It Always Ends Bad
Disclaimer: It all belongs to the great and powerful Baz. I'm just playing.
Nota: I've posted this fic, in its entirety, before, but have since decided to rework and repost it. Hope you enjoy.
"'It tells the story of a prostitute and the man who fell in love with her.' Some say that love can conquer all. But for a certain Narcoleptic Argentinean, a love affair with a woman who sells herself can only end badly."
* * *
El Comienzo
-The Moulin Rouge, 1899-
The Argentinean had always been alone. For as long as he could remember, he had existed solely on his own. He had no close friends, few acquaintances, and no longer had any living family, though he had long excluded himself from them. It was only him.
Of course, there had been women. Affairs, quick, brief joinings, paid whores... more often than not, he had turned to the later. The prostitutes were not like other women. They were professional, aloof, in control even while writhing beneath a sweaty body. They were safe.
That was why he had come here.
At the Moulin Rouge, the women were not lovers, they were business partners. Sex was merely signing the contract that money and propositions had laid out. Over the course of his time at the Moulin Rouge, he had made many such contracts, when the money left over from Absinthe and rent allowed. But he was careful. He would not fall again, would not allow the night to become anything more than sex. The women whose beds he visited were nothing to him, and that was they way they would remain. He would not fall. Not again. Not when it had ended so.
In the bed next to him lay Nini Legs-in-the-Air, the most professional and heartless of the whores of the Moulin Rouge... the very reason why she was his favorite. Their joining meant nothing to her, never would. Her heart had been lost long ago.
His had been shattered.
They had finally exhausted themselves from hours of frenzied lovemaking, him desperate to forget, her thinking of the money that lay on the bedside table. It was amazing how one could be paid to fake passion.
She slept now, her back to him. Her dark hair, loosed from its customary chignon, flowed in tousled waves over the pillows and tangled sheets that she had drawn over herself. It was not modesty the possessed her to do so, for she had none of that virtue left, but the cold. For all its electric lights, the Moulin was still frightfully chilled during the night after raw hunger had been sated.
This was the time, while she slept, when he hated to look at her. He could bear her mid-coitus, with her flushed skin and flashing eyes and painted lips. He could even stand to see her dance, her muscular legs encased in black stockings and her cancan skirts flying everywhere. Anytime but now. For when she was silent and facing away from him in sleep, she looked so much like her... he tried in vain not to think of it, to dwell on his visions of her, but she always seemed to haunt him when he least wanted it.
//Admit it// came the dreaded voice inside his head, the one that always accompanied her memory, //you loved her. You needed her.//
"No," he whispered, though he half-wondered wondered why he even bothered denying it anymore. He was, in a sense, lying to himself by claiming that she had not consumed him completely with her passion, her fire, her life-force. She had been his undoing, as he had been hers. But unlike her, he had not yet come back together.
//Admit it.//
"Go away." His chocolate eyes opened and he looked over his shoulder, half expecting to see her again. She was not there. He was alone in the room with his whore.
Then why could he still feel her?
With a low growl he rolled over and disentangled himself from the sheets, pulling on his discarded trousers and crossing the room to stand by the window. The cold seeped up through his bare feet, startling him back to full wakefulness. He would get no sleep tonight, and even if restless repose did come, it would only bring more vivid dreams of her.
He let his forehead rest against the cool glass and closed his eyes, wishing that these day-mares would not always take him back to the same time, the same beginning of the end. Why could he not remember other times? Surely his life had not begun that day in Buenos Aires, in that cursed brothel. There must have been happier times... perhaps in his youth.
But he could not remember being a day under twenty-five, could not remember touching another woman before her, could recollect neither mother nor father. Had he had siblings? He didn't know. It had all begun then, at twenty-five, when he was too old to be born, yet too young to die. But young or old, that year he had done both, and both had been by the burning hand of the same woman.
He felt it this time, the wash of unconsciousness. It seemed to take him slowly, as if graciously giving him time to prepare. He stumbled back, half-senseless, into the chair by the window, grasping wildly at the armrests so that he would not fall, would not break his neck in the attack.
Before the blackness took him, he whispered a single word, "Roxanne," gasping out the two syllables as the woman in the corner, deathly pale and wearing her white dress as always, smiled mockingly back at him, her hand splayed across the vivid bloodstain on the front of her gown.
And as always, when the blackness released him, he was standing once again outside the same brothel, feeling the same money weighing in his pocket, and the same lust tugging at his groin.
Despite the voice of foreknowledge screaming at him to walk away, to hurl the handful of bills at the wretched building in defiance of Fate's cruelty, he pushed open the door and stepped inside.
END CHAPTER ONE
Nota Parte Dos: Forgive me for the short chapter, the proceeding one will be much longer. So far, I'm much happier with the flow of the storyline than with the original. Let me know what you think, whether or not you've read the former version.
This is for Petal La-Belle-En-Cuisse, without whom I would not have been inspired to rewrite this. After reading her wonderful NA/Nini fic "You Can't Walk Away From Love," who wouldn't be inspired?
