Authors: Jessa Hawke
The fact is that I can tell Justin the truth—I could never sing in front of him, because that’d be pretty much like Monet asking Mozart to paint him a landscape—a complete crime against nature. Also, I can’t figure out why it seems like Justin’s just become interested in me overnight. It throws me off, and I think twice about going back to Otto’s for his and Henry’s semi-regular show.
I go. Of course I go. Even though as usual, this week’s been so packed with grant proposals that I’m too tired to do anything but put on my “nun dress” and schmear some lipstick onto my mouth. So I’m off to a trendy young bar in an outfit that covers me wrist to ankle, and I don’t give a damn. I’m going just for me. Me, my eye candy, and I.
I position myself at the periphery of the crowd, and there’s this intriguing-looking guy next to me. He’s like a mix of Eric Forman from
That 70s Show
, all dweeby, skinny charm, but the choker peeking out of the neck of a white linen button down shirt clues me in that he’s not nearly the nerd he appears to be. I see him eyeing me rather blatantly; I must be ovulating, because I can’t imagine that my appearance could give anyone any real feels right now.
“You’re into standup?” he asks me, smiling.
“Not really,” I tell him, leaning in. “To tell you the truth, I’m only here for the music. I like Henry’s band.” I hesitate for a moment, then think about the fact that I’ve never seen this guy here before, and if he’s not a regular, who’s he going to tell, anyway? “I’m here for Henry. And the guitarist.”
The guy’s grin turns extremely mischievous. “I like the guitarist, too,” he says, and then, after a moment, “I hear the stand-in drummer’s a real hot piece of ass.”
I crane my neck, but it looks as though Susyque’s object of lust has not joined us this evening; this explains her absence from Otto’s, as well. Instead, the drum kit is empty. I turn to my new companion. “There’s no one there, though.”
“Welcome to Otto’s, everybody!” I hear Henry cry, and the guy beside me locks eyes with me, gathers himself up from the fake pleather booth, heads over to the kit, and picks up the sticks. God damn it. He’s the drummer.
And he’s right. Now that I see him in his element, he IS a hot piece of ass.
Someone’s developing a thing for musicians, it seems.
I try sinking myself into the music like I always do, but tonight I’m distracted by the fact that Justin keeps looking at me from the stage. Is he jealous that I was talking to the drummer? Whatever his reasons are, when he starts performing songs from his latest album release, he keeps looking out at me, making eye contact. I squirm, not knowing where to plant my own eyes, because my own private oasis of Justin-ogling has been invaded. Suddenly, there are two of us on the island, and it’s uncertain which one of us will end up the survivor.
My little rough girl
, he sings,
You’re worming your way to my heart
From the start
I met you and I was your fool
Work me, use me, I’m your tool.
He’s singing to me. I swear he’s singing to me. And I’m loving the way the words are rolling off his tongue, all the rs and alliterations, and when he says rough, I’m picturing him in bed with me. I can’t help it and I don’t want to. I want Justin’s own rough tongue on my body. I want him to push me down onto the bed and hold my wrists captive above my head. Then I want him to worry the sensitive, fine hairs on my neck with his lips and teeth until I’m writhing out at him, all my secrets unwound. I want him to look me in the eye, just like he’s doing right now, straight into the wide-pupilled heart of me, into the aroused center of me, and I want to feel the fullness of his erection against my thigh. Because I want him to know he’s got power over me, but not be left unaffected. I want to affect him.
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.