The future is hurtling breakneck speed toward them; they do not have time for politeness. In fact they don't have any time at all. The future is here. The trombones are crooning, the piano's tempo whirling faster and faster until the keys are practically shattering from the force and the speed. The piano man is possibly insane. They all are.
Except her. She stands in the corner of the club, note pad in hand. A child of progressives and temperance women, her parents toiled on streets littered with the refuse of big machine bosses, and in turn she toils in their memory. Ghosts trail her like private detectives. Paris calls to her, and she does not answer. She refuses to admit that she is lost, and holds her stories out in front of her like a map.
Her desire for a story, a cause, will lead her to him.
He is a man in a suit, even though right now he is more jazz than job. A half empty class is clutched in his hand, gin warm from breath and sweat. He has no story and is not a cause. Neither is the girl who he just barely touches as she pulses against him, her flapper beads tickling the inside of his knees
The crowd's shouts are practically whispers underneath the screams of the trombone. In his arm his accessory, the girl, stumbles, and he lets her. He throws away his broken toy, and buys another one on the margin for half the price.
She sees him and sees a cause.
He sees her and sees his next stock option.
"Hello."
It's the kind of moment that happens to two people simultaneously so that it doesn't belong to either of them. It's not a beginning moment, but a moment stuck in the middle, stuck at the peak.
Desire shimmers in their eyes like a coin flipping mid-air. "My name is Isabella." Her words are cut from grammar books and one-room schoolrooms, even though she grew up in a city where cracked fire hydrants were the only relief from the summer heat.
"Edward." He holds up a half empty glass. "Good bootleg tonight." But he's not looking at the beer, like any good introduction his is only a preamble. "Let's dance, baby."
"Dance?" She wants to go to Paris, and yet even English words sound foreign to her. She isn't lost in the world, but lost within herself.
He knows exactly where he is going. "Come on, doll face."
"My name is Isabella." She is an observer, not an actor. The world is spinning too fast for her to join in.
He raises his eyebrow. "Doll face, we don't have names here." He thinks without really thinking, it is skill he has long perfected. "Come on, have a drink."
She takes the drink, and looks at it like a reporter, but there is no story in gin; it's clear as water. It's condensed pleasure, plotless and poisonous. It tastes delicious as it trickles down her throat. Her dictionary brain promptly comes up with a million synonyms, but she settles for one: ambrosia.
He offers her a second, and then a third. Soon the world is spinning even faster than the music, and she is in his arms. Her hemline is longer than the other's, and her breasts aren't flattened artificially. She doesn't try to look younger, so she looks timeless: a wood nymph lost among the smoke and toddler skyscrapers.
Soon his lips are at her throat and she is peeled back for him, her dress ripped enough that it slips down her shoulders. He leaves little marks like constellations around her collarbone. She groans.
They are offbeat, or maybe they have created their own. "From the moment I saw you, baby," he whispers, and each word is candied, metal and painted bright colors. His kisses flicker like jazz hands.
It is a fantasy, and he is not really there.
She pulls away. "Saw me what." She isn't breathless; her vocal cords are just slippery. Every part of her is slippery, bruising herself against him. She grabs him so hard that he cries out, not entirely in pain.
His suit is ripped too now. He'll buy another one tomorrow, he thinks. He won't. Tomorrow the world is going to end.
"Saw you here, like a lost little lamb, baby. Just had to have you. I want you." He grabs her hand, but his fingers are unable to find purchase against the smoothness of her skin and the smoothness of her dress.
He wants to hurt her. He wants to pleasure her. For him they are the same thing. Everything he loves he destroys, even the world. He, like every other hedonistic american, has eaten away at the foundations of society until every building, every family, every business is built on sand. Soon everything will fall. Soon is tomorrow.
But not tonight. Tonight is a good night. Tonight he has met her. Tonight he will take her back to his apartment not to far away from Tin Pan Alley, where if you listen close you can hear the sounds of jazz's history and it's future.
