Lindsey
accepted the shot of whiskey with a nod of thanks and a generous tip.
He was in another cheesy club on another Friday night.
The music flowed, however, as did the alcohol.
There were warm bodies to dance near, if not with, and he hadn’t seen
a brow ridge or a set of golden eyes yet.
The
whiskey was decent; nothing like what stocked his bar at home, but certainly
better than what he used to drink in college.
Lindsey was pleasantly blurry, limbs heavy and sweetly aching as his
muscles relaxed. The music was mostly from the 80s, some sort of theme
night. The songs were filed away
into the umbrella category in Lindsey’s mind of “before money”, but he
knew most of the words and the beats had him moving in time even before he was
on the dance floor.
He’d
always found it odd to dance with both hands free; the weight of a beer in his
right hand had always provided the perfect ballast. That, of course, had been before,
and now that there was an after, he
occasionally felt strange about using a bottle in Brad’s former hand.
Not that it would stop him after a few more drinks, but the stage
between sober and plastered tended to make the scar burn a bit.
He
was dancing in half-time, moving on every other beat as the bodies around him
frantically fought to keep time. He
occasionally envied the people with no sense of rhythm whatsoever, those not
beholden to the beat of the song. Envied
them until he got an elbow in the ribs, anyway.
A
slower song, throbbing beat that couldn’t have been inspired by anything
besides sex; Lindsey had to speed up while everyone else slowed.
He closed his eyes briefly against the strobe lights, but was jostled
out of the moment as a group of drunken girls backed into his space.
Back
to the bar for another drink, something cold this time he decided as he pushed
his hair off of his forehead. Lindsey
rounded the corner and clipped another body with his shoulder.
“Sorry,” he offered, as the other person turned to him, and he
froze as if he’d smashed into a wall.
A
boy. More accurately, The Boy.
Huge eyes in her pale oval face, his
straight dark brows. The pull was
instantaneous, lips, heart, cock. And
throat. Even if he hadn’t read
the entire file, which had appeared on his coffee table one day, scented with
Lilah’s perfume, he would have known.
“Hi,”
he croaked, and mentally smacked himself.
The Boy looked down at him, an unsure smile playing around the corners
of his lips. He reached out a
hand to Lindsey’s shoulder, and Lindsey nearly recoiled before he realized
that he was standing off-kilter, tilted slightly from the collision.
Lindsey
straightened, and offered The Boy his most charming smile.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” he said, pulling the words kicking and
screaming out of the frantic mess of his brain.
“Lemme buy you a beer.”
One
slender wrist held up, unadorned by a plastic bracelet.
“I’m not legal,” The Boy answered.
“Don’t
matter,” Lindsey said, cringing inwardly at the country-boy grammar, but
knowing the effect it had on people.
“Okay.”
Dark, fine hair fell into his face as he nodded.
“Sure.”
Lindsey,
on autopilot, ordered two beers, nothing fancy, and another shot of whiskey
for himself. He took the shot at
the bar, and ambled back over to corner where he’d collided with Angel’s
son. He was waiting patiently,
rocking slightly to the music.
“Here.”
He proffered one of the cool bottles.
“Name’s Lindsey.” He watched for the telltale reaction of surprise at his
unusual name, but there was none.
“I’m
Stephen.” Long fingers brushed
against Lindsey’s own as the Stephen took the bottle.
Lindsey’s mind clouded slightly and then cleared; the mind-wipe
attempting to exert its hold over him even though he already knew the truth.
“Funny,
you don’t look much like a Stephen,” Lindsey said, and felt the mind-wipe
push at him again. Stephen
shrugged thin shoulders.
“You’d
be surprised at how often I hear that,” he said, and took a long drink from
his beer. “Like everyone knows
something I don’t.” His eyes,
visibly blue even in the dim light, unfocused briefly.
“I
get a lot of shit for my name, too,” Lindsey replied with a half-smile.
“Something we have in common, I guess.”
The boy nodded, and Lindsey continued, desperate to keep the boy from
walking away. “Isn’t this
music a bit before your time?”
Stephen
smiled, something more genuine than Lindsey had ever seen on either of his
parents’ faces. “A little
bit. I know all those songs,
though, my mom is one of those perpetually stuck in the 80s types.” Lindsey had a brief moment of private hilarity while he
imagined Darla in fingerless lace gloves.
Lindsey
tried to think of something else to say while Stephen drank and absently
looked out at the dance floor. He
wanted to be witty and forceful and charming, but seemed to run up against an
invisible wall every time he thought of something to say.
Maybe the mind-wipe held some power over him yet, though he couldn’t
imagine why. Unless the boy had some sort of pre-natal memory, there was no
way he could no Lindsey.
Of
course, there was another answer which embarrassed Lindsey to no end to think
about, because he certainly didn’t want to admit that he was feeling shy for
the first time in ten years, and all because of some nineteen year-old kid.
His original plan had been to play with the edges of the mind-wipe, see
if anything he said sparked a glimmer of recognition in Stephen’s eyes, but
he couldn’t do it. For the moment, anyway.
“You
want to dance?” Lindsey asked finally, after a silence that had been much
too long. Not exactly the
smoothest of lines, and it evoked some uncomfortable memories of junior-high
dances, but Stephen just shrugged again.
“Sure.”
Stephen
moved to some syncopated rhythm hidden deep within the beat of the song,
graceful as a cat. He wasn’t quite dancing with Lindsey, but seemed disinclined to move away.
