by Katie Porter
“That was when you thought I was a groupie.”
“I’m not banging the daughter of my...”
His eyes cloud. He doesn’t have an end for that sentence, and who could blame him? He and Ian—best friends since childhood—met my dad through friends of friends, when they were in need of a guitarist for their new band. Alec and Ian were in university together. Dad was younger than them. He should have been in the English equivalent of high school, but he was working instead. Or maybe also? I don’t know a lot about Dad’s history that didn’t end up in interviews.
Together the three of them formed a band. The Skies. They lived together, adding Nicholas to the picture to replace their busted drum machine. Eventually they fought, drank, shared food. Everything. Before they were nothing.
“I’m not fucking Silas’s daughter.”
“You won’t fuck groupies,” I say. “You won’t fuck me. Who do you fuck?”
“No one, really. Not lately.”
I lean into his touch, letting my head tip, making it more than he meant this moment to be. He smells expensive. “What if I tell you that I want it? That I crave you? That I fell asleep touching myself last night, making myself come over and over.”
“I’d say you’re an angry woman who’s lying.”
He’s right about half of that. “Are you sure you’re a real rock star?”
“Not anymore.”
I turn my face into his hand, let my lips slide across the palm. Watching him means looking out of the corners of my eyes. “I’m not lying and I can prove it.”
“Am I supposed to believe you took pictures, just in case?” He’s trying to act snide but failing because he wants them. Wants pictures. He’s gagging for them, even though he hates himself for it. So much judgement turned inward on himself.
“No,” I tell him. “Not that time.”
I take his hand in both of mine and pull it away from my face. He lets his limb be turned as I like, as if I’m in charge of him. The thrum of his subtle strength tells me I’m not, but it’s kind of him to allow me this delusion. I guide his hand down the front of my pajama pants. I have panties on this time, but they’re satin and thin to begin with. Now they’re soaked with my cream. His touch sears my already throbbing flesh.
He doesn’t look down. I don’t either. Our breath passes back and forth in something closer than a kiss.
“Anyone could...” he says on a whisper.
“Anyone could.”
Still he doesn’t pull away. I hold my hands around his wrist and rock my body. He curls his wrist, providing resistance and strength. I wiggle so that his fingers push my panties between my lips. My clit tingles. A moan slips from me.
That’s what it takes. That’s what breaks him. The sound of my lust, my desire in the air and wrapping around him.
He lashes an arm low around my hips. I’m not lifted far from the ground, but it’s enough. He walks me backwards through the door to my bedroom of the suite. I don’t know how he knew it was mine; I don’t care.
We ram up against the window and I don’t have to fuck myself on his hand anymore. He’s doing all the work, his fingers sliding in and out of my wetness. He plucks the swollen nub of my clit. I let my head fall forward, resting my forehead against that pristine white shirt. I want my hair to fall around my face so I can hide, but he hooks his free hand underneath my chin and pushes my face up toward him.
He watches me. Inspects me. I want to pretend that I don’t know what he’s looking for, but we both know it. My truths. The honesty of the way I want him. That this isn’t some big lie.
He doesn’t kiss me until I come. When he has three fingers deep in my channel and his thumb alongside my clit, I explode. Then he takes my mouth. His lips are too hard to be perfect. His kiss is too cruel to be loving. He’s too furious with himself.
I only have moments to ride out the orgasm. Seconds, maybe. There are no kind pets or lingering caresses. He takes my waist and turns me around. I press against the window, my hands on the cold glass. My elbows lock. The English day is grey outside. I close my eyes.
Alec presses his dick against my ass. When men wear jeans, when men’s dicks are average, it can be hard to tell if that lump is an erection or a fold of cloth. Not with him. Not with the fine wool of his trousers. Not with the hard, lengthy bar of his cock.
I spread my fingers on the glass and tilt my hips backwards, rubbing up along him. His hands dig into my hips but he’s not trying to stop me. Instead, he’s holding me closer to him, reaching up to unbutton my top. He parts the cloth wide and explores me by touch. His forehead digs into my shoulder. The silk strands of his hair stick to my orgasm-sweaty neck.
