The bed was like a battlefield, torn, twisted, desolate. The sheets, wet with sweat and blotted with semen stains, had rolled into tight, sinewy ropes. Pillows had fallen into a scatter all around the bed, and the headboard jutted slightly awry.
Bobby and Leda lay sprawled across the bed like fallen soldiers, naked and utterly spent. As he held her in the crook of his arm, her eyelids fluttered as she dipped in and out of consciousness. Heat radiated from his body, and she breathed in his musk.
The gauze curtains of the window trembled in the cool wind bursting from the air conditioner. But for the bed, the hotel room was a near spotless white, now swallowed by moonlight. The diligent lights of the city poked through the translucent fabric at the window.
Together they lingered in the limbo between exhaustion and insomnia, their eyes varnished with desire, their heartbeats irregular, their breathing wet and hushed. There were no words between them; they didn’t need words. They had their own tacit language: a movement of the limbs, a twitch of the mouth, a fervor in the pulse. Their bodies were their voices.
Slowly, deliberately, Leda lifted her head and flicked her tongue against Bobby’s chest, again, again. He let out a soft throaty moan, and his head fell back upon the pillow, his hair a mass of sweat-drenched curls. The fuzz of body hair tickled her tongue, and she tasted his salty sweat and soapy deodorant. He ran his fingers through Leda’s own thick hair, his nails prickling her scalp with the precise, tantalizing touch of a spider. Her hand brushed against the thin raised scars on his torso, along his taut, quivering belly, and descended lower…
He couldn’t bear it any longer. The feral animal inside him unfurled once more, and he drew Leda to him. Her lips, still stained with the cherry-red of last night, curled into a languid smile, and she leaned in close.
Before his eyelids fell closed, Bobby saw a familiar but discomfiting glint in Leda’s dark smoldering eyes--was it love? Or was it lust? He couldn’t tell. But at that moment, as Leda’s tongue crept into his mouth, and the sweet oblivion tore into him once more, he couldn’t care less.
Afterwards he held her sleeping form in his arms, stroking her smoothly, instinctively. He held her tightly but gently, like a doll, like a lost relic of his broken childhood. They had been dating for six weeks, yet he still barely knew her--but it made no difference. All he knew was that he loved her, irrevocably. He was sure of himself, and of her.
But as he listened to the dull blare of traffic, and as the city lights twinkled out of his darkening vision, Bobby could not shake the fear and doubt rattling in his chest like a bird in its cage, struggling to escape.
~
They both awakened at dawn, emerging into the bloodless light that fell upon the small balcony. Leda pressed herself against the rail, inhaling the dew in the air, and Bobby stood behind her, his arms wrapped protectively around her waist as he breathed down her neck. It was a cool breath, sweet and refreshing, smelling of milk.
They stared at the city, a wild, untamable beast that never slept. For now, the sound of the traffic softened, and the bright synthetic lights dimmed. A haze of weak sunlight bled through the gray horizon, seeping into the gaps between the skyscrapers, sleek and jagged like shark’s teeth. Early morning was the city’s time of quiet recovery, when the fatigue of the previous night at last began in earnest.
He kissed her neck, so softly. She smiled without knowing it. Her fingers, long and lithe, clung to the flaking metal rail of the balcony. Her heartbeat quickened and her body tensed, like a bird preparing for flight. She could plummet to her death at this moment, but she didn’t care; all she could imagine was being swept away by the breeze cutting into her skin. Death would be something like this, she thought. Like an overheated body doused in a cold sweat.
Her thoughts and dreams were always fleeting and surreal, images that she entertained moment by moment but never seriously considered. She didn’t know if she was the better for it, always abandoning those thoughts.
“Let’s go to a club tonight,” she said at last, her voice breaking as Bobby’s mouth reached her ear and his hands slid along her shivering torso.
“Whatever you want,” he murmured absently.
His eyes were sealed and his mind was blank. He thought of nothing but what he held in his arms, what he never wanted to release, filled with a familiar feeling he could not find the words to express.
With a dark, feverish gleam in his eye, Bobby pulled Leda inside the hotel room, away from the balcony, away from its exhilarating risk of death, begging her, beckoning her.
She followed him willingly.
~
ADRENALINE.
The name of the club was scrawled on a banner above the entrance in ragged red letters, as though limned in hasty brushstrokes.
