A coupe de champagne sits prettily on the table, glowing in the particulate darkness of the club. Each strobing flash of light is a vicious strike, surgical and immediate. It goes red, blue, purple, white, red, blue, purple, white, and so does the coupe, empty as it is. Angular glasses sit scattered across the table, and they are not smooth. They glint out in fragments of color, never showing the same face on their many different sides. Among them is the long, roughened cylinder that Amber abandoned; its frosted surface shatters the incident light into murky mystery. The others are short and faceted. The ice still melting inside compounds those facets into an arcane kaleidoscope that corruscates and fades with each new illumination, bounces off the watered down pink or brown booze still slicking the bottoms of the cups. No matter where you look in this room, pulses of light glimmer back to you, each flat surface host to a hundred glass baubles.
It’s that time of night.
In this antechamber the music is blunted, less the catastrophic waterfall roar of the main rooms and more a low, drifting tremor that the graduate student can feel in her lungs.
And feeling it, the scientist sinks into
the couch beneath her.
To either side slate grey cotton rises up;
she moves her hands in endless tactile infatuation.
The surface is rough in a way that not much is, now.
In a moment, she will close her eyes to listen.
You will, too.
Above all and below all, the physical force of the music obtains. It stands in the interstices of the glasses. Of our senses. It soaks our breath like humid air. Through this medium comes gliding the razor edge of laughter, clinking, a shouted conversation. And if we feel closer, closely: the paraliminal beating of the graduate student’s anarchic heart underscores the sound, just there, of mouth and mouth.
Our eyes open with the woman’s, soft slow languid, and though we can see the couple on the couch behind hers, she cannot. She knows, though, how the shorter woman pulled the taller by the hand, the shifting skirt; velvet knees on the rough cotton couch. She can hear the movement of their hair. She leans forward. Amber has been gone, she knows. Long enough for the student’s glass to glow red blue purple white. It doesn't matter; she has the couch and its rough musical weave. The biologist watches the people dancing by the opening that leads to her den, luxuriates in the synchronicity of sound and sight and her open hand. The beat drops and so do the dancers and so does the light. She is still watching them when Amber’s outline appears at the door. Her blonde curls a halo.
– Hellooo, Amber calls as she steps through the doorway. The graduate student can’t hear it, but she can see it on her friend’s painted lips.
Amber is in the doorway and Amber is flourishing in the antechamber’s empty belly and Amber is smiling and leaning down to press a Sunflower into the student’s forgotten, empty hands. That explains the wait.
“How much– ” says the addict, and even though she moves over as Amber sits down there is still a long line of contact that she can’t avoid, silk to satin. She tries again. “How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it,” says her friend. “It was free.” Amber is glittering like all the glass in the room. The addict is blinded, just a little.
“How’d you manage that?” She turns her head away, takes a sip.
“I may have flirted with the girl in front of me in line,” says Amber. She’s laughing.
“And that got you two drinks?” says the student, incredulous.
“We’re both blondes,” says Amber. “Apparently that’s worth more than one drink.“ She’s still laughing and swaying and pressed up against the woman’s side. The woman tilts too, to look at her friend.
“It was more, wasn’t it!” A scandal. “She bought you three drinks and you’re still back here!”
”Well,” Amber draws out the word. She takes a sip of her gin and tonic and looks up at the woman through her lashes*. “Okay, it wasn’t three. She bought me one and I was practising, you know? And when we’d finished she wanted to have another, and she stood in line with me but I told her I had to get back to you. So it’s free!” The graduate student frowns as she tries to catch at the thread of the story. The women behind them move and her hands are full; the Sunflower.
