Trust, a moulin rouge fanfic

Title: Trust

Author: Opie

Disclaimer: The idea of Moulin Rouge! belongs to the incredible Baz Luhrmann and his staff. I am eternally indebted to him. And after I am done emotionally scarring his characters, I will place them neatly back on the shelf where they belong. The bit at the beginning comes from the Hole song, "Asking for It," from their album Live Through This.

Author's Notes: I got the idea for this when I watched the expanded version of Le Tango Roxanne. Watch it if you can get your hands on it. I mean, wow.

Warnings: Language

***

Was she asking for it? Was she asking nice?

If she was asking for it, did she ask you twice?

I killed her. Bitch.

It wasn't as if I didn't warn her. I was her best customer. And although there was a lot going on, I warned her. She just didn't notice, didn't pay attention, didn't understand . . . somehow she didn't get it. Or maybe she didn't care. Either way, she knew. In a way, she knew. Or she had the chance to know, and wasted it.

It was the last time we danced the tango. I'd been teaching her to dance the tango, because she was young and pretty and agile. No one in Paris really knew how to dance it, and I thought she could. She was smooth, fluid in her moments. She was flexible, capable of bending the right ways quickly.

When I first met her, I was barely twenty-five, still impressionable. Oh, I had the image in my mind of being jaded and worldly, but although I'd been raised in a bordello, I had as much clue what went on there as Christian did when he first arrived in Paris and met Satine. I left Argentina to join the Bohemian revolution - I wanted to be a famous actor, and my French was very good. So I went to Paris, where the revolution was in full swing. I took a room by myself, but the rent was easily too much, so Satie and Toulouse-Lautrec, who both had the money to live by themselves, moved in with me, most likely out of kindness.

What a bunch we were . . . an albino numerologist, a perpetually inebriated dwarf, and a narcoleptic. A musician, a painter, and an actor. It was true revolution, the three of us living together.

***

I met Nini two days after they'd moved in. Toulouse and Satie decided that the proper way to christine our friendship was to go to the Moulin Rouge that night and, as Toulouse put it, pouring us glasses of absinthe, "Make love to the fairies of the revolution." And so we went.

Although every man on the floor went crazy when Satine was lowered on her trapeze - this was about three years ago, but she was already a woman, shapely and perfect - I wasn't drawn to her as everyone else was. I'd always prefered darker women, with heavy eye make-up, dark tresses like silk. Although Satine was perfectly lovely, my eyes were pulled continually to a slender dark-haired can-can dancer in the front row of the stage.

Nini was nineteen at the time. She was already addicted to absinthe, and as a prostitute and stage performer, she spent most of the daylight hours inside, asleep or working on the dances. Her legs were the first thing I noticed - clad though they were in dark stockings with black stripes on them, I could see the muscle there, strong and gentle at the same time. Her panties were red, like the inside of her dress, and ruffled. Her dress was yellow and black striped, form-fitting to the waist, where it flared out to her ankles. Her waist was inconceivably tiny, and from the straps of her dress flapped black beads. Her movement was incredible, fast and vibrant and speaking of a life none of the other girls seemed to possess. But her face captured me.

Even back then, she had a perfect face. Like a china doll, her lips were painted a living red. Her skin was the white of porcelain, and her cheeks pink from the speed of the dance. Her eyes were huge, outlined heavily in kohl, and black, near as I could tell. Her hair was black, short bangs flipped across her forehead, the rest of it pulled back so she could move quickly and easily.

When the floor dancing came, I moved towards her, my feet taking on life of their own. In a moment, almost, she was in my arms, twirling and grinning coquettishly. I'll admit, from that moment, I was smitten.

We danced all night - every time she tried to leave, I'd catch her by the arm and whirl her and she would continue dancing with me. As Zidler began to ask people to leave, around two in the morning, I offered her money, and we went up to her room.

***

Nini was the best at her job. She was hard inside, which is why she was able to stay so disconnected from everything. But she was still sensitive enough to know what people liked, what they wanted. She knew how to tell me what I wanted to think, how to convince me she loved me and only me.

I still paid her for her time, of course. I couldn't not pay her, because then she was disappearing nights and returning with no money. She would surely have been put out on the streets if one night she was Zidler's highest cash-bringer and the next she was bringing in nothing at all. And neither of us could have coped with that. She was clever, Nini was. She knew people, more than anything else.

I'll admit readily that I fell in love with her. I thought a few times about asking her to give up whoring and marry me, though I'll confess I never broached the subject with her. She was just too awkward, too sad to ask anything like that of.

I thought we were in love. We danced with a passion I could feel straight to the marrow of my bones, and after we made love, she slept peacefully in my arms, as if she belonged there. As if she would stay there, for ever and ever. Perhaps I was stupid, naive to think that a woman stays with a man for three years for no reason aside from love. But I was a Bohemian, and believed in all the traditions I now find ridiculous and stupid. Beauty, freedom, truth, and love. Hah.

***

The last time we tangoed, the day we all sat around the theater waiting for the Duke to finish with Satine, I gave her her warning. I'd watched what happened with Satine and Christian, and realized that I could no longer trust her. She was a woman who sold herself, and I know that the times I'd thought about her being with another man, I'd nearly gone mad with rage. The jealousy would consume me until I felt I couldn't breathe, and wanted to hang myself to stop the pain.

Christian was going through the same thing.

I watched her during the tango. As we told the story, I watched her. I knew she was acting - she was a brilliant actress - but I couldn't help but wonder. When I said that love without trust wasn't love at all, I was right. I meant it when I told them that. Because I couldn't trust her anymore. I watched her face as she danced with these men - the smooth moves so erotic, even to my eye - and I wondered in that moment if she really loved me, as I thought she did.

When the couples took to the floor, I watched her. Her eyes were on me even as I watched her. Her eyes were on me, even as she caressed herself, teasing me, tempting me. I could almost feel her flesh against mine, her skin under my hand, her pores beneath my lips. It was more than I could stand, after seeing her dance with all those men the same way she danced with me.

At the end, as the men clustered around her again, she tried to break out of the circle, but she was simply tossed along, as if she were no more than a rag doll, a sack of potatoes. And when she reached me, I twisted her as if to snap her neck.

***

I didn't, of course. Not yet. I waited.

For a while, things were perfect. She was loving, attentive, and kind to me. We would dance for hours, make love until long after the sun had come up, orgasms wracking both our minds, pillaging and raping our brains. We would drag ourselves to rehearsals and dance more.

Satine passed on, and Christian finished his book before packing up and heading back to England. Zidler closed up the Moulin Rouge, but Nini found work at another bordello down the road. She moved in with me, and she danced there, though she promised to do no more whoring.

I believed her. Bitch.

I came home one day from a party, where Toulouse and I had been drinking absinthe and wasting time until I could go home to Nini - she was working, after all. I didn't want to wake her, because sometimes she was asleep when I arrived home - if she'd had a particularly difficult day, or something like that - and so I walked quietly up the stairs. On impulse, I'd stopped at a street vendor and bought one of his last bouquets of roses, and I held them behind my back.

I snuck up the stairs and into our rooms. Strange noises came from the bedroom. The creaking of the bed, and soft moans from my woman. Heavy, male breathing.

I flung open the door, and there lay Nini, a man atop her, like the whore she was. My own words echoed in my head. Without trust there is no love.

They both looked at me, and the man climbed off her quickly, hauling his pants on and climbing out the window and down the trellis outside our apartment. Nini looked at me, her eyes as huge and soulful as the first time I'd seen them.