Authors: Jane Prescott
The more he sings, the more I shiver. It’s all over much too soon, and as he closes, he’s looking at me again, and it’s all I can do to keep from scanning the audience so that everybody knows that the sexy, talented guy on the stage right now is talking to moi. Little old moi. I want the world to know we’re eye-fucking each other right now. If that is indeed what’s happening.
Pretty soon, it’s the same old story, the band packing up the instruments, the crowd a’mingling. Henry asks me to guard his stuff while he grabs a beer from the bar, and I gladly do, delving into a little dark nook far away from the roar of the hipsters who have just decided that Otto’s is the place for them to be that night. I close my eyes and indulge in my aforementioned fantasy, and just as I’m unbounding Justin’s hair from the tie that holds it together, I feel a hand on my shoulder. Talk about déjà vu.
I open my eyes, but it’s the drummer. Hm. I like his glasses even more now, and those big gray eyes behind them, too.
“Let’s go sing,” he says, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. And somehow, it is.
“Let’s,” I agree, then crane my neck for Henry. He winds his way back through the crowd of kids, clutching a huge mug of beer. “Henry, hurry up and drink that, we’re going to go to karaoke.” Henry looks excited; he loves karaoke, he’s been inviting me for weeks, and I’ve never said yes until now. Maybe it’s because, sweet as he is, he lacks a certain small-time rockstar charm.
I spy Justin coming out of the back room, carrying his guitar case. Nando waves him over. “Hey, we’re going to karaoke.”
“Cool, yeah, I’ll go.” I laugh silently to myself at his cockiness. I like it.
Henry gulps down his beer and we exit into the chilled night air.
The first place we hit is the Zebra Lounge across the street; it’s filled with kids who are carbon copies of the baby monsters teeming around Otto’s. There’s nowhere to put our coats or butts down, so we leave. Then the drummer—his name is Jake, he tells me—suggests a place over on St. Mark’s, though he can’t remember the name.
We walk into the hippest place in the city to be on a Friday night; it’s all bright lights and penis bongs, pimply college kids spilling out of bubble tea places, their faces sucking on each other like they’re dementors freshly freed from Azkaban. The group of us walk up the stairs to what I now recognize to be St. Mark’s Sing-Sing karaoke bar into a field of white girls who decided that tonight was 80s night. They don’t sound half bad, but from the way they’re dominating the bar, we realize we’re never getting a song in edgewise, so we book a room.
Positioned on that narrow plastic booth together in front of a big blue screen, I’m as simultaneously uncomfortable and excited as a girl getting her first vibrator. Justin’s going to hear me, and I can’t exactly croon the way he can. I think he realizes this, because when he looks over at me, his eyes are animated as all hell.
“What?” I hiss, self-conscious in my nun dress and trying not to care.
“I’m gonna get to hear you siiiing,” he says in a sing-song, and though neither of us has to say it, we can both feel it. That charge, that intimacy that’s going to pass between us as surely as death itself will one day come. “It’s been my dream,” he continues. I edge a little closer to him, he edges a little closer to me, and then Nando, who’s on my right, edges a little closer to all of us. I pull out the karaoke song list book, and start chattering away about all the songs I like. I’m going on and on and then I realize that neither of them has said anything in response.
“Hellooo, is anybody home?” I ask, waving a hand in front of their faces.
“Oh, we were just checking to see,” Nando says casually.
“See what?”
“How long you’d keep talking if no one interrupted you,” Justin chimes in. That sassy bitch. I gasp and slap him on the shoulder, and he laughs, but I know I like it, that cockiness, that self-assuredness, the fact that he’s not afraid to rib me. What else would he not be afraid to do, I wonder, my hand lingering on his shoulder, where the curl of his hair lays against my fingers, softer and denser than I could have ever imagined.
We sing. Justin hogs the mic, but his voice is so good that I don’t even care. Henry is old school. Nando knows all the words and we belt out Chicago song after Chicago song together, and while I sing, I feel their eyes on my face, and suddenly, I truly don’t care that I’m not wearing anything but lipstick, and that my nun dress is all wrong. Dear me, dare to be different, dare not to care.
The hours tick into long after midnight, when I remember that I actually have class in the morning. The cold air creeps into our bones as we all congregate on the corner near Ray’s Famous Pizza. Nando and Henry insist on walking me to the train, and their manners warm me despite anything. Justin decides to walk back to his car; he’s got a long drive back upstate, where he goes to grad school, he explains. And then he in his tri-color knit hat walk off into the night.
And that’s February.
* * *
So now that you’ve heard me sing, I write, you’ll have to come up with a new dream. I send the message and hold my breath. It feels ballsy to send it, no matter how innocent it is. I try not to care. I hear a ping and look down.
You sound good. Your voice makes everyone sing in tune.
Huh? I never expected the corny out of Justin. But there it is.
What, was it your first time at karaoke? I tease.
First time with a beautiful woman, he answers, and my heart starts to hammer. Justin Raleigh, whose face I see in my dreams, has just told me I’m beautiful. Does he know? I wonder. Does he know that last night, I pictured us leaving the coffee shop next to Otto’s in the early morning, his neck wrapped in a gray and red striped scarf. Does he know I saw the steam from the coffee in my mind rise up and curl around his face, and does he know that in my dream, I felt something so strong for him that I walked up to him, took his face in my hands, and put my tongue into his mouth, and that it was better than I could have ever imagined? My phone pings again.
Come see Romeo and Juliet at my school this weekend. I’ll drive. Nando will come.
The drive up is wonderful and exciting. Nando is meeting us there, so on the way up, I tell Justin all about Romeo and Juliet, and he patiently lets me nerd out about all the adaptations I’ve seen or heard about.