She drinks. A golden line runs out from the corner of her mouth and down her chin to fall to her chest and as it falls she makes the choice to leave the story where it is. When it hits the woman leans forward again. The contact, shoulder hip knee, is broken, but our scientist looks over her shoulder and says, “We should go out again, after.” Red blue purple white, Amber’s face alight and shifting, Amber’s eyes dark and new. When the shadow takes her again she is raising her glass to the woman, taking a searing drink. She says, “Yes,” and smiles at the scientist like there’s no doubt at all about why she’s here. The woman doesn’t know why she’s here.
The student drinks. Then, there is a hand in her face and Amber standing above her with her golden halo afire with the frenetic lightning of the club and when the student ignores it and stands on her own with her own balance and her own drink drained the room spins and shivers. Then that hand on her arm. A voice in her ear. Amber against her side again.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“I’m okay,” the scientist says bright eyes dizzying dizzying smile. She takes Amber’s hand.
She leads her out to the dance floor.
Face lifting to the sky, in the rainstorm press of light bodies the woman shows her teeth and feels all of the shoulders and hips and thighs and hands in their hundred blind ways shred at her brute base edges. Oceanic crash and break and break and break and break while up above on the great iron ring of the second floor the other people watch. The colors of light swing and cut through the air to cut out the faces of the crowd. This is a way of being without one body.
Our scientist is not dancing as much as she is swaying, her movements dreamy and fluid and set to the time of a beat defined by light and touch as much as sound. A presence at her back and she moves into it, body to body until it moves away. One at her front, this time persistent. Her eyes open to Amber’s shock of hair and so she brings a hand to her friend’s waist. They don’t do this; the graduate student has been expecting it. They drift together. The woman brings her other hand up, brushes the tips of her fingers against Amber’s ribs. Amber twists–
stretches jolting away and none of us really expected that, did we? A flash of brilliant blue light carves the student’s suddenly sober expression into a caricature. Darkness blankets the women once more, but you can still watch as the liar schools her features back into a clumsy, drunken grin. That’s all Amber sees when she turns back to our actress, and it seems to work. Amber is unconcerned, happy. Amber is back to movements that echo the music’s beat and not the student’s, back to her cautious distance, near enough to touch but too far to kiss. The scientist isn’t looking when her friend is submerged in the crowd. She has closed her eyes.
The song changes and the student resurfaces to find herself alone. She doesn't have time to feel abandoned; there is a woman standing on the tips of her toes to speak into the scientist’s ear.
The Unknown: Your friend left.
The Addict: I guess that’s what you get when you take a straight girl to a gay club.
The Unknown: Her loss.
The woman pulls the woman into an aggressive grind. Her ebb and surge; the sublunary deluge. She is demanding. She is demanding. It’s that time of night. Neither woman hesitates at the kiss, at the slipstream slide of wandering mouth to wandering hands. When the other woman sets her teeth into the botanist's lip, the graduate student has to fight to lie still on the bed. She has been dancing around Cal for months now, each touch and text and call a tentative foray, a hasty retreat. It wouldn’t do to startle her now.
Because Cal is such a delicate little bird, isn't she, always on the edge of flight. But she wants to trust the plant scientist, she is willing to trust the plant scientist, though she is so skittish that she bolts even when she wants to stay. But now, in the thin darkness of winter, Cal strokes the length of the student's side, slips her hand up into the addict's hair and so lightly down the skin of her neck. Has been stroking her side for an hour. If the graduate student didn’t know any better she would say that Cal has been teasing her for an hour, even though they’ve never so much as held hands before tonight. So the kiss is blinding, an assault on the woman’s already seething nervous system, an onslaught so calamitous that the addict can do nothing but submit to Cal’s whims and hope that her self control has enough steel to it. The scientist wants to show Cal that people can be good. The scientist can be passive. The scientist will be good. Cal’s teeth are at her throat and –
– the timer’s going off, her alarm is going off, she needs to leave for work. She pulls herself up and says, “Okay, I really have to run now.” Cal is still lying there, the wan spreading spring sunlight washing out her rumpled clothes into faint grays and violets, and now her face is contorting, horrible, and now she’s screaming, a wordless, wild, stunningly primitive sound. The woman doesn’t quite know what she is supposed to do here; her girlfriend is shockingly far outside of bounds but perhaps this is part of her wounding too. Cal has been so mistreated. The woman goes back to soothe her, expects a bite and a punishing grip but –
– the kiss is so gentle and diaphanous that the addict isn’t quite sure what she is feeling in the late spring breeze. Cal’s lips are not allowed to be there anymore, aren’t allowed on the student’s neck, aren’t really allowed anywhere near the student so maybe it’s all about plausible deniability. The woman thinks about vomiting, heaves herself away and –
–finds herself in a club. She’s got her arms up in front of her chest and her hands held like cages, like she wants to protect both her eyes and her ears but she can’t decide which she should prioritize. Maybe it’s her neck. The other woman is laughing.
