A low-fidelity rhythm thunders like tachycardia, a transcendent beat you both hear as if sharing ear-buds like back when you were kids on the bus. Every movement is part of an orderless dance, from dressing for Fernando's Bachelor Party to doing lines on her coffee table...you didn't even know she had coke, but the white-powder impacts your neon-lit brain and soon there's nothing but the need for revelry.
You want to get drunk until you vomit. You want to dance until your limbs break. You want to
fuck
and
laugh
and
eat
and
rip
and
HUNT
until everything around you is a boiling, crimson lake of the Kill...but not yet. Not until Carmen has joined you.
You watch Lana intently as she cups her round breasts in crimson lace, as she pulls a matching little string of a thong up her hips to cup her sex and temptingly display the teardrop shape of her ass; it's tempting to shove her on her bed, pull that string aside and shove yourself inside of her...but you fucked her over and over again in that impossible darkness beneath the Earth for centuries. A spot of wetness gathers on strip of crimson silk covering the swollen peach of her vagina; she wants it too, it's why she's swaying her hips temptingly at you even as she drapes a mini-dress of black lace over her strong body, edged with designs that remind you of the iron-gate of a graveyard. Your best friend turns and gathers her hair up in a bun, impaling the platinum strands in place with a red chopstick.
"You like?" she asks casually, the shape of her buttocks shifting hypnotically as she turns to face you, hands on her hips. You're seated on her bed, basking in the heat of her stare crawling over you with shameless hunger...how could she not? You know she wants you, she howled like a beast for you for hundreds of years in that chthonic place.
"I
need
...but you'll see. Later," you assure her.
"I want it
now
," she insists, digging her nails into your shoulders and leaving deep crescents. "I'll wait though. I know...I know Arjuna."
You know nothing,
you think; unfathomable thoughts that aren't your own whisper gory imagery of her glassy eyes, staring upward and still at the crescent moon. You can still taste her icy blood, and picture it painting Carmen's lips when you kiss her. There's nothing wrong with it, she understands her part in tonight's raving waltz and if she doesn't -
Arjuna stop this, stop it now she's your only real friend -
-that isn't your problem. The Hunt is Everything.
The clothes make the Hunter. You're looking good in your sleeveless black shirt, revealing freshly carved deltoids and biceps, cable-like extensors. A silver chain hangs around your neck...it burns. You love it. Fitted black pants do little to hide the bulge of your masculinity; you're like a well-honed blade. Shining, with an edge so sharp she won't even feel her tongue split when she kisses you.
It's time.
The time between NOW and THEN lurches by, a taxi or an uber or...something taking you to Fernando's choice spot; a 'gentleman's club' appropriately called Silk Sensations...perhaps not the most creative but people don't come here to be wowed by literary aptitude; they come here to see meat on display. The space between an abattoir and a strip club is small, separated by mere inches of life and breeds of hunger; nobody goes to a butcher shop with the intent to bond with a New York Strip, just as people don't expect intellectual engagement from the girls dancing on stage.
Eating and fucking are both messy necessities whose Venn Diagram is melding into a single circle of brazen flesh.
You've never been to a strip club; it wasn't that you rejected open expressions of sexuality but the whole notion of throwing cash to women who are being taken advantage of always bothered your higher reasoning. That, of course, has been subsumed beneath the layers of your awakened lizard-brain and monstrous instincts.
Your silver-stare and Lana's icy-gaze comb over the club, like sharp-toothed savannah creatures considering clustered herds of gazelles. The audience is primarily men and doesn't play to your palette, but Lana is practically tonguing her teeth with desire; she's always been partial to either sex. The wide open area is hemmed in on both sides by raucous pink bartops whose curving shapes remind you of those old 1950s restaurants, a sort of post-pre-modern attempt at futurism. The circular glass tables are occupied by flint-eyed men with the occasional female trophy sitting bored at their sides, a price they're willing to pay for finery and freedom from drudgery.
Younger men crowd the stage, a stark thing of corrugated steel that reminds you of a slaver's block. You see...a gorgeous woman with golden skin dancing sinuously on stage, winding around a pole like a ribbon of feminine mystique given form. You feel...nothing. No hunger, no lust. A mutual friend of yours claimed that the club's rules ensured the girls had some sense of agency and power over their bodies but that was just American-girl nativity; Lana thinks differently on the subject, Keynesian creature of fortune and opportunity that she was who simply sees people using their assets to earn whatever living they can.
It doesn't matter. The plight or power of the woman on stage is the sort of thing First World people occupied themselves with. People like you, who strode the line between Western opulence and Old World Desperation, could sometimes but focus on the scent of blood in the water.
