neck.
“Now I really do need to go.”
I open my eyes but: “It’s so dark.”
“It’s five-thirty.”
“Wow. I can’t remember the last time I got up this early.”
“I need to work. Got three moves today. That’s twelve hundred bucks. Then we need to train again later—it’s off-season but we can’t let our fitness slip. And...well, I’d also like to see you. If...you have time? Tonight?”
I can’t stop the smile forming on my face. “Yes, I’d like to see you tonight. But don’t think of putting me anywhere near that gym. Every muscle in my body aches.”
He runs a gentle hand across my cheek, doesn’t speak.
There’s only one thing I’d like to do with Declan. One. And a little voice in my head tells me that I shouldn’t be doing that so early. That relationships are more than that. That they should be slow, and planned. You shouldn’t jump into them so quickly! my mom had once said to me.
That same voice also tells me that Mamah is alone. That she had a perfectly good chance to be with a man who loved her, right here, and who could provide for her. It’s different when you get older, Błażej, she also said.
Every cell inside me fights these voices. As if there is something fundamentally wrong with their logic. As if their logic is all that is wrong with the world and every sociological and ideological problem within it. Because all I want is you, Declan. You, now, in this bed.
“My place again?” I say.
He grins, and his cheeks go rosy. He moves down to kiss me. It lights my lungs up. Sultry, hot air. “Mmmmmm,” I moan. I wrest myself away from him and lie on my hand, facing the other direction. If I look at him any longer, he won’t be moving anything today, and I’ll miss my meeting at eleven. “I think you’d better go now or else I’ll hold you here all day.”
When his warm hand rubs down my tatted arm, my eyes close as I wait for the inevitable touch of his lips to my skin.
That touch arrives, soft and hot. And down below, it moistens me up like a crashing wave. I inhale deeply, exhale slowly.
When he does leave, I take a shower. A cold one. An extremely cold one. And when that’s done, I’m still thinking of him. I’m thinking of nothing else, actually.
And that’s bad.
Because life isn’t only about a boy.
-4-
Clubs feel different in the day. They’re colder. And the smoke in them is stale. In the day, you see rips and tears on the faux-leather couches. Couches which, under black light, look like nothing less than god’s gift to his people.
In the day, you see stains. Tables have scratches, and gum peeks out from underneath their edges.
Sacrament is like the Brooklyn Underground’s equivalent of the huge and glorious Club Pacha in the city. Massive and thrumming. An underworld of decadence. There’s only one dance floor. Leather couches along the walls. Stairs on either side leading up to a mezzanine with lots of other, more comfy, couches. Couches made for lying down. Perfect for two. At night, blue lights and red flames on the walls make it look like the bee’s knees of overindulgence. Now, it just looks like the gutted warehouse that it once was.
And essentially still is.
The meeting was changed from Randy’s DJ gear store to Sacrament. “You’ll see when you get here,” Xavier told me.
Randy greets me with open arms inside the club. “Heaven-Leigh!” He hugs me warmly.
Xavier sits at a couch a few feet away, smoking. Dressed in a cream designer suit. He gets up and gives me a hug as well, not as warm, purely for form’s sake. “Blaze.”
He holds me back by arm’s length, eyes me down with a Mr. Hyde smirk. A flashback hits me: Our backs against a wall in Savannah’s apartment as Xavier and I sat with our toes pointing up at the ceiling. She and Patryk on the couch, her pants to her knees while she giggled and he kissed her there. I was so zoned out that all I registered was smoke flowing from Xavier’s mouth next to me like a dragon. And then, as if it were only an instant later, that same mouth of his licking me. There.
I knew little about boys in those days. And there’s more history to me and Xavier besides drugs. Mountains of it. I’ve known him since I was five and he was eight. One thing led to another. I can’t blame that I was totally zonked out when it happened, because I know I played along with the obvious flirting even when I wasn’t. I believed I felt something for him back then. I believed a lot of different things back then. That drugs fuck with your mind wasn’t one of them. So I widened for him, and pushed him into me with my hands, deeper...
Urgh.
“Xavier.” I keep my response as cold as possible.
“Keeping well?”
“Fine.”
Randy, smiling like he just won a game of high-stakes poker, says, “Heaven-Leigh—”
“Blaze,” I say. “Heaven-Leigh’s my stage name.”
“No problem. Blaze. Xavier will be joining us for our meeting. Is that OK with you? It’s only fair, seeing as he’s the one who discovered you.”
Oh, so that’s his pitch. My skin cools. Xavier smiles wickedly. “Is he with the label?”
“Oh, Blaze, we’re not in label discussions right now. We’re...just seeing where things might go with you.”
You mean, how he can best use me to make a profit?
My skin bristles...but I hold my cool. Best to hear them out. I’m still at the stage where I can pull out. That’s also what I said when I smoked my first joint.
“So, Xavier here tells me yooze used to be good friends at one stage.”
