Melt With You

by Alison Tyler

  It was Gael. He had been sleeping on the floor. Tall and tan and naked. Dori closed her eyes and tried harder to remember the previous evening. Had she slept with Bette? Had she fucked Gael? All she could remember was leaving the club, curled up on Van’s lap, letting his warmth soothe her.

  Bette caught her watching and said, ‘Come on, Emma! Make me some coffee, will you?’ Bette looked as if she were in a far worse state than Dori. Her make-up was smeared, and her hair, usually artfully in disarray, was now just seriously messy. Dori headed back to the kitchenette to make the coffee, but found no coffee pot. She looked in cabinets until she located a bottle of instant. Grimacing, she heated water in the tea pot and made her boss a cup of Folgers. Then she went to the bathroom to tackle her own appearance.

  ‘You can wear something of mine,’ Bette called out, ‘if you need a change.’

  Dori felt as if she were moving through quicksand. But when she saw her reflection, she realized that she didn’t look half bad. Her hair just needed a good brushing, and once she’d washed away the previous night’s make-up, she appeared fresh-faced. A sadness throbbed through her, but she guessed that was a combination of coming down from the X, plus confusion at being caught in the 80s.

  Bette seemed to have decided Dori was her new best friend. She drove the two to work in her tiny celadon-hued Karmann Ghia, sighing with relief when she saw that Nina had already opened the store and the day was progressing appropriately, even though Bette’s internal alarm clock had failed. When she saw the OPEN sign hanging in the front door, Bette visibly relaxed.

  ‘I’m going out for real coffee,’ she said. ‘Do you want one?’

  Dori nodded as the thought of real coffee perked her up. Then she settled herself behind the counter with Nina, who was busy painting her long talon-like nails. Dori remembered those nails from high school. Nina was one of the first people she knew to use acrylics, and she kept her nails nearly two inches long, cruel, curving daggers adorned in a gloss of rainbow colors. This meant that she had to use a pencil to punch in the buttons on the register or when making phone calls. Dori had always enjoyed watching her maneuver through life with those dragon-lady nails, although she’d never been tempted to put on a set of her own. Nails like that would have made her job as a make-up artist next to impossible. Clients would have shied away from her in fear.

  ‘What do you think?’ Nina asked, waving her hands in front of Dori for approval.

  ‘Mono Blue, right?’ Dori asked. She loved the fat round bottles of Brucci polishes, and recalled her own collection from her youth. She’d had over a hundred bottles in her nail polish collection, with very few ‘normal’ colors. Black, neon-green, and this beautiful deep blue with shiny silver flecks had been her favorites.

  ‘You have Van last night?’

  Dori looked at her, certain she’d misheard. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Did you have Van?’ Nina repeated, an evil grin on her face. ‘Bette said something about you liking him.’

  Dori swallowed hard. She remembered the way the ladies had discussed their sex lives, but she found it strange to actually be one of those ladies now, instead of a naïve outsider looking in. Nina was gazing at her with a combination of expectation and curiosity. Would Dori fit in with the group? This was the test.

  ‘I had … I had fun,’ she said, and Nina seemed to accept that answer.

  ‘Different from New York?’

  Dori nodded, trying to remember what she’d heard about Manhattan in the 80s. She could only think of movies – Desperately Seeking Susan. After Hours. She tried to remember, but Nina was already off and running on a different topic. Dori watched her, recalling that this was what talking with Nina was always like – being an audience in front of a short-attention-span theater.

  ‘Did Bette tell you the plans for Friday night?’

  Dori shook her head.

  ‘Rocky Horror,’ Nina announced, grinning broadly.

  ‘You all still go to that?’ Dori was surprised. She remembered attending Rocky Horror shows at The Majestic in high school, but she didn’t recall ever seeing any grown-ups in the crowd. She must not have been paying attention.

  ‘Of course,’ Nina said. ‘We get dressed up, drink a little. It’s a blast. What else are you going to do at midnight in this small town? Hit the Creamery? No offense to Gael, but that’s not much of a night.’