Into the ragin, glimmering night, the scientist says, “I need to get some air”. Her pace is sleek as she moves through the crowd towards the courtyard outside of the club. She’s lost her connection to everything; the booze, the beat, the people. Amber. The bench she chooses is sheltered by the rich red floral spikes of a rhododendron tree. Let’s join her. Beside us, opium poppies sway, their heads heavy and their petals fluttering downwards at the lightest touch. The addict presses her fingertips to the fat fruit of a poppy and finds that her hands are steady and so she takes the fruit in a fierce grip. A painted nail dug into its flesh draws its white latex blood; she watches as the viscous liquid that took Mika down drips onto dirt. The woman licks her finger clean. It’s disgusting.
The botanist spends a long time with the flower. It’s different than her research subjects, curvaceous and deadly where they are narrow and reserved. She doesn't know much about this kind of being. When the addict culls the flower it’s with the entitlement of a scientist. She cracks the crown of its seed pod open with a twist; thousands of tiny seeds pour out. The scientist isn’t sure if she is hearing their impacts or feeling the cascade strike her hands and her body, but in either case she knows it is like rain.
She is rolling the seeds between her fingers when Amber appears in the courtyard, a glass of clear red wine cradled in her interlaced hands. A curl has been caught in the ivy framing the doorway. Amber doesn’t seem to notice, but the students eyes are caught on it as it stretches past endurance and finally springs back into shape. Amber might be stumbling; the graduate student can’t tell one way or another. I think, though, that that girl is stone cold sober, and that stumble is a put on.
Amber: Oh, no!
Amber moves inelegantly to the bench beside the botanist, pressing herself against our student’s side.
Amber: She didn’t really look much like Cal, did she?
Amber* brings her arms around the graduate student’s shoulders and the graduate student, reflexive, brings her own to cover her chest and face. Amber’s eyes harden. Her lips thin.
Amber: What did she do to you?
The woman is silent.
Amber: I wish I had been there, I could have helped. But I couldn’t find you, you know, since you left me to get with her. It was a little jarring! I even went to the second floor to try to spot you, but your hair is so hard to find in this lighting. I texted you a few times too. Your phone is probably in coat check, though, isn’t it. I don’t really like being left all alone in clubs.
The woman’s face is lowered. Her eyes are on the hundreds of poppy seeds littering the ground.
The woman: I’m sorry
Amber: I’m here for you, you know.
Amber’s eyes have glossed over with unshed tears and her voice has broken and failed. Her arms have fallen away from the graduate student to wrap around her own body. The graduate student responds without thinking, pulling her old friend into a rigid hug. Amber’s face presses into her shoulder. She is not crying. She is saying, “I’m sorry, I must have had too much to drink,” but the scientist still pets at her hair, keeping up a gentle murmur of apologetic comfort. As she does this, the woman looks up, and, oh!
Is she looking at us? No, she can’t be. She can’t see us. We aren’t a part of this story. But that is anger on her face, unconcealed under the wash of her apologies and the bright moon. Look. Her face in the night. It is brutal, and cold, and white.