She stumbles. He catches her.
Soon they are kneeling in the floor, an island of stillness in the sound and fury of dancers. For a second they are the ones looking not on what they want but what they have.
And she smiles. No, she laughs. It erupts from her throat, and it is not the laugh of the woodland nymph, it is laugh of a girl who is drowning in gin, drowning in the reflection of herself in his eyes.
When he kisses the world returns to it's normal speed of frantic abandon. It's default setting is "hurtling itself to the apocalypse". Slowly they rise like some forgotten star in some forgotten sky. Her hands encircling his biceps.
He turns around searching for an empty chair on which to hang his coat. It doesn't matter when he doesn't find one; he tears his coat off anyone exposing an only slightly muscled chest beneath it. His suit is already ripped, so he cares not when it becomes a pinstripe rug for dancers. In fact he is one of them, whirling her around in his arms, tearing up his suit.
Her lips do more than meet his, they search him out.. They crash against each other. His tongue tiptoes at first over the ridge of her gums. She scolds him wordlessly for his shyness, her hips orbiting his, closer and closer until they are crashing.
The explosions leave them aching for more. She bites his lip hard enough to draw blood. It tastes good mixed with the aftertaste of gin on her lips. The gin had numbed her taste buds with its wood varnish taste, but now his blood, all rust and strangeness revives them.
But they don't have time for slow motion moments; if the moment could have been either romantic or awkward neither knows. Her brain sinks from the alcohol, and his thoughts were only facades to begin with.
While neither of them think, there are some thing he knows. She is a virgin. Her kisses are sloppy. His are too, but there are some things that men just know. The same way he knows which stocks to invest in, or which broads have legs tighter than a speakeasy's owner's lips.
He tells her. "This your first time, doll face." It isn't a question. His lips are all statement, his hips exclamation points. She is so close to him she can't remember where his limbs begin and hers end. In fact it feels to them as if they are eternal, never-ending, a part of the beat, a part of the trombone.
She draws her lips to his, and the first part of her kiss is like an unpulled trigger. Promises that shouldn't be made, threats that shouldn't be threatened. And then she shoots. Her lips suckle his flesh, suck and suck and suck.
He cries out in ecstasy, and she stops.
"Don't," she pants, her lungs collapsed inward from trying to breathe in his skin instead of oxygen, "ask me that again." Tonight is a night for forgetting, and she doesn't want to remember that the ghosts are still watching, nodding in disapproval and taking notes for when she travels up to the black and white gates far up in the sky.
"Whatever you say, doll face." In truth he doesn't want her to speak ever again. He wants her to continue to carve her name onto his skin with her teeth. "Let's blow this joint." His pants are as tight as her.
They do not remember the trip through the streets in his Rollys Royce. It was a pause, a bit of restraint they didn't know they had. It was awkward, romantic, and irrelevant, something they don't want to remember. But they will. Come dawn they won't remember much, but they'll remember this.
She'll remember how distinct his knuckles were as he gripped the steering wheel and the gears, how bad of a driver he was, how his skin glittered with sweat, how they tried to start conversation, but it fizzled like a wet sparkler because she could only stare at his crotch.
He in turn won't remember her breasts, how they heaved delightfully as she struggled to breathe in the cold night air, to gain back some of the lost sense. But her coin had been flipped long ago. In fact it was already close to landing.
Instead he'll remember her eyes: brown and innocent and afraid, and tempted. Regret is not a word he is familiar with, but he will be. Up until now his life has been written in the future tense, but now it shifts to present. Tomorrow it will be past. His life has been written on stationary with his initials embossed at the top, but soon it will be scrawled on napkins and backs of newspapers that he doesn't want to read.
But now is not the future. Now they are tumbling out of the car, a whirlwind of kisses and touches forgettably brief.
