by Mia Storm
“Which has nothing to do with Juan or anything else,” she finishes.
“But has everything to do with Byron,” I say, flipping to the end of the book. “He died from injuries he received at war fighting for Greece’s independence while he was in the middle of writing Canto seventeen. The adventures of Don Juan themselves are thought, in certain literary circles, to be poetic re-imaginings of Byron’s own escapades and dysfunctional relationships with the women in his life. Basically an imaginative autobiography wherein Byron retells the classic story of Don Juan with himself as the womanizer.” I lean back. “Like writing himself into his own porn.”
When she smiles and lowers her lashes, I realize I said what I just did to see what her reaction would be. I need to rein myself back. She’s totally off-limits.
“But why would he want to portray himself like that,” she says, lifting her eyes back to mine. “I mean, Don Juan’s kind of an idiot. I get that he’s sixteen and all, but it seems like he’s just sort of stumbling around here and there and lands dick first in women’s crotches totally by accident.”
And, Christ. She just picked up my innuendo and dished it right back.
Game fucking on.
I lean forward onto my elbows. “That’s true in a lot of ways. As I said, he’s generally the pursued in Byron’s version.”
Her eyes scan down my face to my chest, then over my biceps. It’s only with her scrutiny that I realize how tightly I’m clenching every muscle in my body, trying to keep it from responding to her presence.
“And he seems to like it,” she says, her eyes lifting back to mine.
I swallow when I feel my dick twitch to life again. “Yes. But what sixteen-year-old boy wouldn’t.”
“But his lovers are all older.” Her gaze twitches to my left hand, where it lays on her open copy of Don Juan, then back to my eyes. “And married.”
“And, therein lies his conflict.”
“He doesn’t really seem that conflicted.” She leans closer and lowers her voice. “He just fucks them.”
Fuck. There’s nothing I can do to stop my hard-on from raging. “Keep reading. Things go downhill fast.” Because they always do when you fuck people you’re not supposed to.
She leans back and pulls the book out from under my hand. “You’ll work it through with me? Because, I’ve got to tell you, I’m not seeing the conflict.”
“What year are you?” I don’t even realize I’ve said it until it’s out of my mouth.
Her eyes flick from the book to mine. “A senior.”
I feel my eyebrows arch before I can stop them. “You look younger.”
She bites her lips between her teeth for a moment. “Is that good or bad?”
“Neither, I suppose.” But my insides burn, knowing that she’s not as off-limits as I originally thought. It’s nearing the end of January. Commencement will be here soon enough. She graduates and all bets are off.
“So…” she says, twisting a finger into the ends of her hair. “I know you like old, dead poets. How do you feel about hearing something fresher?”
I lean toward her. “Such as?”
“I’m reading in a poetry slam tonight. It’s just something over at Tino’s in Jonestown on the fourth Friday of every month. There’s no prize money or anything, but I perform something new pretty much every month.”
“A poetry slam…” I want to say yes in the worst way, but it feels dangerously like a date.
She must read the hesitation in my eyes. “If it’s too weird, no worries. I just thought, since you like poetry…”
She leaves the thought dangling. Like a noose. And I jump right into it. “Yeah. Why not?”
The answer to that rhetorical question is that it’s not May yet and she hasn’t graduated. I’m risking everything I’ve worked the last three years toward. My entire future. But the voice of reason is being drowned out by the raging waves of something rolling up from the deepest layers of my being like an undertow. Something base and essential. And unrelenting.
“Do you want to meet me there?” she asks, standing from her seat and giving me a better view of the entire exquisite length of her.
“Yeah…that’s probably best.” Plausible deniability. No, Dr. Duncan, I didn’t have any clue she’d be there. Just went to hear the poetry.
“Great,” she says as she gathers her book and shoves it in her bag. “It starts at nine. There are usually five or six poets and it’s a random draw, so I don’t know what time I’ll be reading.”
