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Chapter Text

I was carrying my heavy DJ bags up the back stairs at Limelight when I saw the small blond Asian boy. He was sitting in an alcove at a turning point about halfway up that had once held a shrine or a stand for votive candles, but now functioned as a dark corner for drug deals and surreptitious bumps (in both senses of the word, if you catch my drift). Just as I rounded the corner of the staircase and climbed towards him, he suddenly looked down, and our eyes locked, with an electric crackle of frisson, like the glitch of static from nylons on an old carpet.

My record bags were heavy, and I had really been hoping to set them down for a moment before dragging them all the way to the top floor of the club, but his small pack of rivetheads had already claimed the narrow bench. For far too long a moment, we just stared at one another, eyes wide with surprise or wonder, until finally I raised my eyebrows hopefully and ventured a friendly smile in the hopes he might, you know, be a gentleman, stand up and offer me the seat? But he just continued to gaze at me inquisitively, the look of startled confusion on his face slowly lighting up in a dreamy little smile, as if I were some mirage shimmering out of the desert.

He was clearly off his face, as the whole group were already looking slightly the worse for wear, even though it was still quite early in the evening by New York standards. There were three of them piled into the tiny alcove, two Asian boys including Blondie, and one Westerner with his back to me. I wondered if they were tourists or locals – but I’d never seen the blond boy before. I would have remembered a face like that. He wasn’t exactly handsome, his nose was a bit too crooked and his stubborn jaw a bit too elfin, but he was almost startlingly pretty, with wide cheekbones, sleepy bedroom eyes, and an almost perfectly round cupid’s bow of a mouth. At some point in the evening, he had clearly been wearing makeup, but his thick eyeliner had smeared and his painted lips looked almost bruised, lending him a slightly dishevelled wildness that only heightened his fawnlike beauty. The rest of the rivetheads were of course a sea of black clothes, but the blond boy was wearing something dark threaded faintly with gold, and the single pin-light in the alcove caught his clothes and his hair, so that he seemed to be glowing like an angel.

Realising I’d been staring at him so long it might come across as rude, I broke his gaze, and turned to glance down the stairs, to check if Dawn was still behind me. From the direction of her glance, I could see that she, too, had clocked the beautiful rivethead. We exchanged brief grins, and she mouthed “pretty” at me. But as we rounded the corner, and passed the lads, chattering among themselves, her expression darkened.

“What?” I asked as we rounded the next bend of the stairs and passed out of sight.

She shook her head dismally. “Japanese. Don’t even bother.”

“Bother what? Looking is free,” I laughed. Dawn’s family were originally Chinese, via Singapore, and the whole clan seemed to harbour some deep resentment against the neighbouring nation.

“Where the hell have you two been?” As we passed the meandering punters and reached the top of the stairs, Toni’s voice immediately rang out from the threshold of the top floor bar. “Doors are in ten minutes, and there’s no DJ!”

“Doesn’t DJ Morticia usually open up the Groovie Goolies nights?”

“Don’t you check your answering machine? Morticia can’t make it until midnight. You should have started, like five minutes ago.”

“Chill out, Toad,” sighed Dawn, dropping her load of my CDs in front of the DJ booth and heading for the bar. The building had originally been a church, back in the late 1800s, and the attic floor of the outbuildings still bore traces of its gothic origins, so it felt slightly sacrilegious DJing behind something that looked like it had once been the side chapel’s altar.

“Don’t call me that,” grumbled Toni, as I made my way over to the booth to start lining up my records. I had learned the hard way to keep a wide berth of Toni until at least half an hour after her nights had filled up. To be fair, they always did fill up; Toni was too infamous among the downtown party scene not to pack out a club. But she always fussed. Getting down to work, I pulled out my minidisc player, cued up a mix I’d I’d burned earlier that afternoon, and plugged it in to line-check the sound system, bringing up the volume in the house speakers and fiddling with the compression and the EQ, while Dawn chatted up the bartender.

“What are you drinking?” she called back to me as I knelt down to plug in a missing cable under the mixing desk, probably showing a bit too much leg to the empty room. I always made a point of dressing up for Groovie Goolies nights, but it wasn’t exactly easy to reconnect EQ units gracefully while wearing a black and white Op-art micromini.

“Gin and bitter lemon, please.”

“Shit,” said the bartender. “Forgot the Limey was gonna be here tonight. We’re out. Toni, can you go down to the main bar and get a couple of bottles?”

“Can’t you see I’m busy counting the float? Aurora, can you make yourself useful and go?”

“No way, not doing those stairs twice in one night.” But Dawn’s lips twitched up in a cheeky smile as she swivelled round on the barstool to face me. “I bet Alice wants to go downstairs again, though.”

“Why would I want to…” Then I remembered the angel in the alcove and started to laugh. “Alright, I’ll go. Dawn, can you keep an eye on the decks for a minute?”

“DJ Aurora on the decks,” she giggled, and joined me in the booth. “Ooh, take a photo of me?”