“There’s a comic book, and a military version, and a Di Caprio version—“
“So that’s your type?” he asks, one hand on the wheel, the other stuck instinctively between my two gloved hands.
“What?”
“Blonde and blue-eyed.”
“I’m more a personality and talent kind of girl,” I say slowly, suddenly shy, and cradle his hand like it’s a precious bird, oblivious to the danger of the road.
He nods and smiles slowly. He draws his hand out of my hands and focuses on the road. “Good,” he says.
I’ve got my hiking boots on and after the play is over, Nando, Justin, and I go into the woods by the school. There is still frost on the ground, leftovers of winter, and the bare tree branches trace crazy circulines into the sky. The three of us are mostly quiet, but I’s companionable silence, the kind that you don’t want to be broken except for the occasional lone cry of a bird communicating with the other end of the woods. There is a gargantuan tree branch making a bridge over a frozen pond, and the boys flank me on either side to escort me across. Our breath puffs into the cold, crisp afternoon air.
Later, in his campus apartment, Justin mixes a batch of cupcakes from a mix. And I don’t care that he’s vegetarian, I really don’t, because our mutual love of chocolate drowns that out into obscurity. Nando sits in the corner, drumming on a blind table, the kind drummers use for practice.
“So when did you lose it?” I ask Justin suddenly, and as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know I regret asking the question. Because I know I’ll be asked, and I know the answer might leave me ostracized from the cozy little sub-community I’ve just managed to enter.
“Fourteen.”
Fourteen? Good God, he was just a child. He catches sight of my expression and explains. “It was my babysitter. I think she was just bored one day and thought it might be fun to play around with a kid. Screwed me up for years,” he says, and goes back to stirring the mixture in the bowl, even though it’s already turned silken.
Nando has also perked up; I can almost feel his ears point like a dog’s in curiosity. “Sucks, man,” he says, but he’s staring out the window as if he’s lost in his own little world. “They say guys are jerks, but damn, doesn’t anyone ever wonder how they become that way?”
Justin finishes pouring the mix into a muffin pan and pops it into the oven. “Preach,” he tells Nando, and plops down on the couch next to me. I can feel his body heat seeping into me as our thighs touch.
“How about you?” Justin asks me, stringing his arm along the back of the couch, along the back of my neck. If I lean back now, my head will be on his arm. I wonder what that feels like, but my stomach has dropped down through my feet and it’s plummeting towards an unseen bottom.
“I, uh, haven’t. Yet. So how about them Rangers?”
I expected shock. I expected outraged gasps. Instead, what I see flicker and settle on the faces of the two musicians is curiosity. Curiosity about me.
“Never?” asks Nando and gets up from the corner to join Justin and I on the couch. I can feel my body curling in on itself; I want to hide. That’s when Justin grabs my hand.
“Don’t close up,” he says, dark brown eyes looking deep into mine. And then he lifts my hand slowly to his lips. When he plants that kiss, I feel my whole body meld into the luxuriousness of the feeling. “You have something special,” he continues. “And I—“ he looks over at Nando, “We would be honored if you would share it with us.”
Oh my.
Justin lengthens my hand into my arm and drapes it over his shoulder; he is solid underneath it, with the softly rounded muscles of someone who is long familiar with vinyasa practices. He pulls my face into his, and then his mouth is on mine, soft and tempting, probing and warm. He tastes good, like cupcake mix. I lick his lips. We draw away a little, lips throbbing. He traces my face with a hand, those musician’s fingers setting my nerve endings ablaze. Behind me, Nando draws his hand down my spine and presses himself into my back. I can feel the boy fullness of his chest pressed against me, his lips on my neck.
I am being kissed by two guys. I have hands stroking my arms, Nando reaching over me, making a cradle with the breadth of his arms, unbuttoning my shirt with his long fingers. Justin slides it off my shoulders, and I’m sitting there in nothing but my bra and jeans before them. Justin tilts me back until I’m almost one morphed beast with Nando, and we’re kissing each other. He’s different, more insistent than Justin, his tongue darting against mine, stabbing me, doing his drummer thing in my mouth. Sounds grosser than it is.
All too soon, I’m naked. And nervous.
“Hey,” I say, hardly recognizing the hoarse voice croaking out of me, “That’s not fair. I’m naked, and you guys aren’t.”
Nando and Justin share this wicked naughty smile that leaves me breathless. They make me comfortable on a few pillows, and then crawl over until they’re crouching on their haunches on the couch, facing one another. And then I see them reach out for each other, take each other’s faces, and press their mouths together.
Oh.
Oh
.
I can’t say I’m entirely surprised by this turn of events. But I can say that I am turned on by it. They’re tearing off each other’s clothes as only guys do, like the clothes don’t matter, and when they’re both stripped to the waist and done clutching each other with near violence, I’m licking my lips. There’s a throbbing between my legs that I’m starting to address with the heel of my hand, and when they look at me, their mouths wet and small welts rising on their shoulders, they’re hungry.
Nando growls, and I squeal with laughter, faking escaping to the floor. I’m on my back, and Nando’s on top of me, the long press of him in between my legs, his teeth on my breasts through the bra. And then Justin’s behind me, unclasping my clasps, unhooking the waistband of my panties, baring me to the wanting eyes of the room. I turn and now Justin is in Nando’s position, and he’s everything I expected him to be. I run my hand up his stomach, to the sparse hair on his chest, and then Nando comes up behind him and frees his hair. The long curls tumble down his back, and it’s like we’re in a biblical Jewish tribe, and he’s our leader. We’ve taken him down to his roots, and we’re both kissing him, and he’s got his eyes closed, those long lashes driving me crazy.