I nod without standing, no longer able to tame my erection. “I’ll be there at nine.”
“You know where Tino’s is?”
Electricity crackles under my skin. I’m really doing this. “Yeah. I’ll find it.”
∞
I feel better about the whole thing when I walk into Tino’s. The bar is very dimly lit except for the spotlight on the MC up on the stage. He’s a blond kid, probably twenty, with a top hat and a flair for the dramatic. As I move deeper into the room and my eyes adjust, I don’t see anyone I know. Including Blaire.
I find a seat at an empty table for two tucked into the back corner near the bar, and a toothpick thin waitress comes over for my drink order.
“What’s your house scotch?” I ask, needing something stiffer than a beer to calm my jitters.
“Johnny Walker Red,” she says, jutting a bony hip and fisting her hand on it. “Want some?”
“Sounds good. Make it a double.”
“You got it,” she says, already twitching toward the bar.
Onstage, the MC finishes announcing the first poet, and an Asian woman takes the stage. I lean back in my seat and rub my eyes as she starts her poem, something about a tsunami.
“Hey.”
Blaire’s sand-on-silk voice is right beside me. A second behind it, the warm press of her hands on my shoulders knead them down from my ears. She’s only touched me once before, when her hand brushed mine taking the book from me that first day in the library. Just like then, her touch is like a grenade, sending shrapnel ripping through my insides and leaving me gutted and gasping.
“Hey,” I answer when I’ve gained my composure, twisting in my seat to see her.
She’s pulled her dark waves up and pinned them into a loose bun on the back of her head. She’s changed into a long-sleeved blue top, but I can’t tell if she put on a bra for the occasion because she’s got a scarf around her neck that hangs over her breasts.
“You’re so tight,” she says, her fingers massaging deeper.
“This should help with that,” the waitress says, back with my drink. She thumps it on the table in front of me and looks at Blaire over my shoulder. “What about you, honey? Something to drink?”
“Just a Diet Coke,” she says, releasing me and slipping into the seat on my right. Once the waitress is gone, she pulls her chair closer and leans in. “I’m last tonight. Better for scoring.”
“Scoring?”
She gives a loose shrug. “It’s pretty random. Every night there are five judges. They score just like in the Olympics, from one to ten based on how much they liked the poem.”
“But you said there’s no prize money.”
Blaire looks at the stage as the first poet finishes and the audience claps. “The bigger slams all offer prizes to attract better known poets, but this is just for the community, so all we’re competing for is bragging rights.” She smiles up at the waitress as she sets her Coke in front of her, then turns back to me. “And every once in a while, someone gets discovered at one of these things.”
A boo goes up from the crowd when the MC starts to read the scores. I turn and see a guy at the bar holding up a 5.5 on his whiteboard. The other scores are in the sevens and eights.
Two more poets perform, and they fare a little better, inching into the nines.
“That’s Gloria,” Blaire says, pointing at the black woman climbing the stairs to the stage, preparing to perform. “She’s really good. She usually wins when s
he brings something original.”
“Doesn’t everyone?” I ask, then clarify when she gives me a blank stare. “Isn’t every piece performed original poetry?”
She sips her Coke from the straw and nods when she understands what I’m asking. “We all write our own poetry, but most of what you hear is rehashed. Some of them read the same thing over and over for months. That’s when the scores really drop, since it’s generally the same people here listening each time. If you want to score, you have to bring something fresh, which is why I write something new every month.”
“Can’t wait to hear it.” I can’t help but smile at her enthusiasm.
She twirls a tendril of loose hair around her finger and sucks on her straw, her eyes shifting to the woman onstage. My gaze doesn’t follow, even though I will it to. I can’t take my eyes off the smooth line of her jaw and the curve of her mouth, the nose that turns up slightly at the end. Her whiskey eyes are large and wide-set under arching black brows that flatten at the outer ends. She’s exquisite.
Fucking flawless.