“At one stage.” I burn Xavier down with a stare, try and reach the Jekyll inside him. Because I’m not in the mood for his shit right now. He’s right that I need a break—desperately, probably—but he’s wrong if he thinks I owe him anything because of it. “But then we had a fallout. Call it irreconcilable differences. Isn’t that right, Xavier?”
His smirk softens a little. His amber eyes—Savva’s eyes—rage with an emotion I don’t quite place. I wish it was regret, but I know it isn’t. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who reg
rets her death.
Maybe Patryk does. Maybe. But regret and “feeling sorry for something” are far from the same thing. I know Patryk’s sorry for it, but regret?
Xavier looks up at Randy. “It’s true, Randy. We had a fallout.” Then he turns to me, and, as a firm warning, “But that’s all in the past, isn’t it, Blaze?”
Sensing the tension, Randy says, “Blaze, we have some bubbly here.” He turns to show me a table behind him. Four glasses set up, and a bottle of Krug. “Not the most expensive. But not the cheapest, either. Consider it a thank you from me to you.”
OK, he’s trying to butter me up. I can deal with that. Let’s just see where it goes.
We sit. “Who’s the fourth glass for?” I ask.
As if on cue, a door opens up in the back. The man who comes out is tall and strongly built. He has a mane of golden hair that looks like an eighties shampoo commercial. His light brown eyes match his disco shirt.
And he’s tall. Really tall. “Randy, honey. Let’s go in here.”
Randy looks at Xavier and raises an eyebrow. “Well, Blaze. It seems Gavin’s more excited to meet you than I expected.”
We get up, bubbly in hand. Xavier grabs the fourth flute. When we enter the door that Gavin the Golden Haired is holding open for us, I realize there’s more to Sacrament than meets the eye.
Much more.
Like, cages and chains more.
And a whole new world beneath the one that’s apparent. A world I fought so hard to leave. And which I’m slowly getting roped back into again...
-5-
“It’s not a secret club, Blaze,” says Gavin the Golden Haired—owner of Sacrament, including its “not secret club” that we’re currently sitting in. He lights up a smoke on a cigarette holder, crosses his leg and exhales slowly. With one hand tucked under his elbow, close to his chest, he says, “It’s a liberal section to the club, let us say.” He flourishes a hand to the cages, the red ambient lights, the wall-chains. “And it’s on the right side of the law. There’s fire exits and all that jazz. It’s just...not everyone’s cup of herbal tea, shall we say. It pulls in a special clientele. High-rollers. Men and woman who like things the way they used to be. You know, before the Giuliani apocalypse. That motherfucker really screwed things up for those of us who played it straight. Then again”—he takes a drag, exhales—“Gatien’s tax evasion didn’t help much. But, anyway, I’m probably boring you with this shit. People my age tend to reminisce about the nineties a lot. Not so, Randy?”
Randy smiles wistfully. “Those were the good ol’ days.” In his Sri Lankan-Brooklyn mix, he says Those like Doze.
Gavin smiles, eyes glinting. “Actually, if I’m honest with you, I remember more the Club 57 days. Orgies with Madonna and Cyndi Lauper and Fab Five Freddy. Hoh! Those were the days. This was before AIDS and that shit of course. How I didn’t catch it is beyond me. Anyway, good ol’ days. But that’s because I’m the oldest one at this table. But amongst us girls, no one’s gonna let that slip, now are you?”
Randy and Xavier shake their heads.
I say nothing.
After a bone-cracking moment of silence, Gavin leans forward and steeples his fingers. The cigarette dangles from them like someone leaning off the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge. “Blaze, here’s the simplicity of it. You have talent. But you need friends. Talent will get you nowhere. The people at this table will.” I swallow. “Now, it’s no secret that a residency at an establishment like mine will have you voted up into DJ Mag’s Top 100 almost by default. And then you’ll go off and make lots of money and chat with Paul van Dyk about how bad drugs are for your body.” This elicits a cackle of laughter from Gavin and Xavier.
I don’t laugh.
Gavin notices and goes quickly serious. “But that’s also if you DJ out there.” He points at the door we walked in through. “To get out there, you have to go through here. My rules. It’s just the way I like to do it. It builds trust. And, to get out there, my regulars here have to vote you out—or, vote you in, shall we say. You get voted in when you’re good. I have very influential people who come in here for a good time.” He looks at Randy. “It’s a pity old Giuliani never came here!” And another set of cackles from him and Xavier.
I can’t help but notice that, although he does laugh, Randy’s heart’s really not into any of the “jokes.”
“So, what I can offer you is the following.” He raises an index finger. “One gig. Four hours. Two Saturdays from now. You’ll be the main DJ. Randy played me a recording of your set at House Market.” He leans back, exhales and fans himself. “Ooh, girl. Hot. But my crowd’s a little different. We need something a little more”—he waves his hand in the air—“sensual. Think: Paul Emmanuel’s remix of Give it to me Right. Or Gus Gus’s David. To be Real, by Lady Cop. Love for Love—Robin S. Maybe the greatest House song every made. You know the tunes?”
