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.
