Soul Siren

by Aisha Duquesne

  Then Luther ruined everything. Damn it.

  I say he ruined everything, but she started it really. She provoked him, looking to get a reaction even if she wasn’t aware of what she was consciously doing. She skipped appointments to come into the studio to lay down vocal tracks. She had me call Brown Skin Beats and pull her out of doing guest vocals on an album for one of his visiting British protégés, a chore she was happy to do before and was actually looking forward to. The management at BSB dropped hints like cartoon anvils on my head that Erica must be taking diva lessons. They were losing patience with her.

  The days of Brahms and Chopin were over, and she was spending long hours lying on her bed in the apartment, listening to nothing. I was getting worried. I wanted her to turn to me, but she retreated into a dark place inside. She wasn’t eating enough. I said maybe it was time she considered seeing her doctor and getting a short-term prescription for anti-depressants.

  Sitting on the edge of her bed, I said gently, “Look, you loved Morgan, and now he’s gone. I miss him, too…”

  “Self-righteous prick,” she muttered. “Hated A-B rhyme schemes. Probably laughing his fool head off at me right now as he burns. God, I do miss him, but…Mish, honey, this isn’t about him. Okay, it is, but it isn’t.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  “I can’t. I just need you to leave me in the dark for a little while. I got to find my own way out.”

  I felt helpless. I had never felt helpless with Erica before. When she finally got out of bed at eleven on a Thursday evening, I asked if she was ready to go see the doctor tomorrow. Not at all, she replied. Tomorrow she would be fine. She was going out now “to return something.” I learned later that she had headed over to Luther’s. In the pounding rainstorm that sent sheets of water down on the New York streets, she demanded that Luther buzz her up to his place just to spend ten seconds outside his door.

  “You can have this back now,” she said, and she slapped the gift of his grandmother’s gold watch into his palm, storming off towards the elevator.

  A bewildered Luther stared at the watch, and then he ran down the hall to catch up to her. The elevator doors were closing on his protests. “Erica? Erica! What the hell are you doing this for all of a sudden? Erica?”

  She must have thought I was asleep in my bedroom when she came home. I crept into the hallway and watched her quietly sobbing. She threw her jacket off, tossed her handbag in a corner and made herself a drink. Dark rum, a generous pour from the bottle. I would have gone out to comfort her if the buzzer hadn’t made a shrill ring. Luther, of course. He had followed her home.

  She didn’t have to buzz him in. She could have told him to go away, leave her alone. Her choice to let him up. Neither one of them offered a greeting at the door, they just got straight into it.

  “What is this supposed to mean?” he demanded, holding out the watch.

  “Whatever you want it to,” she answered. “I don’t think it’s right that I keep it. Not anymore.”

  “And why the hell not?”

  She sat on an ottoman, tugging on one of her fingers nervously, staring at her baby grand. “You know I haven’t worn the damn thing in quite a while, never did check whether it tells time properly. I’ll bet if I open it up, there are no gizmos in there. I bet it’s empty. Just like you.”

  “Erica, I think you better come out and say it. I don’t know if I have all night to crack your code.”

  I hung back like a child hiding on a staircase, listening to Mom and Dad fight.

  “I’m saying why haven’t you called, huh? Morgan dies, and you go MIA when I ring you up. You’re never around. What do I need your gift for? A reminder that I don’t see you?”

  “I gave that to you in friendship and—”

  “We’re not friends! And we sure as hell aren’t lovers. I don’t know what we are to each other these days—”

  They’re going to sense I’m here, I thought. Yet I had to keep watching. I advanced on tiptoe past the front lounge and crept down the hallway to what we called the sun room, what used to be a little office area but had been converted into the storage space for all the surveillance cameras and home-protection gear. I sat down and punched up on the control panel to put the living room on the main viewer.