Disclaimer: It all belongs to the great and powerful Baz. I'm just playing.
Nota: I've posted this fic, in its entirety, before, but have since decided to rework and repost it. Hope you enjoy.
"'It tells the story of a prostitute and the man who fell in love with her.' Some say that love can conquer all. But for a certain Narcoleptic Argentinean, a love affair with a woman who sells herself can only end badly."
* * *
El Comienzo
-The Moulin Rouge, 1899-
The Argentinean had always been alone. For as long as he could remember, he had existed solely on his own. He had no close friends, few acquaintances, and no longer had any living family, though he had long excluded himself from them. It was only him.
Of course, there had been women. Affairs, quick, brief joinings, paid whores... more often than not, he had turned to the later. The prostitutes were not like other women. They were professional, aloof, in control even while writhing beneath a sweaty body. They were safe.
That was why he had come here.
At the Moulin Rouge, the women were not lovers, they were business partners. Sex was merely signing the contract that money and propositions had laid out. Over the course of his time at the Moulin Rouge, he had made many such contracts, when the money left over from Absinthe and rent allowed. But he was careful. He would not fall again, would not allow the night to become anything more than sex. The women whose beds he visited were nothing to him, and that was they way they would remain. He would not fall. Not again. Not when it had ended so.
In the bed next to him lay Nini Legs-in-the-Air, the most professional and heartless of the whores of the Moulin Rouge... the very reason why she was his favorite. Their joining meant nothing to her, never would. Her heart had been lost long ago.
His had been shattered.
They had finally exhausted themselves from hours of frenzied lovemaking, him desperate to forget, her thinking of the money that lay on the bedside table. It was amazing how one could be paid to fake passion.
She slept now, her back to him. Her dark hair, loosed from its customary chignon, flowed in tousled waves over the pillows and tangled sheets that she had drawn over herself. It was not modesty the possessed her to do so, for she had none of that virtue left, but the cold. For all its electric lights, the Moulin was still frightfully chilled during the night after raw hunger had been sated.
This was the time, while she slept, when he hated to look at her. He could bear her mid-coitus, with her flushed skin and flashing eyes and painted lips. He could even stand to see her dance, her muscular legs encased in black stockings and her cancan skirts flying everywhere. Anytime but now. For when she was silent and facing away from him in sleep, she looked so much like her... he tried in vain not to think of it, to dwell on his visions of her, but she always seemed to haunt him when he least wanted it.
//Admit it// came the dreaded voice inside his head, the one that always accompanied her memory, //you loved her. You needed her.//
"No," he whispered, though he half-wondered wondered why he even bothered denying it anymore. He was, in a sense, lying to himself by claiming that she had not consumed him completely with her passion, her fire, her life-force. She had been his undoing, as he had been hers. But unlike her, he had not yet come back together.
//Admit it.//
"Go away." His chocolate eyes opened and he looked over his shoulder, half expecting to see her again. She was not there. He was alone in the room with his whore.
Then why could he still feel her?
With a low growl he rolled over and disentangled himself from the sheets, pulling on his discarded trousers and crossing the room to stand by the window. The cold seeped up through his bare feet, startling him back to full wakefulness. He would get no sleep tonight, and even if restless repose did come, it would only bring more vivid dreams of her.
He let his forehead rest against the cool glass and closed his eyes, wishing that these day-mares would not always take him back to the same time, the same beginning of the end. Why could he not remember other times? Surely his life had not begun that day in Buenos Aires, in that cursed brothel. There must have been happier times... perhaps in his youth.
But he could not remember being a day under twenty-five, could not remember touching another woman before her, could recollect neither mother nor father. Had he had siblings? He didn't know. It had all begun then, at twenty-five, when he was too old to be born, yet too young to die. But young or old, that year he had done both, and both had been by the burning hand of the same woman.
He felt it this time, the wash of unconsciousness. It seemed to take him slowly, as if graciously giving him time to prepare. He stumbled back, half-senseless, into the chair by the window, grasping wildly at the armrests so that he would not fall, would not break his neck in the attack.
Before the blackness took him, he whispered a single word, "Roxanne," gasping out the two syllables as the woman in the corner, deathly pale and wearing her white dress as always, smiled mockingly back at him, her hand splayed across the vivid bloodstain on the front of her gown.
And as always, when the blackness released him, he was standing once again outside the same brothel, feeling the same money weighing in his pocket, and the same lust tugging at his groin.
Despite the voice of foreknowledge screaming at him to walk away, to hurl the handful of bills at the wretched building in defiance of Fate's cruelty, he pushed open the door and stepped inside.
END CHAPTER ONE
Nota Parte Dos: Forgive me for the short chapter, the proceeding one will be much longer. So far, I'm much happier with the flow of the storyline than with the original. Let me know what you think, whether or not you've read the former version.
This is for Petal La-Belle-En-Cuisse, without whom I would not have been inspired to rewrite this. After reading her wonderful NA/Nini fic "You Can't Walk Away From Love," who wouldn't be inspired?