Swan Song

by Tracey Ward

  We’re sitting on the couch in his office after everyone has gone home. I wanted to lie down for a moment before he took me home but one thing led to another and now I’m straddling his lap with my skirt around my waist and the shoulders pushed aside to expose my naked skin. His hands are holding onto my hips, grinding me into him in a steady rhythm that’s driving me crazy. I can feel his hardness through his pants, straining to get out. To get inside me.

  I run my hand down his exposed chest, across his taught muscles and the thin trail of amber hair peppered over his skin until I reach his belt. He bites down on my lip as I slowly undo the buckle. Then the button. Then as the zipper comes down he buries his face in my neck, nipping at the skin and sucking hard. Hard enough to mark me, but I don’t care. I take him in my palm and slowly caress the length of him, enjoying how hot he feels. How heavily he fills my hand.

  “Baby, yes,” he groans, letting his head fall back against the couch.

  He looks at me with his hard eyes and they hold me steady. They pin me in place and I watch his face contort with pleasure as I rub him up and down, as his breathing changes, becoming spotty and hiccupping in his throat.

  “Tell me no, Adrian,” he growls, looking in my eyes. “Tell me no and walk away like you always do or I’m not stoppin’ this. Not this time.”

  I stare down at him, lost in a fog of pain, laudanum, lust, and loneliness. I want him but I don’t. Not really. I feel my body respond to him every time he touches me, but I’m not there. I’m not in it, not in my heart or my head. But I want something, I want someone, and it’s like the Cotton Clubs. It’s like Cicero and New York. I want what I want, and I have what I have, and maybe it’s time I played the cards I’m being dealt instead of reaching for the deck trying to steal all the aces.

  “Don’t stop,” I whisper shakily.

  He groans as he descends upon my skin.

  “You are so damn beautiful,” he whispers against my neck. He reaches my ear and runs his tongue along the outside. When he dips the wet tip inside, I shiver against him.

  “Shut up and do it already,” I moan, writhing. I’m eager and burning, dying for this thing that I don’t actually want. Not from him. But I need to forget, to pretend I’m back in that alley with that man and he’s going to finish what he started when he pressed his body hard against mine.

  “Look at me,” he demands.

  “Just do it,” I tell him, using my hand to try and push his onto me. Into me.

  “Look at me,” he says more forcefully.

  I don’t want to because it will be all wrong. The look in his eyes, the color, the shape, the set of his jaw. His smell alone, cologne of some kind that you can get in any drug store anywhere, is always in my nose. Always bothering me, irritating me. But if I want him to finish this – to finish me – I have to do it.

  I open my eyes and lower my head to look down at him. His beautiful, violent face is staring back at me with such intensity I wonder if this will actually work. But it’s too different. It’s not the exotic honesty I get from Drew. It’s all possession. Dominance.

  “Look at me while I do this,” he says quietly. His hand slides forward, spreading me wide with his fingers. My breath catches in my throat and I want to close my eyes again but I don’t dare. He’ll only stop and I need him to get me there. To wipe my slate clean and let me know this is it. This is what’s what and nothing else.

  I feel the pad of his thumb move quickly once over my nub, making me jump and whimper. “Do you like that?”

  I nod slowly.

  “Say it.”

  “I like it, Tommy,” I whisper, feeling small. Feeling dangerously close to everything I never wanted to be.

  He does it again, more slowly this time. “Do you want more?”

  “Yes,” I mewl.

  “Ask me.”

  I shake my head, biting my lip.

  He tickles me slowly. I breathe evenly, staring him down and refusing to beg. Then his fingers move in impossible ways that strum cords in me that have never been played before. It’s so sudden, so rough, but then he stops and I’m panting. And angry.

  “Ask. Me,” he commands.

  I lick my lips and swallow hard, staring into his eyes. “I want you to fuck me, Tommy,” I lie in a hoarse whisper.