  Well, yeah, that’s what Dori’s crowd generally did. Hung out at the Creamery until show time, and then went to Rocky Horror at midnight. She recalled exactly how ancient she’d felt when Rocky Horror had been re-released on DVD in honor of the 25th anniversary. Many of the actors had been interviewed for special features on the disc, and she was horrified at how dignified they all looked. Barry Bostwick with his silver hair and Tim Curry looking more like a lawyer than a lover. Damn. The man should always wear fishnets, in Dori’s opinion. It should be law. Or, at least, he should in her fantasies.

  She realized that Nina had moved onto a new subject. ‘Do you have a favorite character? You must go as Frank-N-Furter, right? With your big eyes, full lips, dark hair …’

  Dori nodded, thinking since that’s who she had dressed as in high school, why stop now?

  ‘I’m usually Magenta,’ Nina said, patting her beehive hairdo, ‘and Bette likes to switch.’

  ‘You bet I do,’ Bette agreed, coming in from the back with a cardboard tray of coffees.

  ‘We were talking about Rocky Horror characters.’

  ‘And I was talking about something else entirely,’ Bette grinned, giving Nina a kiss on the cheek and making Dori’s eyes widen. There was a whole world that she’d never known about when she was a kid, a whole level of sexuality that she’d never even considered, like an electric current running through the conversations all the time. Bette should have a neon sign hanging over her head that flashed SEX, SEX, SEX. ‘Are you coming with us Friday?’ Bette asked, as she handed Dori her coffee.

  ‘Nina just told me. I’m sure I can find something to wear,’ Dori said. She was extremely excited at the thought of hitting The Majestic as a grown-up. The theater had a bar in the front, and she and her friends had occasionally scored drinks with fake IDs. But this would be the first time she could drink there as a grown-up.

  Except, she couldn’t exactly flash her ID, could she? Her driver’s license had been issued in 2006. That might cause some consternation, right? The worst fake ID of all time, one printed with a year two decades in the future. But why worry about being carded? She glanced at her reflection in the mirror behind the counter and, although she looked good, she felt every single day of her thirty-eight years.

  ‘I’m going to be Columbia this time,’ Bette said, breaking through her thoughts. ‘You do my make-up?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And mine?’ Nina asked.

  She nodded. This was one thing she had no worries about. Putting on make-up always soothed her. Which was a good thing, because as she was retouching her own make-up in the back room, she heard Van arrive.

  ‘Where’s the new kid?’ he called out, and her hands started to shake.

  Dori hadn’t been much into sexual experimentation, ever. Not even in college, when her friends bounced around from boyfriend to boyfriend as if each man they met had an expiration date stamped on his ass. Dori had always been on the lookout for the next real love of her life. The next long-term boyfriend before she found the final one. That’s what Bryce had been – or so she’d thought, anyway. The one. Mr Right rather than Mr Right Now.

  Where Dori had bounced around was in college. She’d started at UC Santa Barbara, but couldn’t focus. So she’d transferred to a junior college, trying to appease her parents, who weren’t pleased with the thought that she wouldn’t have a four-year degree. And then finally she’d said ‘fuck it’ and did what she’d wanted to do from the start. She entered beauty school, got her license, and started doing make-up. She’d had a friend who worked behind the scenes on movies and Dori began hanging o
ut with her on sets, filling in when Joelle was swamped, and soon people saw that Dori could handle the hectic schedule on her own. She was in demand right away. But while her professional life seemed almost cosmically blessed, her love life didn’t follow suit. At least, not until she moved to New York and met Bryce.

  Then everything seemed to fall into place.

  Van found her in the back and he wrapped his arms around her slim waist.

  ‘Last night was incredible,’ he said, nuzzling the nape of her neck.

  She was surprised by the warmth of him, by the way her body naturally responded to his touch. It hadn’t been that long since she’d been with someone. Not counting Luke. She had lived with a man for two years, had been granted access to his body whenever she wanted. But this felt different. Maybe it was because of her current predicament, her feeling of being an alien from the twenty-first century. But while she craved human contact, Van craved something else. Or something more. And what Van craved right now was a quickie in the backroom.

  ‘No.’ Dori shook her head quickly.

  He took her head in his hands and made her nod instead, as if he were a puppet master and she was his marionette.