“Afraid to have me naked?”
His hand spreads over the back of my head and gently shoves my head against the glass. My cheek goes flat. Cold seeps in at my temple and my bared shoulders. The room is so clean, so pure and pristine and unlived in. Unloved in. Only the rumpled bed says anyone has been here.
“Can’t they see enough of you already?” He grinds against my ass. His shaft is safe behind wool and his leather belt.
“No one is looking,” I say, dizzy.
“Someone is always looking. That is one thing I know.”
Does he mean strangers? Or himself?
He reaches between my ass and his hips, releases his belt. My breath catches and stutters and I’m tingling from head to toe. My pussy is clenching. Nothing is enough. He could fuck me for hours and it wouldn’t be enough. I’m breathless at the possibility that he might put his body inside mine. He opens the fly of his slacks and there’s no fumbling. He’s far too urbane for the mistakes of a teenager.
He strokes his cock. His knuckles rub over the curve of my pajama-covered ass. He palms my tits, clenches them hard, abuses my nipples with avid pinches. I tilt my pelvis to tempt him. He keeps up greedy pulls on his dick. Selfish.
I try to turn and he stills my head against the window, not even letting me look. His long fingers spread across my skull, through my hair, and lash me down. This doesn’t count if I can’t see him—as if he can get away from the truth of us, the line he’s crossing again after knowing who I am.
I close my eyes and I can see it all better inside my head. His pale skin and dark hair. His crude, rough strokes. There’s desperation on his face, I know. His mouth must be drawn so tight and hard. I rear up even though I don’t want him to let me go. I only want to feel the way he’s holding me down. I revel in the constriction.
When he runs his thumb over the head of his dick, picking up wetness and stroking it along his skin, I can imagine that too. He’s that close to me. We’re that intertwined. He can pretend whatever he needs to, but I can tell when his body tenses, when he drives harder against me. His shoulders are edgy. His arm moves against my back. His cock is metal pipe. He’s going to come.
He hides his eyes against my neck. I reach behind myself and catch his hip, his waist. So much fine cloth. I can barely find a strip of skin to sink my nails into. His groans are music.
His body jerks and his hips drive forward, fucking his hand and by proxy, me. Come spurts across the skin of my lower back in hot streaks. He grunts a filthy word against my nape. Gooseflesh takes over my skin.
I want to cry and I want to howl in triumph too. What the fuck is wrong with me? What’s right anymore?
At least he doesn’t leave me. He doesn’t drop me like a whore. He slurs his hand through his mess on my skin, drawing it up my spine. Smearing it wider. I should be mad. Offended.
Christ, I’m not. I revel in the stickiness. My tattoo.
“I can’t be here,” he says. The conflict vibrates from him. No one comes that hard and still has so much tension resonating in their bones.
I don’t answer. There’s nothing pretty I could say. Even now, I want him. I need to break him apart and see the bits inside, and I don’t know what the fuck is so goddamn compelling about him.
He touches the corner of my mouth. There’s come o
n his fingertip, salty and sticky. “You make me feel like I’m standing in a puddle of petrol.”
“I suppose I should stop handing you matches.”
“But you won’t.”
“No. I won’t.”
Chapter Five
Alec
IAN IS WAITING FOR me on the curb outside the same cafe we’ve been going to for the better part of three decades. The area’s come up, much as he has.
The first time or two we met here, there was a scrubby street dweller sleeping against the telephone box with a watch cap dragged down around their ears. Their bony wrists stuck out from a battered jumper. They were always asleep, probably on the nod, but the cups of hot chocolate I left seemed to be appreciated. I hadn’t the chance to figure out if they were a boy or a girl before they disappeared one day, never to be seen again. I thought about them for a long time, hoping their life turned into something better.