  It’s not exactly what he wanted, but it’s something he didn’t expect either. It’s enough to distract him from the fact that I won’t beg him, and suddenly he’s spinning me around. He presses me forward so I’m bent over the arm of the couch. He moves quickly, efficiently, as he lifts the dress around my waist again and exposes me. Then I feel him hard and ready at my entrance, and I groan, pushing my hips back and trying to take him in. I just want this over with. I just want to feel it, to know it, to understand it. I need it to happen before I can think twice about it.

  He pushes inside of me with a grunt, and I cry out. I’m suddenly so full where I’ve felt so empty for years. I can hear his breath coming in sharp gasps as though he was as surprised by his entrance as I was. Then he’s pulling out painfully slowly. I whimper at the near loss of contact, but before I can voice a protest, he’s driving back into me.

  I cry out again as the couch scratches across the floor. He retreats and advances, and I groan as I bite my lip to keep from screaming. It’s torture and it’s bliss and I feel something start to build inside of me. I take his hand and bring it to my mouth, pulling his finger inside and biting down on it to silence my cries.

  “You’re killin’ me,” he breathes. “You’re everything I knew you’d be.”

  His free fingers reach down and play that wild chord in me, moving to an easy beat that builds and builds and builds. His thumb is strumming, hitting the snare that makes me jolt every time, and then we’re reaching the crescendo. The beat is faster, faster, faster, the snare snapping over and over, and then it’s chaos and a symphony of color bursting behind my closed eyes that can’t bare the sight of this man as he owns me, controls me, plays me.

  As his body goes rigid, jerking behind and inside of me, I fall off the edge. I burn inside, biting his finger still in my mouth until I taste blood. His blood.

  He’s inside of me now, in so many ways, and the thought makes me shiver.

  “Fuck, Adrian,” he growls deep in his throat like an animal, sounding almost angry. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  I feel dizzy all of the sudden. Disoriented. Lost.

  “You moan like you sing,” he whispers, his eyes half closed. “Throaty. Rough. It’s beautiful.” He kisses my shoulder as he gently pulls my dress back up onto my body. “Everything about you is beautiful.”

  I sit back to look at him as he continues to dress me. My brassier is replaced, the other shoulder of my dress looped over my skin. I reach down and push him back into his pants, watching his eyes as I do it. We stare at each other as we dress one another, packing away what we’ve done. What it meant. What it will mean to us in the future.

  I know if anyone can distance themselves from another person, it’s Tommy, but is this all laying groundwork for some huge misunderstanding that will leave us both angry and confused? Is it like the gang wars that wage around us, threatening to blow up in our faces every single day? Some days I think so. Some days I know it because I’m not an idiot. I know this will be a massive disaster and that I’m playing with fire in a TNT factory, but I don’t stop and I try not to care because I’m hurting, I’m confused, and I’m just plain tired.

  And lonely. That’s the worst of it, the loneliness. I haven’t felt it in years, not since my parents died and I ran away from Iowa to a city teeming with life and people and noise. I’ve outlasted it for so long, but when I look in Tommy’s hard, empty eyes that are softening around the edges, I see it catching up with me.

  It’s then that I know I can’t run forever.

  Chapter Twelve

  Christmas comes and it’s just Rosaline and I in our tiny apartment with the saddest looking tree you’ve ever seen. We got it as a cast off fro
m the club. It’s one of the ten or so trees that were decorating the joint during the season, but now that we’re closed for Christmas Eve and all of Christmas Day, it was either heading for the trash heap out back or to our apartment. Looking at its pathetic browning boughs, I think it might have looked better in the trash.

  “Christmas trees are supposed to make you happy, right?” I ask Rosaline.

  “Supposedly. Most of them just make me sad.”

  “This one certainly does.”

  “You know what’s odd? Not me.”

  I glance over at her where she sits on the couch, her head tilted to the side examining it. “Really? You can look at this thing and not feel sad inside?”

  “Yep. Because we saved it.”

  I sit down beside her, tilting my head to examine it as well. “Did we?”

  She nods. “From a fate worse than death. Can you imagine being a Christmas tree and spending Christmas day behind some trashy club in downtown Cicero?”

  I look at her in mock surprise. “Are you calling the Cotton Club trashy?”