They had transformed into creatures of glitter, feathers and sequins. In the night their real lives are costumes that didn't fit. They need to be naked.
He fiddles with the key, and she presses him into the door. This time he's the one kissing her. His tongue explores the ridges of her ear, a tourist in her body, but at the same time more familiar with it than she is. He knows her switches. And he presses, and presses, until his teeth mark her.
She cries out, but he doesn't pull away. He presses harder, furiously. His heart beats faster, and his lips try to keep time, elavatoring up and down the column of her neck. His fingers tangled in her hair, or maybe her hair tangled in his fingers.
Fuck no. There is no maybe. There is only pressure, insistent. There is only will.
The door gives.
She falls onto her back with a crack. The pain is dull, and she feels bruises forming there to match the ones where he has bit and teased her flesh, but she is not broken. There are too many chemicals; her body doesn't know how to respond. Everything is flashing and spinning.
The sight of her creamy gams exposed for him, her skirt thrown up over her shoulders break his last levies of control. He is flooded with desire deeper than the oceans after forty days and forty nights. He will never cry out to God again, not when he's been blinded by the pleasure she's given him.
Words have become a dilapidated language, but he uses them all the same. "Take it off."
Her ghosts, her fear, haunt her edges, even now. Even when she is not herself they are her. It doesn't matter how fast they kiss. And then she turns the world upside-down.
"You first," she says.
His fingers, sticky with spilled mixed drinks and his own dry sweat, trip over the buttons of his trousers.
She watches him for a moment, cocked head. Her chest is tight from fear. The ecstasy has died, but the need has not. She doesn't want him, but she needs him. He wants her, but doesn't need her. He is taking to long.
She crawls like a child, scrambling and uncoordinated, toward him. Grabbing at the bottom of his cuffs she drags her self up until her mouth is kissing his hands away. Then her fingers, deft from years of sowing quilts for fundraisers, undo his pants.
But there is another layer, his underwear. Through it she can see the line of his cock and the thick swell of his balls.
She doesn't call them that though; to her they are indistinct, frightening shapes. Fear will lose tonight; her soul is movement, and his heart is action. Her fingers pull his underwear down so fast that his cock pops out. She draws back.
She sweats out fear, he alcohol, and he can smell both. He is not good at being gentle. She saw in that the way he gripped the steering wheel, the same way he saw that she wasn't good at running away from her shame. So he kneels, pulling off his shirt, and he holds her.
His fingers explore the Labyrinth mess of her long hair; so different from the short bobs of all the other young flapper rebels. She is a mess, a beautiful mess. Looking at her close up is like staring at a blurry kaleidoscope and he is at once entranced and disgusted.
"You've got me going goofy," he whispers, and kisses her so softly she can't feel it.
But she feels nice in his arms. She thinks his tenderness is a trap, in part it is. She falls into it willingly, and soon his kisses aren't nice, soon they are rough. Soon their tongues are swinging against each other. Soon the beat has emerged from their bones like Venus from the ocean. Soon she is at his feet, staring up at his member.
He is thick; she didn't know that men were like that. He is also slightly hairy. For a moment she just stares at his cock in wonder. Will that really fit inside her? Her hand fits around it, and she begins softly, stroking it like a kitten. He purrs.
She doesn't want him to purr; she wants him to scream until his throat bleeds. She tugs. He moans. Harder. It's not enough. He's ice-skating around the edge. She wants him to fall, and fall, and fall, like she's already fallen.
It's not inspiration when she puts her mouth around his cock. It's fury, desire, fear and hunger. It does not taste good, but she is hungry. It tastes warm, like his skin, but crinklier.
But he's still not screaming. His moans are scrappy. She wants full blown shrieks. She wants the neighbors to think that she is murdering him.
She almost throws up when the tip of him touches the back of her throat. But he likes this, she can tell because his little moans have intensified into cries. Somehow he has grown even larger. He never was flaccid, but now it is as if every blood cell, every part of him is in her mouth.
