Requiem lowered me to the chair by the stage and lifted the reserved sign off the seat before I sat on it. I forgot to smooth my skirt down in back until I touched the cold chair. I had to sit up enough to smooth it down and not put my bare cookies on a chair that someone else would have to sit on later. Just politeness. But my eyes never left the stage.
Nathaniel did push-ups, then his hips dropped lower, and his body came up, and he did a movement that managed to look like he was fucking the stage, and at the same time, was a bigger movement than that, like a wave that went from his head to his feet. Over and over again, until the women in the audience were almost hysterical. A woman two chairs to my right was pulling down her blouse, flashing her breasts at him.
He crawled across the stage in that way that the wereanimals had, as if they had muscles in places that humans didn’t. It was graceful and dangerous, and utterly sensual, as he slinked on all fours toward the end of the stage.
From the back, with his legs tight together, he looked nude. He laid his head on the floor, and the ponytail of his auburn hair spilled out around him like a cloak. He stayed that way for a moment, in a tight ball that looked so terribly nude. Then the music changed and his head flew up, his hair spilling in an arc through the air like a shining spray of colored water, until it fell around his back, and I realized that he had it up in a high, tight ponytail. So that the hair bounced and moved with him. He used it like it was a piece of costume, to hide his body, to peek pale flesh through it, then to swirl it around him so that the hair itself was the show for a moment, then he began to do that sensuous crawl around the stage, and people began to put money in the thin strap of his G-string. There was already a pile of money at the far end of the stage, as if he’d been getting it all along, but only now was he letting them slip the bills in so close to his body.
One woman pulled on the G-string, pulling it away from his body, and he cupped his hand over the front of him, to hide, and I almost got up. Almost rode to his rescue, but he didn’t need to be rescued.
He kissed her, and she let him move her hand away from his clothes and sat back like he’d stunned her. He joked and chastized and flowed through their hands like muscled water. He was always almost close enough, but never quite where they reached, if they were reaching where they shouldn’t have.
I watched the other women, and the one or two men, and I felt something. Lust, I think, it was lust, but it was as if their lust was solid enough to grab, to pull out of the air itself and wrap around my body like a coat. Jean-Claude’s voice whispered through my head, “Ma petite, do you want to know how to feed on their lust, to feed without touching?”
“You know I do,” I whispered.
And it was like before with Primo, it was as if he stepped inside my skin almost, so that I suddenly knew what he knew. I knew how to open myself up and pull in the thick air. It wasn’t like breathing, and it wasn’t like feeding when I touched someone, it was closer to literally pulling at the air with metaphysical hands and dragging the lust hand over hand and pulling it inside me. It was the oddest sensation, as if the lust were silk or satin and I pulled it inside my body, as if silk scarves could pass through a hole in my skin. The sensation felt like I’d made a wound in my body and was pulling things through that wound. It was a sensation just this side of pain.
Jean-Claude’s voice in my head, “It will not be so uncomfortable when you have practiced it.”
“It feels awful.”
“But are you feeding?” he asked.
I had to think about it, because all my attention was on how disturbing it felt to draw the lusts of strangers inside me. But once I thought about it, I realized I was feeding. I felt less cold than I had, but… “Do you ever fill up this way?”
“It keeps one from starving, but it is not a meal, no.”
I don’t know what I would have said to that, because suddenly Nathaniel was in front of me. I think he was repeating himself, but I hadn’t heard him the first time. “I said, do you want to come play with the kitty?”
Jean-Claude was gone from my head, and I’d stopped feeding from the audience. Everything just shut down, everything but the lavender eyes staring at me from the edge of the stage. His hand was held out.
Women’s voices were calling, “I’m not shy… pick me, if she doesn’t want to go. Brandon, Brandon, she doesn’t want you, but I do…”
I put my hand in his, but I made a face to show just how uneasy this whole thing made me. I didn’t like to dance where strangers, or even friends, could see me. Being dragged on stage at a strip club was so far beyond my comfort level. Until that moment, I hadn’t really thought about what it would mean to mark him tonight. On stage, in front of people. Eek!
I stumbled going up on the stage, because I remembered the short skirt and the lack of anything under it, so I was very ladylike getting up on stage. Trouble was the stage was too high from the floor to be that ladylike, so I stumbled, and he caught me and gave me a look. That look gave me a last refuge. That look said, If you can’t do this, I’ll let it go. He would have, too, but I also knew that if it wasn’t me, it was going to be someone else. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how I felt about watching him get pawed, or paw another woman. The fact that I thought flaunting myself up on stage would be a lesser evil than watching someone else flaunt themselves at Nathaniel, said clearly that my priorities had become skewed.
They’d brought a chair up on stage, and I hadn’t seen it. The money was missing from his G-string, I think he’d put it with the pile at the end of the stage. I hadn’t seen that either, which meant that I’d missed some of the act while I was feeding off the audience.
He led me to the chair and sat me down in it with a flourish of his arm. I looked up at him and knew that the look on my face was suspicious. It said clearly, What are you going to do to me?
He laughed, and it was that full-throated laugh that turned his face from handsome to something younger, moreinnocent, for lack of a better word. I valued that laugh, because I didn’t get to hear it often. If me sitting here like this made him feel that good, then it just couldn’t be that bad.
He put a hand on the back of the chair on either side of my shoulders, leaning his face very close into mine. I could see the eyeliner around his lavender eyes now and realized that there was mascara there, too, not a lot, but his eyes didn’t need a lot to go from beautiful to freaking amazing. “You’re not allowed to touch me, and I’m only allowed limited contact with you, but your hands need to stay on the chair most of the time.” His lips showed the shadow of the smile that gleamed in his eyes.
I don’t know what I would have said to that, because the music came up, or maybe it just began, and he started to dance. It had been spectacular enough from the edge of the stage, up this close, it passed from spectacular to embarrassing. It didn’t matter that I slept with him almost every night, or that I’d seen him more nude than this more than once. It mattered only that it was in public, and I didn’t know what to do.
He started by writhing over me with his hands still on the back of the chair. His chest was so close to my face that it was harder not to have my lips touch him, than to touch him. I’d seen him use his body before, but not like this. It was as if every muscle from shoulder to groin was capable of moving independently, and he was using every one of them. It was amazing, and in private I would have told him so, but here and now, I blushed.
He sat in my lap with his legs wide around the chair, his hands still on the back of it. If he’d just sat, I could have handled it, but of course he didn’t. He moved his hips around my lap, like he was stirring something, but the movement didn’t stop at the hips, it danced up his body, so that it was a bigger movement and more of the crowd could see it, as if there was any doubt what he was pantomiming.
My face was hot, as if my skin would burn if you touched it.
He leaned in against my hair, where I’d hidden my face, and whispered, “I’ll stop and pick someone else if it’s too much.”
I raised up enough to meet his eyes. “Pick someone else?” I said.
“The act doesn’t change,” he whispered, “just who’s on stage.” The smile was gone from his eyes. He was serious again. I’d killed the smile in his face, or my embarrassment had. God.