“She’s done that one before,” she says with a scrunch of her nose, turning back to me, and I realize I didn’t hear a word the woman onstage uttered.
I reach for my scotch and knock half of it back in one swallow.
Blaire leans her shoulder into mine when I set my glass down and juts her chin at the mousy pubescent boy on the stage, reciting about coming out to his parents. “I’m next. Wish me luck.”
“Does break a leg apply in these situations, or is that just cliché?” I ask with a smile.
She smiles back and pushes up from her seat as the boy finishes and the scores go up. “I’ll take it.”
The MC reads off the scores, all in the mid to high nines, as Blaire waits at the bottom of the stairs. “And last, but certainly not least, we have a crowd favorite,” the MC says as Blaire starts up the stairs. “Our very own, Blaire Leon!”
Something inside me prickles when he catches Blaire by the waist on her way by and whispers something in her ear. She smiles and takes her place under the spotlight behind the mic. She takes a deep breath, then steps closer, lifting her head to the audience. Before she’s even said a word, there’s a whoop from the back of the room, followed by a “You go, girl!” from the poet, Gloria, who’s sitting at a front table with a group of others who have already read.
“They tell you when you’re a baby not to touch yourself,” Blaire starts with consternation on her face and the waggle of a finger. “When you’re a teen, they say: Don’t look. It’s dirty. That website is nasty. And besides, it’s not really like that. No one actually does that. No one sounds like that. It doesn’t feel like they make it look like it feels.”
She lowers her hand and her face softens. “Wait, they say, until you’re older. Wait, they say, until you’re in love.”
Her expression grows into a combination of wary and confused as she lifts a questioning hand, palm up to the audience. “But if sex is dirty, why would I do it with someone I love? If sex is dirty, then didn’t we all come from the dirt? What if I like the dirt?”
She pauses, rolls her head to the side and closes her eyes. Her hands smooth down her sides and splay on her thighs. “What if I want to get dirty?”
Her eyes open and search like a beacon through the dark room, locking on mine. She hooks her fingertips under the hem of her short skirt and I feel my cock respond, swelling at the thought of where she’s going—and where I’m fucking dying to take her.
“What if I want to roll in the mud until I’m so fucking filthy that I’ll never be clean again? Does that make me bad? Nasty? A whore? Does it mean I’ll never find love? A life? A man who respects me?”
She lets go of her skirt and her expression hardens. “And what about that man? How dirty is he? Does anyone even care if he’s caked with mud? Does anyone even notice?”
A strand of long, dark hair springs free when she gives her head an angry shake and cascades down the side of her face, partially covering one eye. “The answer, my friends, is no. He can be filthy and somehow that makes him hotter. It makes all us dirty girls want to get even dirtier with him.”
She’s heaves a few deep breaths, as if calming herself from the rant she was working herself into. When she continues, there’s a rasp of despair in her voice.
“If I like to fuck, and he likes to fuck, how does that make us different? Why do his friends talk about me like a piece of meat when mine talk about him as if he hung the moon? Why do my guys never call again, but his women sext him the second they leave his bed?”
One more deep breath. “When they say it’s a man’s world, they must be talking about the bedroom. Glass ceilings are shattering. We’ll have a female president someday. But only if she’s never slept around. Because a male president can get head in the Oval Office, but no goddamn dirty whore is ever going to be good enough to run our country.”
She drops her head and steps back from the mic.
There’s a second of stunned silence, but a woot from the audience breaks it just before the entire place breaks into thundering applause. Blaire bows with a flourish, then skips off the stage with a smile and wave.
I’m still reeling as I turn to the room and watch the first score go up—the guy in the back who’s been tough on everyone tonight. A ten. One 9.9 pops up before two more tens and a 9.6.
I watch her wend her way back to me and my gut reaction is to bolt as the fight or flight reflex takes control. If I understood what she just said, she’s down with getting dirty. Filthy. And I want to fucking roll her in the mud so hard I can taste it. But I can’t.