Her tongue has been exploring lazily, she knows the majority of his pleasure comes from the way her lips fold up and down. He just wants to be encased, to live within her. She doesn't want him to live at all.
Suddenly her tongue discovers something, a spot, a joint, and the place where all of his nerves seem to be. He can't name it, and she can't speak, but she's almost there.
She pushes. Again with the pressure, insistent, unavoidable. Fate is in the way her tongue scrapes against him.
And then he is silent, and her mouth is full with his semen.
He never screamed, but his silence is more telling. His face is drawn into a horizontal line, every expression at once, every color. So much pleasure has transformed his face into so much pain. But he does not scream. The language of man is sound, and it is the rest in the jazz ditty, the part before everything goes to hell, that he inhabits now.
She pulls out of him, drawing away angrily, wiping away the disgusting fluid from her mouth. He didn't even scream. Who is she to read in the silences?
He searches for her, but her gaze is far away. The hunger dies in her stomach once she tastes him, really tastes him. People are disgusting. He is boozy, and they are sweaty.
"Hey, doll face." He whispers as she turns away.
"The name," she grinds out, "is Isabella, drugstore cowboy." She isn't in insulting him; she is reminding herself who he is. To him she is a doll, a body, a chassis. He has hurtled out of control, and he didn't even have the grace to tell her exactly how far into thoughtless pleasure she had thrown him.
The ghosts have won. They stop taking notes and politely golf clap. She can't do it. She is too full of regret for things she hasn't even done yet to do it. She can't hurl herself off the cliff, although she pushes him into oblivion without hesitation.
Now she is the one to scream. She cries. She cries for her restraint, for the pleasures that hover above her range of vision. She cries for all the colors she cannot see.
Ironically, he is the one who is truly blind, for he doesn't sense the root of her fear, and shame. He only senses the emptiness within his balls, and the desire to be refilled and then empty himself again, and again, again.
She tears away from the artificial flickering gas lamps that light his apartment, out his door and into the night.
He does not follow.
- - - - -
The world ends. The stock market crash wipes out all of his funds. He has bought and bought and bought. Spent money he didn't have. Made love to girls he can't remember.
But he remembers her, maybe because he never felt the inside of her. To him on the inside all girls were the same, some a little tighter, but for the most part generic. He has always been a brand name kind of guy, and Bella has become the label burned onto the back of his eyelids. So he remembers her. Even as he sells his apartment. Even as he begs his friends for work. Even as he stands in line at the soup kitchen.
He remembers her eyes; he remembers her tears. He remembers the pleasure, the reckless abandon and how she left.
He writes her name on the back of napkins and newspapers that are freckled with red circles over possible job openings. And now he cries.
And he is still crying for the things that he never really had. All the virgin land still stretched out that he thought he had pilfered. All the stocks he never understood. The moments he didn't slow down to see.
----
She runs back to her shoddy apartment. All her money is under her mattress; she was never a creature of trust. Things get bad, but for her they have always been bordering on miserable. She never goes to Paris. The strangest thing for hers is that the ghosts leave. They take their victory and run.
Even more surprising is that she finds herself imagining his face. She looks for him in soup kitchen lines, in the teeming masses of men looking for work. But it is hard, all these faces are made nameless by their despair.
The most surprising thing of all is that one day she finds him.
----
They talk. Well, she talks; he listens. For once he listens. He doesn't like what he hears; he is disgusted. But he doesn't leave.
One night, on a scratchy mattress above her dwindling reserves of cash, she takes him inside her. It hurts, and now he smells even worse than before. It feels strange. He moves slowly, unsure. When he finally comes inside of her, it makes her remember all the things she tried to forget. She remembers the taste of him. She is disgusted, but does not leave.
----
The world ends. Or maybe, for now more than ever is a time for maybes, it begins.
Authors Note: This is my first lemon. Written for Age of Edward.