I still hope the best for that child. I wish I’d been in a better place to give good things into the world. For too many years I took. When I came to a place in my life where I could look around and understand that the universe moves beyond me and is happy to do so, our cafe creature was gone.
No more hot chocolates and biscuits to leave.
The whole of the neighborhood is different as well. Where once there were dirt-dark streets, now there’s shiny concrete. The facades of the buildings no longer crack and list overhead. Three buildings down is the flat that I shared with four other blokes, one of whom was Ian. The lounge had been converted into another sleeping area, so there was no communal space but the kitchen and this cafe.
Ian and I came here a lot, before we’d head to our bedroom to smoke and listen to records. That many years ago, Ian was as short as he is today, but less round. It suits him somehow, a Scotsman who’s settled into his true gnomish form.
I call his name once I’m near enough to be heard. We indulge in our usual awkward greeting, which includes leaning toward each other as if we might be capable of hugging, but then avoiding the possibility. Very English, no matter how long we’ve been friends.
The inside of the cafe has been modernized as well. The floors are wide, ashen planks. The small round tables are ebony, the chairs matching. It’s owned by the same family, but the newest generation is by now firmly in charge. They’ve made updates.
Ian buys a coffee and a small pile of macarons. I settle across from him at his table and wrap my hands around a paper cup of tea. Unless I want to scald myself, I can’t drink it yet. I’m not sure what the difference would be between that and what I did with Harlow. Scalded.
“I hear you’ve made an arse of yourself,” Ian starts in.
I lurch. The movement is so awkward that tea sloshes over my fingertips. Harlow is the first thing on my mind. Then I’m thinking about my cock against the plush slope of her curves. All of her abandon. All of her shields down.
Ian knows nothing of that. The sheer goddamned stupidity of it. He can’t. He doesn’t. If he did, he’d probably punch me in the face. It would be an awkward punch, coming from a foot below, but he’d give it his best.
Ian’s never been one to mince words when I need to be called out. It’s the reason why he was the first member of The Skies I reconciled with, because he remembers learning to play football together. So many years. It gives him the nerve to point out when I’m off my tits.
Until I was so far off my tits that nothing worked.
“What?” I take a careful, measured sip of my tea. It’s still scalding. My tongue shrieks with pain. I take another sip as punishment for what I did to Harlow, holding her face pinned to the window. Then I take another punishing sip for enjoying the memory.
“You’ve invited Silas Tate into your house,” Ian says.
“He was staying at Claridge’s.” I glance away. Two tables over, a cluster of university students laugh and shout over one another. A pretty boy sits in the lap of a boy in a track suit.
Ian drinks his coffee. “It’s not such an unpleasant place to be.”
The pretty boy leans forward across the table, toward a girl with short, vibrantly red hair. His elbows are his fulcrum. His ass wiggles on the other boy’s knees. They’re all sharing a joke or conversation. I stridently hate that I’m too far way to hear the words. Theirs is a world closed off to me, one I won’t be able to pick apart and describe.
“‘Comme je deviens vieille fille, à manquer du courage d’aimer la mort,’” I mutter, as if it’s not a marker of my old age to be quoting Rimbaud.
“Don’t throw poetry at me. I don’t know what you’re on about, but there’s no chance it’s Silas. You’ve never said a word of poetry about that man.”
“I didn’t ask you to meet so we can talk about Silas.” My tea is finally the proper temperature. I take a long drink. The drink of my childhood, my teenage years, my young adulthood. During those lost years when I had no idea what I was doing, I could still get the kettle on for a cup of tea. Now it’s both my anchor and the liquid I will drown in.
“I know why you wanted to meet,” Ian says, and yet he shoves a whole blue macaron in his mouth at once.
I wait. And wait. And probably wait even longer than necessary because Ian is smugly using our long years together to make me twist. I become sure of it when his happy round cheeks lift even higher on a smile.
“Aye, Nicholas will do the Juvenile Breath Council show,” he says at last. He sits back and folds his hands over his stomach. “His agent just sent over the contract.”