  ‘You’re not serious,’ she added.

  ‘We can’t do it here because there’s only the one bathroom. People are always knocking.’ He seemed to be speaking from experience. ‘But the stockroom …’

  Dori looked at him in the mirror. Being up nearly all night hadn’t affected his looks at all. He’d pulled his long hair back into a ponytail and, with the hair off his face, the striking blue of his eyes stood out even more than usual. He had a cocky, I-am-so-good-looking-how-could-you-possibly-think-of-resisting-me? expression on his face. Inside, she was sixteen again. But maybe she always was. Maybe even in 2008 she still felt like a teenager trapped in a grown-up’s body. She wondered if other people felt the same way, wondered if that was what Luke had meant the other night. That there was no such thing as growing up. Your exterior might change – hair turn gray, wrinkles pull at the corners of your eyes – but the core remained the same. For him, still the high school stud. For her, the wallflower.

  But she wasn’t a wallflower now. Not with Van scooting her out of the bathroom and up the narrow flight of stairs to the stockroom above the salon. And just as the scent of her home had brought her back to childhood, the medley of smells in this room called her back to the years she’d spent working at the store. An uncanny fragrance of sawdust from the unfinished walls combined with perfumes, hair spray, and nail polish from a broken bottle. She’d spent hours up in this tiny stockroom, organizing lipsticks and eyeliners, mascaras in multi-hues. The music reached them, and the heat rose. There was a ceiling fan going all the time back here, the whirr-whirr soothing to her.

  Van pressed against Dori, kissing the collar bone exposed by the boat-neck collar of Bette’s shirt that she’d borrowed, a white sailor-style shirt with blue piping along the hemline and red anchors in a row across the chest.

  ‘You’ve got on one of Bette’s perfumes,’ he said, mouth to her skin. ‘My favorite.’

  She had, chosen from the array of bottles at Bette’s apartment that morning. She’d gone for Egoiste because she’d always loved the sexiness of a woman wearing a man’s cologne. Bette had been the first woman she’d ever known to do that. In Dori’s real life, she sometimes wore Armani’s Black Code and Christian Dior’s Fahrenheit. But she didn’t even think those fragrances existed now.

  ‘They’re going to wonder what I’m doing,’ she said, trying to be the voice of reason.

  ‘No, they’re not.’ He smiled at her, pulling her skirt up as he spoke and giving her a lecherous grin. ‘They’re only going to wonder which position. They’ll know exactly what we’re doing. In fact, knowing Bette, they’re probably taking bets. Five bucks I’m going to fuck you against that mirror.’ He nodded his head to the large oval mirror leaning up against one wall. ‘A twenty that you’ll blow me after I make you come.’ God, he was so dirty. She just loved the way he spoke to her.

  ‘You know, lick your juices off my great big ten-inch …’ he paused before adding, ‘record of a band that plays the blues.’

  She had to laugh at that, wondering if kids today would even understand the reference to the old Aerosmith song.

  ‘Don’t you have to work?’ This was her last-ditch attempt to be adult about the whole thing.

  His eyes roamed over her body, and he seemed to be in awe. ‘I didn’t really see you last night,’ he said. ‘I felt you, of course. And I licked you a little, that curve under your neck. Delicious. But I haven’t ever really gotten to see you. The van was too dark. The Rave was too crazy. God, you’re fucking beautiful.’

  The stereo was suddenly cranked, and Dori realized Bette was making fun of them, playing ‘Hot for Teacher’ by Van Halen. Letting her understand with the soundtrack that she was all-knowing. That nothing could escape her eyes. But was Dori supposed to be the teacher, or was Van?

  She understood that Bette had put this one on solely to mess with her. Generally, Bette stuck to Blondie. Dori wondered what Bette would think if she told her that Blondie’s ‘One Way Or Another’ was now the soundtrack to the dusting device, the Swiffer. Devo was also their bitch, with ‘Whip It’ a sell-out, as well. How many of her treasured 80s songs were now background music for selling hamburgers, cleaning products, tires, and God knew what else? Even her beloved Cure …

  But she had to stop thinking once Van started to really kiss her. His mouth was addictive, but the sensations that his warm lips brought out in her made her want more. More heat. More wetness. More of the way he was treating her.