  “You work there,” she says, grinning into her eggnog. “You know the score.”

  I definitely do.

  I turn back to the tree, looking at it in a new light. “I guess you’re right. It’s like we adopted it.”

  “It’s going on the curb tomorrow morning,” she reminds me.

  I nod, looking at its broken, battered branches and its fading color. At its promise and its shortcomings. At the beauty it still holds in its imperfections because even if it’s failing, it’s still trying.

  “But tonight it’s one of us,” I tell it softly.

  We sit in silence for a while listening to Christmas music on the radio and sipping our eggnog. There’s no hooch in it, much to my dismay. The only thing we have in the apartment is whiskey, a bottle Rosaline got as a gift from the new bartender, Reggie. He’s sweet on her with her long legs, chestnut curls and full lips, but I think if he likes her so much he could have sprung for a bottle of vodka instead.

  As for me, I got a fat lot of nothing for Christmas. Not even a gift from Tommy which I’m actually thankful for. I’m going numb to that whole situation, exactly the same way I’m going numb to just about everything lately. The laudanum is taking its toll and I’m grateful for these two days off work to avoid the spotlight and the club. I haven’t had a headache all day and without Tommy’s watchful eyes on me, I haven’t taken the laudanum either. It’s given me some clarity. Clarity that I wish I could avoid with some vodka in my nog because I’m seeing the Tommy situation for what it is, and it ain’t good. We’re using each other, just as I never wanted to be used, but I’m too deep in it now to walk away clean. I know deep down it’s going to get worse before it gets better and I should probably do something about that, but I don’t know what, so I try to ignore it. If you close your eyes and don’t look at that monster in your closet, he’ll go away, right?

  Yeah, I didn’t think so.

  “What do you think Lucy is doing right now?” Rosaline asks wistfully.

  “If she has any sense, she’s seeing the lights downtown. Maybe catching a late show. Carriage ride through the park,” I reply immediately.

  Rosaline chuckles. “I think that’s what you’d be doing. You know what I think she’s doing?”

  “Hm?”

  “I think she’s sitting by a fire in that fella’s house, surrounded by his family full of sisters and mutt dogs and she’s holdin’ his hand with a big stupid grin on her face.”

  “That’s sentimental of you.”

  “No, it’s sentimental of Lucy. And I think come midnight when everyone else is asleep and there’s nothin’ but the light of the fire and the bulbs on the tree, that man is gonna pull out a small box that holds the ring his granddaddy gave his grandma, and he’ll drop to one knee, tell her she’s swell, and ask her marry him.”

  I smile in the darkness at the picture Rosaline is painting. “You know what I think?” I ask her softly.

  “Hm?”

  “I think I hope you’re right.”

  ***

  Two days later I receive a package. It’s postmarked from New York so I know it has to be from Lucy. I’m thrilled she thought of me while she was visiting my dream city, but when I tear it open I’m surprised.

  “What is that?” Rosaline asks, looking over my shoulder.

  I pull out a small cellophane bag of green and red candies I’ve never seen before. Beneath them in the box is a postcard with a likeness of the Harlem Cotton Club on it. I immediately flip it over and find writing on the back.

  Wish you were here

  That’s it. No signature and no punctuation. I don’t know if it’s meant to be an excited, ‘I wish you were here!’ or maybe a question, ‘Don’t you wish you were here?’. Is it a command, as in, “You should wish you were here’? I have no clue.

  “That’s strange,” I mutter.

  “Did Lucy write that?”

  “I guess so. It doesn’t seem like something she’d say though, does it?”

  “No, but maybe her fella wrote it. The handwriting looks like a man’s. What’s in the bag?”

  I put down the card carefully and open the bag of candy. Popping a red one in my mouth, I offer the bag to Rosaline who takes a green. She immediately puckers her face.

  “It’s sour,” she says.

  “Really? Mine is…sweet.”

  I snatch up the card again, examining the handwriting. It’s not Lucy’s. It can’t be. I’ve seen her handwriting a hundred times on notes and letters. This is completely different than her tight, precise script. Bolder. Unapologetic.