  “—Us to be lovers?” Luther, caught in mid-sentence as I brought up the volume. The sound from the webcams was a bit tinny, an afterthought. It was clear enough for me. He was laughing joylessly at her irrational whim. “I want you ages ago, and you say no, so now we play this game again, and what’s going to happen this time, Erica? What am I supposed to—”

  “No! No, you could have had me!” She jumped up from her seat, one hand on her hip, pointing a finger at him in accusation. “You could have me now! But I know better after all this shit! You always got to ask for more! It’s like you want my fucking soul or something, Luther—”

  “That’s an excuse because you’re scared—”

  “Why you need this big commitment even before we get out of the starting gate and—”

  “I’m in love with you, goddammit!” he thundered. “Erica, when are you going to grow up and take a risk? Have a real relationship? That ‘playing house’ you did with Steven was just bullshit, and you know it! Good ol’ Steven, the pretty boy security blanket and combo insurance policy! And Morgan? You giving him his weekly rolls in the hay or however frequently you two got it on? What did you even get involved with him for?”

  Erica looked ashamed for a brief moment. I watched her open her mouth to say something, to offer an explanation, and I thought yes, do it. Because her feelings over Morgan were so complicated, I couldn’t make sense of them, and maybe we’d learn something now. Why she had felt she had to give herself to her mentor, sexy in his own way, I suppose, but Morgan had been her Dad’s age—

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you!” she said at last.

  “No, you can’t explain! I’ll bet you don’t even know why you do what you do. Big political singer, major talent throwing yourself into it when you perform! And then you play it safe. You do it with Steven, with Morgan, with me—”

  “Don’t you bring up Morgan! Not now!”

  All of a sudden, Luther marched forward and angrily spun her around, his large hand seeming to vice her wrist and pin it behind her back, muttering something I couldn’t quite hear like, “Don’t you pretend with us…” He was kissing her neck, wrapping his other arm around her waist. Erica gave a short whimper of pain but didn’t protest, grinding her ass into his crotch, and that was all the encouragement he needed. His left hand mauled the front of her blouse, tearing it away in a savage fury, ripping at the bra cups, and Erica’s large tits bounced free, soon to be cupped and massaged and fondled by those strong fingers. I loved looking at Erica’s breasts. I loved the way Luther played with them just as I would, tracing circles around their areolae, kneading them like dough, her nipples so thick and erect. Still pinning her arm, as if the jolt of mild pain was counterpoint to pleasure. He frantically took his hand away and unzipped his fly, and the fingers of her free hand were urgently helping, tugging at him impatiently—

  She gave another cry of pain from the stabbing needles demanding attention in her trapped arm, and he showed her mercy at last, letting her go. I saw Erica’s mouth open wide in shock as her knees slightly buckled, the two of them clumsily staggering near the piano, and her hand shot out to rest her weight on its corner. He had her trousers only halfway down her thighs before his fingers played with her mound, and he tentatively drove the head of his cock between her pussy lips. “Oh, God…”

  Erica sighing, Erica making a sound through gritted teeth of “Kkkkkehhhh” as I saw the huge head of that cock linger with achingly light pressure and then dive between her vaginal lips. Warm wet beautiful folds of flesh I had dreamed about. I watched the map of veins and angry blood vessels on Luther’s enormous cock disappear into her and emerge again, polished and gleaming with her juice, thickening and swelling
even more.

  Then, with a burst of tears and an extraordinary strength of will, she moved away from him, slapping away his hands as he reached in confusion for her. “No,” sobbed Erica. “No…You want too much. And I can’t trust you.”

  “What do you mean you can’t trust me?” he asked in a hurt voice. He adjusted himself and zipped up his fly, letting out a long breath.

  “You closed yourself off from me after you came back from London,” she said quietly.