  Van seemed to understand perfectly. He worked her neck, his mouth on her skin, moving lower. ‘You left this morning before I could grab hold of you,’ he said softly. ‘I would have loved to have gotten you in the shower. The hot water. The soap suds. Your pretty, naked body.’

  ‘You had your hands full,’ she told him matter-of-factly.

  He laughed. ‘Ah, so you’re the jealous type.’ It wasn’t a question, but she took the statement as one. Was she? She didn’t have an answer to that.

  ‘We’re just friends,’ he added, reaching his hands under her skirt and pulling down her panties. ‘Oh, look,’ he said, smiling, ‘You’re wearing Bette’s little knickers, too.’ He snapped the waistband of the camouflage-print bikinis.

  ‘How would you know that?’

  ‘I’ve got the matching bra in my van.’

  Dori didn’t know how to respond to that. Everything the boy said, made her want to ask another question. But for a moment, she couldn’t say anything, because Van was kissing her again. Each time his lips met hers, all of the reasons not to do this vanished. But each time they parted, she felt the worries start once more.

  ‘Will she mind?’

  ‘Mind what? That her bra is in the back of my van? I think Bette goes without most of the time. She only had the bra on that night because her shirt was made of that sheer material. You know, sort of burnt-out velvet …’

  ‘No, will she mind that we’re … that we’re fucking?’

  ‘Are we fucking? I think this is called petting, actually. I haven’t brought my dick out yet.’

  He was right. They were merely kissing. But, as he spoke, he popped the fly on his black jeans, and she had to suck in her breath. The sight of him made her desire to be good evaporate. She wanted to stroke him, to work his cock in her fist. The fact that they’d already been together twice only meant it was easy for her to quiet the moral voice in her mind, as Van pushed her down to her knees.

  The music in the store grew louder.

  Dori remembered buying 1984 – the angel on the cover with the pack of cigarettes on his shoulder. And now … now she had recently read that Eddie Van Halen’s own son was joining the band. A fifteen-year-old. He hadn’t even been alive during the recording of 1984. But David Lee Roth was back, and the group was going on tour.

  What had Violet calle
d it? The Antiques Road Show.

  Dori knew that Van would never believe her if she told him that Hagar would leave … that Van Halen’s son would join up. She could blow his mind if she wanted to. But she’d rather just blow him.

  Quickly, Dori parted her lips and drew in his cock. She was overwhelmed by the way she felt, having sex at work. Having sex with a twenty-four-year-old. She thought of what she’d been like in the 80s, getting this job at The Beauty Box, trying to figure out what grown-ups were really like. Up until then, she’d only been around her parents and their friends. Once she’d landed the job at The BB, she’d realized that most adults were far different from her folks.

  Of course, since going back in time, she’d re-evaluated what she’d known about her parents. Her mother smoked pot. Her father had a hidden box of Playboy magazines. They hadn’t been quite as dull as she’d thought.

  Van ran his fingers over her cheeks, pressed his back up against the wall and started whispering words of encouragement to her. She liked the way it felt to be on her knees for him, liked the way it felt to make him moan. She reached one hand up to trace the tail of the scorpion he had tattooed around his waist. The colors seemed to dance under her fingertips. Why was she so turned on by this boy? She didn’t know. By the time she and Bryce had broken up, they’d forgone most oral pleasures. When they did fuck, it was very paint-by-numbers. His hand here, her body there. A predetermined amount of thrusts before he rolled off her and fell asleep.

  Fucking Van was so different.

  Actually, all of the sex she’d had since the break-up was remarkably different. Her night with Luke, and then Van in his truck, at the Rave, and now.

  Van pulled her to her feet, and he stared into her eyes once more. She was starting to recognize his desires. She could tell that he wanted to be inside of her, and she waited, heart racing, for him to say something, to do something. She was surprised when he reached over her head for a box high up on one of the shelves. And then she grinned. The Beauty Box sold condoms, as novelty items only. Condoms with funny slogans printed on the packet. Happy faces and little fortunes. The sort of thing women bought as favors for bachelorette parties.