A woman who had been too old for clubbing the first time these songs
were popular lurched into Stephen’s back, knocking him into Lindsey.
Stephen
was more drunk than Lindsey had given him credit for initially, for once
Stephen’s balance was lost, he seemed unable to regain it.
Lindsey grabbed him by the upper arms, and righted him.
He could feel the tensile strength hidden in Stephen’s skinny limbs,
so like Darla’s.
“Sorry,”
yelled Stephen over the music, grinning, and Lindsey felt himself smile back.
Stephen didn’t step back to his original position, but rather stayed
too dangerously close to Lindsey as he fell into another deeply hidden rhythm.
The tugging was back and Lindsey had to fight the urge to reach out and
touch the boy again. He watched
the stop-motion of Stephen’s fingers trailing through the strobe-lit air and
could almost feel them closing around his throat.
At the thought, his body predictably betrayed him.
“Do
you want another drink?” he said, but Stephen didn’t seem to hear him.
“Connor!” he yelled to get the boy’s attention and then froze as
the mind-wipe made itself known as a piercing pain between his eyes rather
than its usual gentle push. Stephen didn’t seem to realize what Lindsey had called him.
“You
buying?”
Lindsey
nodded, and fought his way off the dance floor and back towards the bar.
He leaned his hands against the hard wood as he waited for the
bartender to notice him, and tried to breathe normally again.
The file on him (labeled Connor, and Lindsey mentally kicked himself
for calling him that) was filled with pictures, but none of them had captured
the fey power of the boy. He also peripherally aware that he was becoming more than a
little infatuated. The boy was
just slightly than ten years his junior, but then, for all Lindsey or anyone
else knew, he might be immortal. Even
this far away, he could feel Stephen’s inexorable pull on him, as insistent
upon his blood as the moon upon the tides.
He
ordered another two beers and another shot of whiskey, realizing almost as
soon as the Jack Daniels passed his lips that it was one drink too many.
Or perhaps the perfect amount, Lindsey thought, as he sought and found
Stephen again.
He
was dancing like Lindsey had earlier; moving in what appeared to be
slow-motion while everyone around him flailed and hopped to the driving beat.
He handed the beer off and nearly dropped his own when he was bumped by
behind. Stephen reached out and
steadied Lindsey with his free hand. Lindsey’s
blood was rushing in his ears now, and he had the faint thought that of the
two of them, Lindsey should be the one not acting like a fourteen year-old in
the first stages of puppy love. Even
that small amount of brain activity flatlined, however, when Stephen moved his
splayed fingers from Lindsey’s arm to his stomach in an almost absent
manner.
He
was just barely touching Lindsey, unconsciously using him for balance while he
danced. His motions were looser, occasionally off-beat.
Lindsey was moving as well, echoing Stephen’s movements with his own
hips. They were as close as
possible without touching, aside from the feather-light pressure on
Lindsey’s abdomen, and Lindsey vaguely realized that Stephen was keeping the
distance between their bodies constant and absolute.
The carefully delineated space had a searing heat to it, and as Lindsey
looked up at the amused but slightly glazed look on Stephen’s face, he
realized that the boy had at least some inborn talent for toying with his
prey. The twist of his
wine-colored lips was neither malicious nor cruel, and Lindsey was caught
somewhere between thankfulness and a wistful longing for the past.
Only
a true musician would have been able to find the rhythm in the way they were
dancing, moving lazily into song after song.
It took what Lindsey figured to be at least twenty minutes for him to
move his own hand to Stephen’s hip, feeling the slight falter as Stephen
started at the touch. The
drunkenness was coming in waves now, blurring the lights and colors and
settling a permanent blush into his cheeks.
Stephen looked little better, eyes closed and his lips just slightly
parted. They were leaning into
each other without touching, creating the illusion of balance, but Lindsey
knew that they were one ill-timed shove from ending up in a tangle on the
floor.
The
lights coming on at 3 AM didn’t startle Lindsey; in fact, the sudden
brightness barely registered. It
was Stephen’s slightly slurred “Lindsey,” in his ear that woke him out
of his reverie. Lindsey looked
up, found Stephen’s eyebrows drawn together in a familiar way, though he’d
never seen actual concern on Angel’s face.
For him, anyway.
Lindsey
blinked, seeing Stephen’s face as a blurry composite of Darla’s delicate
features warring with Angel’s craggy ones.
It took a second for them to resolve back into Stephen’s face, and
Lindsey realized that he was standing with his head tilted, neck exposed.
“You
didn’t drive here, did you?” asked Stephen, his pale face hovering above
Lindsey’s own.
Lindsey
shook his head, and regretted it when the room spun. “Cab,” he answered.
Stephen looked like he had something to say, but instead seemed at a
loss. He began to turn to
go when Lindsey grabbed his shoulder. “You
gonna be here next week?” he asked, feeling foolish. Both of them were well past drunk, though, so Lindsey hoped
Stephen didn’t think him as desperate as he felt.
Stephen
paused. “You buying?”
Lindsey
grinned. “Sure, why not,” he
answered, finally beginning to feel a bit like his own self again.
Which vanished completely when Stephen bent and brushed the lightest of
kisses across his lips.
“Next
week, then,” said Stephen while Lindsey tried to pull himself together, and
then he was slipping through the crowd quicker than Lindsey could follow.
--The
End--