Or maybe it's just the Monster you are that doesn't care. Fernando and his numerous nearly identical cousins intercept you both at the doorway; they remind you of a gathering of actors who'd be typecast as nebbishy hard-luck side characters...the kind of small man you'd laugh at on screen trying to control a motorcycle too big for him, or getting rejected by a generically pretty girl in a cocktail dress. They take it all with a hard-luck grin. Then again he was the guy getting married and you...you were barely able to distinguish reality from unreality, friend from food.
You and Lana play the Human game. You hug and 'heeey!', you guzzle down lime-biting Silver Label shots and engage in mile-a-minute drunken babble with faceless people associated with Fernando; you knew of them but didn't know them. You acted the part of the old, serious friend, smiling a glass smile as dollar bills fluttered across the stage at the high heeled meat masquerade.
Like sharks in the water you swim with the fish...she doesn't know what the both of you are waiting for, she doesn't even know you're waiting but you remember Carmen's words on Friday.
Work me into your plans.
The better judgment that forms the foundation of your human reasoning encourages you in a dull way to run; it doesn't matter where, as long as escape
Her
but compared to the bellowing mental chorus of DESIRE and HUNGER and NEED, reason may as well pack up and walk shamefully home.
When Carmen enters the room everyone notices, consciously or not.
It isn't that she's substantially more stunning than anyone here, despite the fact that your sexual and emotional pull to her eclipses any prior experience; her simple, flowing white dress with flower prints flatters her heron-slim body but isn't the sort of eye-catcher that saunters by on the catwalk...instead her presence radiates outward like sunlight. You recall one of those old Western films where the hero strides into a saloon and all fall silent, staring with reverence; jealousy; fear...only it's the modern day, so aside from furtive glances and the occasional overlong gawp, she's left in peace.
Carmen's nose twitches almost imperceptibly, drawn by the thread of your scent as her topaz-bright gaze falls upon you. She smiles at you, sly as a mongoose and fetching as a vixen; the crowd milling in front of the bar parts for her like a dromon through chaotic waters. Your heart thunders in your chest, excitement and
delight
at her presence...
But then she lays eyes upon Lana.
Your valkyrie-tall friend is leaning against the bartop at your side, a bead of condensation dripping down the side of the beer glass in her right hand; Carmen's gaze crawls across your best friend's dignified visage, down the definition of her shoulders and hangs on the rounded fullness of her breasts. A tightening sensation roils in your belly, a reminder of when the MONSTER woman of your desires revealed that she not only had a...'mate', but that she was regularly having sex with the both of you. It's a simmering beryl coal in your belly that she ignites by turning her attentions on someone who isn't you; the insecurity whines and moans wordlessly that she's YOURS and not SOMEONE ELSE'S even as your reasoning mind objects. You have no claim over her.
...still, it is with brazen command that she knots her fingers into the front of your shirt and pulls you against her for a hot kiss...the kind you hold with tongue, teeth, with her nails digging into your chest; it's the kind of kiss that makes your guy friends bleat a noisy 'OOOHHH'. Lana watches with fascination, none of the green-eyed venom you'd felt rising in your chest.
Then again you notice that Carmen is making intense eye-contact with her while she's necking with you, favoring you with her trademark cockeyed smirk of mystery before releasing you.
It makes your blood boil / it excites you beyond words
.
Carmen, once you two have entered the gravity well of her personality, pulls you away from your little star system of Fernando(s) who barely seem to notice, focused as they are on the legs, the ass, the tits up on stage; they either know Lana is disinterested or they don't have the confidence to approach her; when they look at Carmen you see unconscious fear slither behind their faces. You're at your own table with the two of them, more or less...watching them entangle with one another.
In your state, words leave your mouth and you don't remember what you say, just that you say the right thing; similarly whatever Fernando or Lana stated goes in one ear, works through your frontal lobe, and then it's gone...Carmen's words, however, hook themselves in your memory.
" - met him at Ford's MMA...you didn't know he fights? Arjuna you didn't tell her about how you got in the ring and tried to beat me - you didn't even *mention* me to her, your best friend? Baby I'm *shocked* - "
*I didn't want to tell her you kicked my ass...*
" - get to see them live in Ashland...I'm surprised, didn't take you for a woman of culture, hmmhmm. INSTRUMENT OF AGGRESSION is usually a bit heavy and fast but I rather like intense experiences, overwhelming sensations..."
*You're looking at me as if I'm one of those overwhelming sensations...do you really think that?*
" - prefer horror from the 1980s; I know, shocker, CGI ruins scares...we should hang, us two, and y'know."
What about me? Am I to be left out, longing and hoping for you while you fuck my friend?
She's in the touching phase already, a delicate caress and Lana smells of arousal.
Your mind curls in on itself while you hold your own glass - how many have you had? Three? Four? You can normally handle two before you start to lose your sense of control. Gazing into the piss-yellow brew, heady with bubbles and stinking of industrial hops, your imagination will not leave you the fuck alone. It assaults you with images of:
