Blue Desire

by Sindra van Yssel

The couple kissing in the back looked up. The ravers were beginning to edge back to the left of the room. They might outnumber the Kradle fans, but they clearly thought they were the prey. No, Angus wasn’t stupid enough to storm the stage. He was trying to start a riot instead. Kat didn’t think he was going to succeed, because she respected her fans more than that. Some of her songs might have a violent edge on the surface, but her fans weren’t crazy. They understood the difference between being pissed off that things weren’t right and actually hitting someone. She hoped. In any case, ravers might be strange, but they weren’t the people to be pissed off about.

  She needed to sing something, get people together. She’d been doing it all night, and now, suddenly, she didn’t know how. But she stepped up with the microphone anyway, and Cindy, who’d been taking a break, slung her guitar back over her shoulder in response. She still didn’t know what to sing.

  Then she saw Brett walking up to Angus and locking eyes with him. Somehow, she knew then it was going to be okay. She might not think much of the way he ran his relationships, but the man was as solid, in a way, as any man she’d ever met. Solid. She didn’t know of any better way to put it than that.

  “‘Liquid Dreams,’” she murmured to Cindy. “Hit it as soon as you’re ready, and play it loud. No bass.” It was one of the songs Kradle had never played, so Angus couldn’t claim it was his. He’d complained the bridge in the middle was too melodic, and Kat thought it was perfect, so she wouldn’t change it. Hopefully by the time they got there, the situation would have defused.

  Angus yelled. Cindy played louder. Kat screamed the music as loud as she could while still having a prayer of hitting the notes. At least she had a microphone, and Angus didn’t. They were halfway through the first verse when Angus finally shut up. He stomped out. Brett was with him. A dozen or more people followed, but everyone else stayed. It was all over by the time they got to the bridge, and Kat hurried back to the computer to add in some bass and get people dancing again. And dance they did.

  BRETT HADN’T BEEN in a fight since he’d been on the force, and then he’d had a gun, a club, and solid steel handcuffs. But he knew the image Angus had created for himself with Kradle and knew the other man couldn’t back down from a challenge. Kat was creating something special and unexpected, a strange blend of electronic dance music and hard, driving rock that had captured the crowd’s imagination, and he couldn’t let Angus spoil that, so he’d gone ahead and said, “Step outside and say that.” He felt like a walking cliché.

  Angus had nodded and gone outside. A small crowd gathered to watch the fight, which apparently was going to take place on the sidewalk out in front of the Caravan Club. Brett knew the crowd was not on his side, but he thought he heard Kat’s voice get mellower as they all walked out.

  He had a couple inches of height on Angus but suspected he was giving ten pounds. Any idea he had of reasoning things out once they were outside had vanished as the two men were circled by the crowd. Angus had his fists up. There were a couple of heavy rings on them, not quite as bad as brass knuckles but close. At least he didn't have a knife like the LSD-hyped kid who’d cut Brett years before. Brett waited, in no rush to get hurt or to hurt anyone. The whole thing was stupid. He decided to try reason after all.

  “Weird music, huh?” he said, trying to make his voice sound light.

  He barely ducked Angus’s punch, the red stone on his ring flashing right in front of Brett’s eyes as he ducked away. He was going to have to fight back. He could still hear the pounding music in the background of a song he’d never heard before.

  It wasn’t long until Angus gave him an opening, and he landed a hard punch on the other man’s jaw. Unfortunately, Angus struck right back, and the ring hurt as much as he thought it would. Brett was bleeding above his eye, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before his eye swelled up.

  He could hear sirens in the distance. The Caravan might be in a good neighborhood, but less than a mile away was DC’s biggest open-air drug market, or at least it had been when Brett was on the force. The sirens probably didn’t mean anything. Still, Angus drew back and listened.

  The sirens got louder and closer.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Angus, and Brett wondered who he was talking to. A couple of people in the crowd though moved aside to let him out of the circle and then followed him down the street. The rest stared at Brett.

  “Well?” he asked wearily. “We gonna go back and listen, or are we gonna get busted out here?”

  Some more people walked off, and Brett walked back toward the dimly lit entrance to the club. A few followed. The bouncer looked him over with a wary eye, and Brett stared back. The bouncer decided he had better things to do. Brett supposed his assumption was that Brett had outfought Angus, but the truth was it was at best a draw.

  Inside, Kat was still singing, and the two cultures were starting to mix again. Brett smiled, even though it hurt his eye. It was definitely time for that scotch. Waiting for the crowd to thin was no longer an option. When he got it, he leaned back against the bar and watched from a distance. He’d always liked Kradle because they were fierce and loud and fit a certain kind of mood. Music like that woke him up better than coffee did. But he’d never realized that their lead singer was so talented. Stripped of her bandmates, it was so much clearer what she could do. He watched, mesmerized, through the show and two encores. Finally, Kat told the crowd in a hoarse voice she couldn’t sing anymore and then hopped off the stage.

  Lisa was right. I definitely needed to get out more. He sipped his drink. The show was over, and he might as well go. He wasn’t going to force his way through the crowd to get to Kat; he’d look like a fanboy, for one thing. That wasn’t how he wanted to relate to her, not anymore, no matter how special her music was. He’d always remember the way she moved in response to his fingers and the gasps she made when she came. How her breasts were almost too sensitive to be touched. How she liked being spanked. He sipped his drink, reflecting. Lisa was wrong. He hadn’t been mooning over Kat, but he was getting all too close to it now. The sound system started playing dance music, and the Kradle fans were heading out. He straightened and got ready to follow them.

  Then suddenly Kat was at the bar next to him. “Thank you,” she said, standing on her toes so that she could be heard over the noise.

  “Pleasure.”

  “Tell Jessica hi. And that I’m sorry her man got a shiner for me.”

  He blinked. He remembered her saying something about Jessica when she’d been staring at him and singing the song about cheating, but he hadn’t understood what she was trying to say. Maybe that she was in a relationship with someone named Jessica? But now he was confused. “Who is Jessica?”

  Kat curled her nose in disgust. “You know who Jessica is.”

  He racked his brain. He knew a Jessica at the club and had made a corset for her at the request of her dom, Brandon. “Blonde girl? Goes to Le Petit Mort?”

  “Yeah.Your sub.”

  “My what?” He’d never even played with her, and he’d played with a lot of women. He didn’t understand Brandon’s relationship with Jessica, and he didn’t want to be involved. “She’s not my sub. I don’t have a sub.”

  “She said you gave her a corset. Why would you do that if she’s not your sub?”

  Suddenly it all became clear. Kat must have talked to Jessica at Le Petit Mort, and misunderstood. “I didn’t give it to her. I sold it to her.”

  Kat blinked.

  “I make them,” Brett added.

  “You made that? It was beautiful!” She had a look of utter disbelief on her face, and she said it as if the fact that it was beautiful made it much less likely he had made it.

  Well, fine. He could use that. “I could show you how I make them, if you like.” Would you like to see my etchings, ma’am? It occurred to him the misunderstanding could have all been avoided if he’d told her that fourth vendor table was his, but he hadn’t wanted to derail the conversation.
And he’d found it amusing, he supposed, if he was honest with himself. Maybe it had all worked out for the best. It depended on her reaction, which she seemed to be thinking over.

  “Yes,” she said at last. “I’d like that very much. I have to lug a few amps and talk to Cindy, and then I’ll meet you here. Figure about a half hour, forty-five minutes?”

  “I could help you move your equipment,” Brett offered.

  Kat hesitated and then nodded. “Thanks. Sure you can deal with following directions?” She had a glitter of a smile on her face.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Brett replied back with a grin.

  She laughed and kissed him right above the eye where Angus had cut him with his ring. That was a good sign, he thought. He followed her to the stage. Lisa had definitely been right about him getting out.

  Chapter Four

  They loaded the equipment in Cindy’s SUV because Cindy lived in a house and had a garage, and that was much better than keeping anything in a hotel. The other side of that was that Cindy had a day job and had to keep her cell phone on and answerable during practices. During gigs, at least, she could turn it off.

  Kat wasn’t that interested in how Brett made the corsets. But she thought they were incredibly pretty and wondered how they felt. She’d worn a corset—with plastic boning—before onstage, but she knew that wasn’t “the real thing” in some sense. It looked hot, but it didn’t squeeze the way an old-fashioned corset was supposed to. The women she’d seen at Le Petit Mort looked different. They walked more stiffly, for one thing. She wondered if they found it harder to breathe. As a singer, anything that made it harder for her to breathe onstage was out. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it off-stage. It was kind of hot, she supposed, but she didn’t want to go fainting like some old Victorian matron.

  “How much does a corset cost anyway?” she asked. Cindy had been going to give her a ride home—she was worried about Kat’s car breaking down on the way to the club, even though it had made it all the way across the country, because it was way overdue for an oil change and God knew what else—but instead Kat was riding shotgun in Brett’s car.

  “One of mine?”

  “Yes. For instance. Jessica’s, say.”

  “Well, I made that one a while ago. But if I was asked today to make a corset like Jessica’s, I would charge around three hundred and fifty dollars.”

  Kat didn’t mean to whistle, but she did. She had spent what money she had left on sound equipment. The gig had paid decently, but she had intended to use that money to repair her car. Maybe if the second gig went well, she could hire a lawyer to try to get her money from Kradle, or she could make sure she had a roof over her head for the next couple of weeks. With that being the sort of decision she had to make, she definitely didn’t have enough money to justify buying a corset.

  If she was being honest with herself, however, her interest was only partly in the corset. She was using Brett again. She wanted to sleep next to someone big and strong, and going to his home after midnight she doubted he’d insist on taking her home. She didn’t think Angus would try to find her in her hotel room, but she knew if she was there alone, she’d lie awake thinking about it. He wasn’t stupid, nor was he easy to predict. He wouldn’t want to get arrested for anything serious, although music could be a crazy business, and even bad publicity could be good for sales. Heck, it would probably help get the word out that she’d gone solo if she had a big public confrontation with him. What happened in the Caravan Club would probably work to her advantage. The next meeting might not. It could get out of control so easily.

  He glanced at her curiously, and she expected him to ask what she was thinking or offer her a penny to share. He didn’t. Usually men were more nervous about where they stood, and if she got lost in thought, they started wondering if something was wrong. It was a nice change to be with someone more confident, she supposed, but it started making her wonder if something was wrong.

  He parked on the street in front of a row of brick town houses after driving a few minutes. “Where is this?” she asked. It was time she started to get to know the area, and this seemed pretty nice for the middle of the city. Some of the buildings were old, but there wasn’t the feeling of incipient violence she got when she looked out of her hotel room late at night.

  “It’s called Kalorama Triangle.”

  “Pretty name.” She looked about. “It doesn’t even look like we’re in DC anymore.”

  He nodded. “We’re very much in DC, but this area was developed before the city as such got out here, so it’s not on the same grid plan as everything else. Over that way”—he pointed down the street, but which street it was Kat didn’t know—“are some very rich people indeed, and big houses with lawns that would look at home in suburbia. Go the other way, and you’d get a mile before the neighborhoods get decidedly dicey. But right here it’s what I guess you’d call middle class. I’d rather have a small apartment here than a house in the ’burbs, so I do.”

  His apartment was in a four-story old town house, and they had to climb three flights of stairs in a narrow dark stairway to get to it. She’d been wearing the boots too long, and the heels were starting to get to her, but walking up was better than walking down. There were two nondescript doors at the landing, one labeled 41 and the other 42. He unlocked 42 and let her in.