His hand clasped tightly about Leda’s, Bobby stood at the entrance for a solid moment, unsure of himself. Unlike Leda, he was not a virtuoso in the art of clubbing. Swallowing his uncertainty, he kissed Leda’s lips, crimson and swollen into a wide smile, and they fled into Adrenaline.
For the next two hours, the dance floor seduced and entranced Bobby, its throbbing light cleansing him of doubt. It was a sparkling inferno where time knew no limits, where music was a medicine and the brain was an unnecessary organ.
Beams of neon light cascaded onto the mass of dancers: bubblegum-pink, cotton candy-blue, lemon-yellow. The music was thick and thunderous, so loud he could not understand the lyrics, but he could feel its pulse pounding in his heart, thickening his blood, rattling his marrow, shaking him to his very core, to a tender place he did not know existed.
Sweat slid along his body in shining beads. The sour scent of cheap wine filled his lungs like a drug, a narcotic that kept his legs pumping against the ever-deepening pool of water at his feet. His heart was a balloon in his chest, expanding, expanding, begging to burst. The bass thudded against his chest, and the bulbs hanging above the crowd, swollen with light, flickered like fireflies.
The singer’s voice flared and wailed, lilting upon the hot blanket of the air. The music was unrecognizable; to Bobby’s ears, it was nothing more than a broken violin, a tattered drum, a guitar torn in half.
He danced until his blistered feet cried out in utter torment, until his lungs shriveled in despair and the windless light scalded his skin. He danced dangerously, mindlessly, as though he stood upon a great precipice, hearing the wind’s howl and feeling its bitter sting, impervious to all around him. He clung to Leda’s waist, her chest, her neck, as though she were an anchor, the only tangible thing left standing in the world.
His cock stiffened as he pressed closely, eagerly against Leda’s back like a parasite. He wanted to make love to her on the hard, worn tile of the dance floor, to feel his bare body flayed by color and light. It wasn’t the actual thought of this that thrilled him--it was the total lack of fear, the dense emptiness entirely foreign to him.
All around him the dancers were like faceless chanting dolls, marionettes with their strings pulled by a schizophrenic master. Their arms rose above their heads like scythes, surrounding him, encasing him, aching to slice him open and let the starlight flow from his trembling veins. It was a fierce gauntlet Bobby wasn’t quite sure he feared.
For years Bobby believed he had known what adrenaline was, but on this night, he was exposed and quivering, his nerves raw and frayed: a virgin to the sweet, toxic rush. This lethal fever that now consumed him, setting his body ablaze and awakening strange new thoughts and desires in him like a long-slumbering beast…it was an enlightenment he had never known.
It was gorgeous. God, it was.
But he couldn’t breathe. The heat crept into his lungs and expanded, leaving him lightheaded. The dizziness glued his eyes shut, and the nausea tumbled in his throat.
Tugging upon Leda’s arm, Bobby extricated himself from the horde of dancers, who moved and undulated as a single entity, like a tribe performing an elaborate ritual.
Away from the quaking dance floor and the throbbing light, Bobby felt a great constricting weight lifted from his chest. His grateful lungs inhaled the stale but open air of the club’s lobby. He hadn’t trembled so much in years, since the night he lost his virginity at sixteen, since the countless times as a little boy he had found himself trapped in the looming shadow of a faceless foster mother.
He sighed deeply, shaking his head of old memories that were better left forgotten. In a single night, he had driven himself closer to the edge of exhaustion than ever before. It was the adrenaline, still intoxicating and disorienting him.
“God,” he gasped. “That was--” He stopped. He believed that Leda had followed him from the dance floor, but a sudden instinct told him otherwise. He wheeled around; she was nowhere to be found.
With panic hammering in his chest, Bobby rushed back to the dance floor. What he saw tore him to pieces.
Beneath the umbrella of neon light, Leda danced without restraint, each movement frantic and unbridled, yet graceful and deliberate. Her nubile body strained against her tight little black dress. Behind her stood a man, pressing his body against her back, his face buried in her hair, his hands sliding along her thighs. It was Leda’s total passivity that set Bobby to seething.
The hurt and jealousy howled inside him like a wounded animal. As his teeth dug into his bottom lip, he forced himself through the waves of dancers and grabbed Leda’s arm, roughly dragging her away from her anonymous companion, who soon found a new partner.
“What the hell--?” she muttered, as Bobby led her to the calm air and dim light of the lobby. Her complaints ceased when she realized it was him. “Bobby. I--”
“How could you?” His voice was thick and broken. It was all he could say.