Not yet.
She slips back into the seat next to me and pulls off her scarf, hooking an elbow behind the backrest.
And, Christ, this girl is going to be the fucking death of me.
Her shirt is damp with stage sweat and there is definitely no bra. The thin cotton fabric hugs tight nipples at the tips of breasts that aren’t big enough to be fake, but are firm and round and a perfect handful.
“What did you think?” she asks a little breathily.
“It was…” I swallow. “Just fucking…wow.”
“Not exactly Blake or Byron,” she says, trying and failing to hide a cocky smirk. “I don’t think Professor Duncan really understood what I was talking about when I said I write poetry.”
A smile blooms over my face with the image of Blaire reciting that poem in Dr. Duncan’s class. “Poetry’s not really about iambic pentameter and rhyming anymore, is it?”
“It is and it isn’t.” She slips my scotch glass from my fingers and takes a slow sip. I memorize the curve of her neck and the way her throat moves as she swallows. She lowers the glass to the table and watches her index finger trace the rim. I memorize the shape of her hands and her slender fingers tipped in midnight blue polish. “I think that’s how we all started and I still enjoy writing that kind of poetry. Traditional poetry is important for teaching us how to craft language. But slam poetry is more about rhythm and execution than actual rhyming and structure.” She brushes the errant strand of hair behind her ear. As she lifts her eyes to mine, they sink three layers deeper into me than anyone else’s ever have and moor themselves to my soul. “Nothing about slam poetry is timid or restrained. It doesn’t speak; it screams.”
I close my hand over hers on my glass. “It was incredible. You were incredible.”
I’m losing myself in her eyes. She’s got the power to do that to me—make everything else just fade out until the only thing in my world is her.
“Hey, Blaire!”
The voice rips me out of Blaire and I look up at the MC, standing on her other side.
“You were seriously killing it up here tonight!” he says with a grin. But I don’t miss how his eyes slip to me and narrow slightly.
“Thanks,” she says.
His eyes move between us. “This your uncle or something?”
My throat constricts.
“Caiden, this is C
raig,” she says, flipping a hand at him, “the owner’s son. Craig, this is my friend, Caiden.”
He holds out his hand. I take it and he squeezes more than shakes. “Blaire is something, huh? Had you heard her read before?”
“No, I hadn’t, and yes, she is.”
Blaire stands. “We’ve got to go,” she says, grabbing her bag from under the table. She starts toward the door and flips a wave behind her. “See you next month, Craig.”
I follow but her progress is slow. Everyone wants a piece of her. They’ve all got a hug or a pat on the back for her, and she seems to know them all by name. I stand to the side, preferring that she doesn’t try to introduce me to any more of them and, finally, we make our escape.
Compared to the steamy bar, it’s cold when we step outside onto the walk.
“It’s freezing out here,” she says, wrapping her scarf around her neck, then hugging herself. “You want to get some coffee or something?”
Every fiber in my body wants to wrap itself around her and warm her from the inside out. “Coffee sounds great.”
“The Bean is just up the street. If they’re still open…”
I take her elbow and we walk in the direction she indicated. “How long have you been performing your poetry?”
“About two years.”
“You were really…incredible.” I keep struggling for a word that truly captures what I’m trying to say and falling miserably short. “I’d love to hear more of your work.”
She wraps her fingers around mine, where they rest lightly on her arm, and smiles. “I’m here every fourth Friday of the month.” She presses closer. “Or I could give you a private reading anytime you want.”
Her breast is against my arm, doing things to totally unrelated parts of my body. “That would be…” I look at her and her eyes flash a message into mine. My groin hears it, loud and clear.
She turns toward the storefront we’re passing. “Damn.”
I glance past her and see we’re at The Bean. It’s dark inside. “No big thing.” I look back toward Tino’s and see we’re near my car, just on the other side of the street. “Where are you parked?”