  “Life, the Universe and Everything,” she murmured, as she walked into the apartment. He wasn’t lying about small, but it was bigger than her hotel room. The kitchen was open to the living area, and she could see a single bedroom off that through an open sliding door. On the table in the living room there was a sewing machine, bolts of colorful fabric, and bits of shiny metal. There was a table for two near the kitchen that she presumed was used for eating.

  “Douglas Adams,” he said. “You read much science fiction?”

  She smiled. “Yeah. You?” She looked about for a bookshelf, but there wasn’t one.

  “Yep.Mostly the classics.”

  “Where are your books?”

  He pointed to a leather-clad e-book reader, which sat on top of a couple of library books. “Used to have two bookshelves full, but they took up a lot of space. So I donated them all to the library book sale and bought electronic copies of most of my favorites.”

  We seem to have some things in common. But that pleasant thought only reminded her of what was nagging her since she’d seen him in the club. “Why were you at my concert?”

  “When I saw the ad in the paper, it clicked with me where I’d seen you before. On a CD cover.”

  So it wasn’t just a line, after all, when he said he’d seen me around before. She didn’t think of herself as a person who jumped to conclusions, but it seemed she had a streak going with him. She looked around for his CD collection and realized it had probably gone the way of the books. It was getting so you couldn’t figure people out by snooping around their houses anymore. She giggled.

  “What’s funny?” he asked.

  “I think I’m in the habit of looking around people’s homes and checking out their books and their music and whatnot to see what they’re like, and you’ve thwarted me.”

  “You’re curious as to what I’m like?” He grinned at her.

  Well, that was forward. She blushed. “Fuck,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say. It was lousy reason to swear, which she tried to do only for effect. He was right, though, about her curiosity. “Show me about the corsets, please.”

  He nodded and gestured for her to sit on the couch while he sat cross-legged on the other side of the table. The table everything was on was very low, and she realized the only way he was at the right height for it was sitting on the floor.

  He used corsets in various stages of progress to explain how things all went together: the metal pegs and hooks that made up the busk in the front of a corset, the way he sewed the seams so that flat steel could be inserted to give the corset structure, the grommets for the lacing in the back. But her attention was
drawn by what looked like a completed corset lying next to the ones in progress. The fabric was in two shades. The predominant one was a shade darker than a royal blue and took maximum advantage of the shine of the silk. Mixed with that were delicate vines and flowers of a midnight blue that she thought at first was black. As lovely as the corsets she had seen in the club had been, this one was perfect.

  “I’ve lost you,” he said.

  “I’m tired,” she lied. She ought to be exhausted, but she wasn’t. The evening’s performance had been exhilarating. The incident with Angus had been nerve-racking. Between the two, she was about as far from sleep as she could get.

  He looked at her for a moment, and she had that feeling again that he could tell when she was lying. “It’s not finished,” he said. “I still want to sew some lace around the edges. But it’s wearable, and it’s about your size. Stand, take that shirt and your bra off, and I’ll show you how it feels.”

  He stood up. She stood also. She locked eyes with him. He hadn’t asked, and she wasn’t there as his sub. The moment stretched. As they stared, it became clear they were in a contest of wills. He didn’t look like he’d blink first. If she obeyed him without a fight she was tacitly admitting his dominance over her, although she could take the edge off that by an offhanded, “Sure, whatever.” Or she could bring it out into the open by asking if they were going to play. But the idea of him taking control again made her heart beat faster and her skin warm. She remembered the last time in the club, and how good it had all felt until she thought he was in a relationship with that blonde woman.

  She lowered her gaze and lifted her shirt. She didn’t look at him while she took off her bra either.

  “Lift your hands. I need them out of the way,” he told her, and she obeyed, closing her eyes to avoid looking at him. She wasn’t ready to surrender completely, and the way he read her untruths made her reluctant to look straight at him. Her nipples were stiffening and her skin was probably getting pink and she was having to concentrate to make her breathing sound calm. He didn’t need to see her eyes to see how he affected her. She was giving off way too many clues as it was, and she knew it. And he seemed psychic anyway.