Her face hardened a little. “What are you talking about? It’s not a big deal, Bobby. It wasn’t anything…”
Tears stung in the back of his eyes, but he held them at bay. “It… bothered me, Leda.”
Leda scoffed in frustration; Bobby winced inwardly. “Okay. But how can you get so upset? It was just one little thing, and I didn’t even realize it was someone else…” Her voice trailed off. They both knew she lied.
He licked his dry lips, afraid to speak. He wanted so badly to tell her so much. He wanted to explain the scars on his chest, to tell her of the chain of foster homes, of the jagged inconsistency of his childhood, of his constant need for something more. He felt so much, but the words never came to him, only the intense emotion and the awkward responses. The fear danced on his tongue, and the words burst out: “Leda, I love--”
It only took a fraction of a second. Leda’s eyes widened, and her lips fell open. Bobby realized far, far too late that he had said the worst thing possible.
“Oh Bobby,” she murmured. “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. God.”
He looked away, swallowing hard. The remnants of adrenaline rattled in his throat. Sweat prickled in his armpits. There was nothing between them but for the club’s muffled cacophony.
“How did it happen?” she asked at last. “What made you…feel like this?”
He was taken slightly aback--she sounded so cold. His tongue stumbled over an answer. “When-- When we make love--”
“The sex is great,” she interrupted. “But that’s all there is. Nothing else.”
It was as though a sheet of glass shattered upon his skull, and the shards punctured every pore of his skin. With Leda's words, everything crashed down upon him. It disconcerted him, how callously she observed what he thought was a thing of beauty, the linchpin of their relationship. Was it even a relationship? His doubt repulsed him.
“Bobby, you don’t know me,” Leda continued, softly but with determination. “No one really does. And I don’t know you.”
“You could try to know me,” Bobby replied without conviction, still staring at the floor.
She said nothing, only sighed. Her mouth twitched.
For a moment he was silent and despondent. With a rare bit of guilt gnawing at her, Leda leaned in close. “Hey,” she whispered. “Look at me.”
He obeyed. Her gaze was honest and limpid.
“You’re a good guy, Bobby. But…there’s something wrong with me. I need to keep moving. I can’t stop, and I don’t want to.”
He was crestfallen, but now he hid his emotion well. Her reasoning was neat: her fault, not his; something wrong with her, not him; everything on her terms. He wanted to relive the raw hours of last night, when he held Leda in his arms after making love: stupid, blind, ignorant to what lay ahead.
“I still want you, Leda.”
She smiled, briefly. Her responses to everything were cool and instinctual--she had done this many times. She reached up a hand, and her fingers touched the silver chain at his throat, brushing against his skin. He shuddered. His body betrayed him; her touch still sent desire coursing through him.
“Tonight,” she breathed in his ear. “I’ll still spend tonight with you. But after that…no more. It’s over. I can’t hurt you any more than I already have.”
Bobby could only nod. In an awkward bend of the neck, his lips reached for hers, and she responded to his kiss. But it wasn’t the same. The hunger was gone.
But he wasn’t ready to let go yet. He wanted her so much, and if one night was all he had left, he would take it. Pressing closely against her, his arm wrapped about her shoulders, he led Leda through the glass double doors of Adrenaline and out into the chill twilight.
It was a cloudless black velvet sky, and there were no stars; there never were. Artificial light pulsed through the dense, polluted air like an electric river. The city was utterly alive, more alive in the nighttime than it ever was in daylight.
As they walked along the crowded street lined with palm trees, Bobby folded his hand into Leda’s. Her fingers were at first reluctant, unresponsive like stone, but at last she submitted. Out of guilt or desire, Bobby didn’t know, and he didn’t care. All he wanted was to touch her, and to torment her slightly: holding hands made it seem like she was his.
Her words still scorched him in the gut, the pain hot and brittle like a cigarette burn on his heart. It was only fair he should want to hurt her a little bit.
With their hands braided together, drunk on wine, adrenaline, and pained revelation, they looked like any young couple stumbling down the street after an intense night at a club. No one need know that they were both so damaged. Their hands formed a tenuous link between them, one that would soon break for good.
It did not matter that all contact would be severed within hours. It was a necessary operation, like the amputation of an infected limb. All that mattered was the sliver of time they had left, a night of decadence before the execution at dawn. And after all, even after the amputation, there would still be the occasional throbbing pain of that phantom limb.
That pain, virulent and twisted, would drive her insane and bring him to orgasm.