“Every one of them.”
He raises his precisely plucked golden eyebrows like I’m bullshitting.
“It’s my job to know music. Do you want me to sing them for you?” I’m feeling cockier now.
He almost grins, waves his hand lightly over his face like there’s a fly there. “That won’t be necessary. Those tracks have that rolling electric bass. And that gut-ripping sound that makes you know you’re in a club, baby. It’s very...” Again, he waves the hand. “What is that word, damnit?” He fixes a hard look on me, and his joviality is replaced by straight business: “Carnal. Your mixes have some of it. Not enough, but they do have it. It’s not your focus. Your focus is a little darker, perhaps even a little Goth—not in sound, but in feeling. That’s all good, but my crowd likes carnality in their sound more than moroseness. Did you know your mixes are carnal, Blaze?”
It’s as if Randy and Xavier disappear from either side of me, and this man—who I still can’t figure out if I can trust or not—is talking straight to me. Talking the straight dope. Talking music like he knows it. “No, uhm, sir, I didn’t know that.” I take a small sip of the bubbly to wet my lips.
“Sir?” He chortles loudly. Then, gone as fast as it appeared, he’s serious again. “Yes, your music has that. And more. But don’t let it get to your head. And, for my people, you need to cool off on the dark, and bring in a bit more of the sensuality into the mixes. The carnality.”
“I can do that.”
“I’m sure you can. Otherwise Randy here would not have suggested you to me. So, Blaze, one gig. My guests will then let me know if they like you. If yes, we’ll give you a few more sets here. Not necessarily every week. Pay...well...we can discuss that. You’re no top DJ, so...”
I love it when people tell me I’m “no top DJ,” like they’re trying to convince me of it.
“...say, eight hundred for the first gig. That’s way more than many resident DJs make.”
It really isn’t bad. Not great for what I heard guys make here, but it’s not bad. And add it to Randy’s extremely generous two Gs, and my January is looking pretty good.
“What’s in it for you guys?” I look at Randy and Xavier, not expecting any particular one to answer first.
Randy looks at Xavier in his gangsta suit. Xavier doesn’t budge or move, not even his facial expression changes.
Randy coughs, shifts in his seat. “Blaze, as Gavin here pointed out: You need friends in this business. At the moment, I’m making nothing off of this. But I’d like to sign you for a record deal in a few months. Provided people stay interested in you. I don’t want to commit to anything yet. But I hope that, when your name does start getting bigger, that you will give me top dibs before anyone else, no matter how delicious their offers might be.”
Randy’s chestnut eyes are warm and sincere. More sincere than any of the others in here. It feels like sitting with a pack of wild wolves when I look at the other two. “I give you my word on that, Mr. Randy.”
“Just Randy, Blaze. Just Randy.”
Gavin throws in his last two cents: “The same friends t
hat take you up, are the friends who can bring you down.”
He says nothing else.
Neither do I.
The silence is cut by a dude appearing from a curtain in the back. (Another thing clubs are in the day, is quiet.) The dude’s footsteps are like a bass drum. He’s got a buzz cut, and is pretty trim, but sinewy—low body-fat. He’s holding a folded laptop under his arm. He walks up to the table and, from the look on his face, it looks like someone just spat on his mother. He comes over to Gavin, stands next to him. Gavin doesn’t even spare him a glance. “Yes?”
“I’m done.”
Blasé, Gavin says, “Brenda will wire you the remaining funds, minus three hundred for the damages. We warned you, Mad-Ass.”
“Yeah, whatever.” This so-called “Mad-Ass” (who does look pretty mad) glares at me and says, “You the new one? This ‘Heaven’ babe everyone’s talking about?”
My skin goes cold.
“Go ahead, Blaze,” says Gavin. “Mad-Ass here won’t bite. He’s all talk.”
Mad-Ass clenches his teeth. “He given you the ‘friends’ speech yet?”
I look at Gavin. His face evinces nothing. Cold. All business. I nod at Mad-Ass.
“Yeah, well, don’t forget that the guys at the top are not the only friends you need. Actually, they’re not friends at all.” The man’s voice is a deadly growl. “Randy,” he says. “Xavier.” Then, back at me, “Watch yourself. One day there’ll be another Heaven-Leigh, just like you, and you’ll be out on your ass. Just like you’re putting me out on my ass!” He points at me, almost leaning over the table.
I swallow, wanting to plead innocence. Because, really, what the fuck did I actually do?
Almost too bored to move, Gavin the Golden Haired flops a tired hand at Mad-Ass. “Oh, Mad-Ass. Whatever. Blaze here is just filling a gap. You were out a long time ago. Now, get out of here before I have security escort you out.”
Mad-Ass looks at me with a stare that probably kills rabbits when it’s not aimed at young women. “Watch yourself!”
Know Me (Truthful Lies Trilogy - Book One) Page 13