  “Do you even like sour things?” Rosaline asks, returning to her ironing in the living room.

  I stay in the kitchen staring down at the card and clutching the bag of sweet and sour candies to my chest. I can feel the wild beat of my heart pounding against my knuckles, banging against my body and begging to come out.

  “I do,” I mutter, a smile and a blush blossoming on my pale face like spring warming out winter. Like the sun on a flaxen field. “I really do.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  New Year’s Eve. The entire club has been in a crazy uproar over the fact that Duke Ellington and his band are coming to our Cotton Club. How Tommy managed it is still a mystery, but it’s one no one cares to solve, least of all me. Having the Duke at our club is so close to New York City I can almost taste the apple on my tongue. I haven’t been this excited since the day Ralph Capone walked into that dive bar and asked me to come with him to his club. This is a night where things happen for me. I can feel it in the air like electricity in the clouds before a storm.

  “You’re dolled up tonight,” Lucy says, smiling at my get up.

  I’m wearing the black evening gown I wore for Halloween, the only one I can afford to actually own if the truth be told, and a small array of fake diamonds on a necklace and even small earrings. My hair is down and long, a casual contrast against my elegant dress. It lays smoothed over my head, hanging close to one eye giving me a smoky, mysterious look.

  “It’s a big night,” I say, clicking into the room from the bedroom.

  We all still store our clothes in the bedroom, but Rosaline and I have taken to pulling the mattress out into the living room and sleeping on the floor near Lucy. Neither of us is ready to sleep inside that room yet. Not since Alice. Someday we will, but not tonight. Probably not tomorrow either.

  I wipe my hands together briskly, trying to push away some of the sweat I feel building on them. I’m nervous about tonight and not just because of Duke Ellington and the chance to perform with him. Even just to meet him. I’m nervous because it’s the first time I’ll see Tommy for more than two seconds since the pre-Christmas incident, or complete and utter loss of my damn mind as I’ve come to think of it. I haven’t taken any laudanum since then either and while the headaches have crept back a couple times, I’d rather deal with the pain than the aftermath of poor decisions made in a
drug fueled haze.

  “What are you gonna do tonight?” I ask Lucy, noting her very casual dress.

  “I’m going to a small party one of the other girls is throwing. Nothing huge. I’ll sing some songs, play some games, shout ‘Happy New Year!’ on the roof and head home.”

  I smile. “It sounds wonderful.”

  “Ha!” she laughs, not believing me. “It’s nothing compared to meeting Duke Ellington, but I’m excited about it.”

  “What is Rob doing?”

  “Flying. Delivering mail. Righting wrongs. Saving the world.”

  “One letter at a time?”

  “How else is it to be done?”

  Lucy did not return with the family heirloom diamond as we had expected but she did come back with a very clear picture of what Rob wanted. Her. He absolutely, one hundred percent, for all eternity wants her. He didn’t have a ring, his grandparents had been too poor to afford one and his mother was still using hers, but it’s in the works. Lucy is ‘engaged to be engaged’ as she put it and she couldn’t be happier. I and Rosaline, on the other hand, are starting to wonder where we are going to live in the next couple years. We’re getting by without Alice, but without Lucy too? We’re sunk.

  “Are they sending a car for you?” Lucy asks, grabbing her coat.

  I frown. “No. I’ll walk. It’s not far.”

  “That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not.”

  It is. It’s very strange. Ralph never mentioned it, Tommy hasn’t had time to talk to me, and no one else said a word about my coming to the club tonight. Considering one of my idols will be there, that’s all very strange.

  Lucy and I walk down to the sidewalk together and say our goodbyes while we head our separate ways. I feel silly dressed up as I am and walking through the city streets but it’s late, nearly ten, and several people similarly dressed have spilled out of clubs out onto the sidewalks. I can hear music rolling out of open windows and doors, shouts of excitement and joy ringing out in the cold air and suddenly walking doesn’t seem so bad. At one point I even cross paths with a group of men and women stumbling down the street singing a popular song I do in the club almost every night. I join in as I pass them, receiving a round of applause and sloppy handshakes.