  She looked at the tatters of her blouse and her sagging trousers, and I would have thought she’d duck into her bedroom to change. Leave him behind. Instead, she pulled her ripped top away and let it flutter to the rug, stepped out of her trousers and panties. She didn’t care if she was naked in front of him, and in some personal instances, I think fearless, uninhibited Erica treated her nudity as her personal armour. Her voluptuous body could either beckon or insist a man keep his distance—the way she demanded he stay back now. Like Luther said, she could wear her political heart on her gown in front of thirty thousand fans, but to say what she was thinking to a man…She needed sex for that. She needed to be nude for that. To distract him? Embarrass or captivate him while she was vulnerable? Maybe all of those. She picked up her drink and downed the last of it.

  “You want me to trust you, but you won’t tell me what went on in London. You’d rather tell Michelle. You’re great pals with her—”

  “I know you can’t be jealous of Michelle, Erica. Come on, she’s—”

  “She’s my best friend,” Erica cut through him. “That’s not what I’m saying. You’re punishing me. That’s what it is. I know you wrote music in London, Luther. You wrote to me about it, but you won’t play it for me. You think I don’t have my own contacts in London? They say it’s great, and then ask me, well, haven’t you heard it, girl? And I’m on the other end of the phone, sounding like a fool, saying no, he won’t let me see the charts, won’t play—”

  “And what collateral are you going to put up, Erica? No. You won’t do it. Still playing it safe.”

  “Get out,” she barked at him.

  She turned to face him, still defiantly nude, tears running down her cheeks. “Go home, Luther.”

  “I’m in love with you.”

  “Get out!”

  She took one skittish step back, thinking he might reach for her again, and she wouldn’t be able to stop herself this time. For a moment, I wondered if Luther would try. He only had two choices. Gather her up or walk out the door.

  He invented a third option. He knew one of them had to bridge the gap of trust, and he walked over to the baby grand and sat down. He would play, making love to her this way if he couldn’t touch her with his hands. Two seconds before they reached out to touch the keys, her voice was ready to slam the lid down on his fingers.

  “It’s too late.”

  But of course, it wasn’t. He began to play the songs he wrote in London—snatches of them, opening bars of a couple and bridges of a couple more. I don’t mean to over-blow this, but you have to imagine how privileged I was, getting the chance, not just once, but several times, to hear virgin creations of Erica, Luther, a couple of other major names. What would it feel like? If you were in a room when Elton John casually played for you the notes of “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word”? Or somebody had a guitar and played those signature chords of Peter Gabriel’s “Solisbury Hill” that make you recognise it right away? Or if you were in the room with Quincy Jones when he worked with Michael Jackson? I was down a hall, supposedly asleep, as Luther Banks played the opening of “Resurrect Me” for an audience of one, this woman he loved equal to his art. He played her what became his classic, “Brixton 2 AM.”

  Get out, she’d told him, and now she was a statue, riveted by his compositions. On the monitor, I saw her eyes shine with an epiphany. I covered my mouth with my hand, struggling, too, with my feelings. It wasn’t only because of Luther’s beautiful music, it was the revelation of how he had created it. He wasn’t Morgan playing it safe. He wasn’t Steven sampling and copying her. The songs were original, yet you can hear Erica’s influence in them. I shuddered in my hiding place because I had killed for her, but he made Erica children of notes and chords. She had become an air bubble in his veins, but once it was extinguished by her callousness, he lived again, clean, whole. Every melody was a soundtrack for days of introspection, for the shit he had seen in Hackney, in Lewisham, and, at last, for a grief over her absence in his life, an absence he had forced on himself. They were songs as good as any she had written.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  He didn’t acknowledge this. He kept playing. And she listened.

  She listened as I held back my tears down the hall. Her eyes were opened that night. You see, she didn’t fall in love with him because she’d found her creative equal or soul mate—it was richer than that, oh, yes, far richer. Erica had been looking for inspiration all this time in her flings, searching for a man to be her muse. And now she found this gorgeous man who embodied something higher, who took creative sustenance from her and used his own palette. His music said we want to be made better than our normal selves through intimacy and company with our beloved, and for a creative person, to do your work and then discover you’ve provoked a rich tapestry of musical feedback…Joy.