I clap my hands once. The loud noise echoes through the small shop. “Brilliant.”
“This is really going to happen.”
There are no words I can add. Nothing that would be right, or that would encompass the amount of relief living in my body. It doesn’t matter where things go from here. The band isn’t reuniting or anything of the sort. This show, though... It’s going to rewrite history. It’s going to be a balm for our fans, realigning memories of all those gigs when things were falling apart.
When I was doing my best to ruin everything for no reason known by God or man.
Ian shakes his head. “I... I have to admit I’m chuffed. I never thought I’d see the day.”
The idea of even getting in the studio to practice again is unnerving. I’m honest enough with myself to admit that. Ian, Lee and Nicholas will be in a room, ready to see me again. Willing to see my face. Prepared to take up their instruments and allow me to be their front man again. It’s going to be beautiful to revisit some of those old smashes, to play them again without hatred and confusion turning my melodies sour.
I lift my cup to hide my smile.
We go over a few details: where the four of us will meet up, where we’ll rehearse. We don’t need a producer, as we’re not going to be recording anything. This is more about wiping the dust off the tunes we used to play. The show is in three months.
Ian leans in. “Any word on the venue?”
“None.” I shake my head. “The charity has promised posh, and that we’ll not be let down. At least three thousand seats and within London proper.”
Ian whistles, long and low. “That only leaves a few options and all of them good. Gonna be a good fucking time, no matter what.”
“A good fucking time,” I say with a nod.
“Well.” His expression shifts. “As long as Silas hasn’t killed you before then.”
I think of the man who I used to create music with. Who wrote such intricate, deliberate guitar riffs—so grand that they could go on for twelve minutes and never felt too long or pompous. The tension came when we tried to fashion pop music out of his grand dreams, when I wrote lyrics over the top of his masterpieces. Neither of us wanted to give.
Silas isn’t that man anymore. He’s a wraith, gray and gaunt and looking like one of Lon Chaney’s unearthly creatures.
“It will be fine.” English understatement. The Skies’ reunion gig could be everything that isn’t fine. It could be perfection. Or destruction.
Ian makes his Face of Concern. It involves lowered brows and a tucked chin, as well as a frown that looks odd on his round, reddened cheeks. “I have to warn you, I’m afraid. Nicholas...”
“I know he has doubts.”
Our drummer, Nicholas, was always the most sensible of all of us. He was also the most emotionally fucked up, and he never found steady solo work in the music industry. Silas was a beast and then I was a prat, all at the most vulnerable time in his life. We didn’t support him when his wife was in trouble. I’ve apologized the best I can, but that doesn’t mean much until I can prove I won’t be screwing him over in the future. I won’t allow that to happen.
“His doubts got stronger when he heard that Silas was in London.” Ian folds his hands together. “Even more so when the rumors started about Silas staying with you.”
“Fuck,” I mutter.
“He’s in for now. But he’ll be the first to go if things take a header.”
I don’t need this reunion. It’s not for my career or for money. I’ve sold decently enough with my solo albums, and each one has moved steadily a little higher on the charts. The money I made early on was enough largess to survive even the years when I tried to sniff, smoke or inject anything I could get my hands on.
But my pride needs it. The Skies need it. We deserve it, to reclaim our place in the annals of music. Our songs can stand on their own merit. Because we broke up ignominiously instead of dying tragically, we’ve become a goddamn joke.
I won’t stand for it.
“Silas will be no problem,” I say. “He’s angry, but I’m not. I only want to do the right thing by a dying man.”
A starling spins and whorls before landing outside the cafe window. The weak afternoon sun hides the blue-black in its plumage. It looks ordinary brown. Brown, like Harlow’s eyes. She hides dark thoughts behind those eyes. The complexities weaving around Harlow are where the real problems lie, but no one asks me about that. They all ask about Silas. They’re happy to be fobbed off with placating sentiments, but only because they don’t know what other darkness lurks beneath this shit situation.