  I couldn’t resent Luther in that powerful moment. I was a pedestrian mortal with a stash of high school notebooks full of scribbles and half-finished novel drafts. I had never written anything close to being as good as those songs. Hell, I had never finished a try at a novel. Even if I could, Luther’s playing was a reminder that a page of words couldn’t express a feeling so accurately, so directly as a few bars on a piano. Maybe that was why I never finished those stillborn books. Not only because I loved her but because of this simple truth: she made it easy, my abdication from my own creativity.

  In my own soft, quiet way, I had competed with Steven and the others for Erica in terms of generosity, attentiveness, loyalty—I thought of her as my reward for being a good person. No one, no one, until now had ever assumed that Erica Jones could be incomplete emotionally in terms of the music. Because she was so gifted. But Luther understood. Oh, God, yes, we want to be more than what we are. And as he played on, I knew that love isn’t a slow ballad. It’s the exhilaration of the anthem.

  I didn’t resent him that night. That came later.

  She interrupted his playing, lifting his hand to her cheek. “Oh, Jesus, baby, it’s taken me so long to find you…”

  “Do you want these?” he whispered to her. He didn’t ask: Do you love me? They were the same question.

  Crying now, his thumbs wiping away her new tears, her voice cracking with feeling as she nodded and said, “I want…I want more than having them…for you to…I want you to make an album out of them, your album…”

  “All right then,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  Their foreheads dipped and touched, and then they were kissing again passionately, deeply. Erica’s fingers on his face, his neck, Luther running his hands through her hair. She took him by the hand and led him away. In the sun room, I punched up the monitor for her bedroom. The only reason there was a digital camera in there was the short balcony off the sliding doors, but it took in the entire room.

  They were away from the bed, but I could see their reflection in the full-length antique mirror near the vanity table. I heard Erica say I made you suffer, and Luther denying it. Erica saying, Take me. Luther shedding his trousers as quickly as he could to penetrate her from behind once more. She gripped the ends of the oval mirror as Luther slammed into her, thrusting harder and harder, and I watched the ripple of her ass cheeks with his momentum, the jiggle of her tits. She and Luther captivated by the reflection of their raw need.

  In the sun room, I tilted my chair back and perched the soles of my bare feet on the sill of the desk. My eyes were glued to the screen as I slipped my panties off, already drenched, my inner thighs wet with my
lubrication, one finger anxiously stroking my clitoris. So beautiful, so beautiful when you make love, darling…

  Wishing they’d retreat to the bed, and they did, Luther stripping off his shirt to reveal his well-developed physique, shadows of abs and chunks of muscle on his forearms and biceps from years of his feverish, happy percussion, his legs almost feminine in their perfect shapeliness, smooth and strong. I felt a confusing mixture of arousal, Luther’s balls in a ripe sack of hanging grapes, his ten inches of throbbing penis a dark spear, and I’d thought only one man could reach me, Steven, because of his psych games and his pretty boy androgyny, and yet here was Luther…My mind flashed on the gun barrel nudging into my pussy back in Steven’s house, and I felt a quake in my legs. Erica lay on the bed, opening her legs invitingly, and the dim light of the windows picked up the slickness under her bush.

  I had a zoom-in function on the camera.

  Erica pounced on Luther as he came over, her thick lips smacking and slurping as she took him into her mouth. I could see the veins like forks of lightning along his girth, and, oh, to have that mouth on me. To have those fingers that played with his balls, cupping them delicately. Erica delighting as always in her own prowess when she gave head. Jerking him with her hand to bring him to a froth, sucking now on just the crimson tip, and he couldn’t take it anymore. Neither could I. But they moved too fast for the camera, and it was a blur, my hand darting to the control panel to zoom out and see them. Luther pushing her down on the bed and hooking his arms under her legs, settling his cock between her pussy lips to float there in heaven on a membrane of her juices for a moment before he greedily thrust himself in.