“Your job is to take photos of the punters, not yourself,” I teased as I took her Polaroid and snapped.

“Remind me again, which button I’m not supposed to press? Is it this one?” Her hand hovered teasingly over the volume cut-out.

“Don’t touch anything. Just stand there and look pretty.” I pointed the camera and snapped again.

Dawn struck a supermodel pose with the hand mic, and cackled like a sick duck, swinging her hips back and forth to the music.

Grabbing Toni’s Access All Areas pass from her outstretched hand, I headed for the back stairs and bounced down them, hoping the boy was still there. Yes, the rivetheads were still sprawled across the alcove, deep in conversation. Coming from above this time, I was able to get a good eyeful before he caught sight of me. His bleached-blond hair was short and thick, spiked up quite high on the top of his head, but hanging down a little longer in the back towards the black leather dog collar around his neck, about half an inch of dark roots showing around his ears. He was wearing slim-cut shiny leather trousers tucked into tall engineer’s boots, with a couple of metal-studded belts slung round his skinny hips. So far, so typical for Industrial boys. But as he moved forward to take a sip of his drink, his shirt shimmered in the light. As I got closer, I could see that it was a light, gauzy thing worn over the top of a black vest – the basic pattern was swirling black and blue paisley, but threaded through the weave, either printed or embroidered (it was quite hard to tell in the dark of the club) was embossed the writhing pattern of circuit-boards, the gold wires catching the light.

For a moment, I stopped, mid-staircase, just admiring the cleverness of the pattern, wondering if it would be too forward to just stop and comment, “Hey mate, nice shirt!” But I’d learned the hard way that Americans always seemed to interpret everything I said either as arch sarcasm or a cheap come-on, so I hung back, hesitating.

But of course some fuckwit on the stairs behind me immediately started muttering for me to get out of the way, and though they tried to push past me in a blur of black PVC and platform boots, a candy raver in enormous cargo pants with foot-wide dayglo pigtails was already coming up on the opposite side. Startled at the sound of voices as they tussled, the boy looked up from his conversation, and immediately clocked me. For a moment, I just stared at him, caught like a deer in the headlights, as he stared back, the corners of his lips tugging up in a faint smile of recognition.

I couldn’t think of a thing to say. He was so pretty, he seemed to suck the thoughts straight out of my head, and I couldn’t just stand on the stairs with this man behind me getting aggro. So I shrugged lightly and started down the stairs, throwing only longing looks back over my shoulder. He watched me go all the way down the stairs, until just at the last moment he leaned over, to catch one last glimpse of me, then turned and whispered something to his mate.

Stupid, Alice, fucking stupid, I chided myself as I walked over to the bussing station and tried to catch the bar staff’s attention with Toni’s staff pass. Of course, now the moment had passed, a thousand things leapt into my head to say. A flier for my band’s next show – come on, that was the time-honoured NYC way of making contact with some hottie – invite them to see your band! I could have offered him a drink ticket. Hell, I could have started with something as simple as telling him hey, I’m DJ-ing upstairs in the library in ten minutes, come and check it out. I was still kicking myself when the barback came over to see what I needed, especially considering it took nearly ten minutes to locate any bitter lemon. Still, I took the time to dig through my bag until I found a handful of fliers. Should I write my phone number on the back of one, I wondered, or would that seem too desperate?

Hefting the bottles under one arm, I held the fliers at the ready as I mounted the stairs, but to my disappointment, the boys were gone. Dejected, I stuffed them back into my bag, and climbed the stairs back all the way up to the third floor, to find that the doors had opened, and the place was already more than half full, with more punters queuing up the stairs to get in. Up at the DJ booth, Dawn was posing with my headphones, digging through my records while my mix droned on in the background, playing The Blackout of Gretely. I had better go rescue that girl before it ran out – but first the bar.

I handed over the bottles, lukewarm as they were, but as I waited for the bartender to make my drink, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see yet another rivethead. Fuck me, goth nights were lousy with them since NIN had gone mainstream. This one was tall and lanky, wearing a fuzzy black fun-fur jacket over a faded West German army T-shirt, and a slightly manic smile.

“Look,” he slurred in a broad, drunken accent from somewhere around Kilburn. Oh, lord save me from fresh off the boat Brits who had not yet got used to NYC’s 24 hour clubbing culture. “I know this is going to sound well sus, but my mate would like to buy you a drink.”

I fixed him with a no-nonsense stare, trying to show him I saw straight through his ruse. “If your mate wants to buy me a drink, he can come over here himself, alright?”

The manic smile turned slightly wolfish. “You English?” Shit, he had rumbled me. “Where from?”

“London,” I said noncommittally.

“Norf or Sarf?” he persisted, his non-existent friend clearly completely forgotten. “Sarf, am I right?”

“Croydon,” I lied.

He laughed, the usual reaction. “Buckinghamshire lad, myself.” A hand was produced and shoved towards my chest, but luckily at that moment, my drink came.

“Sorry, would love to catch up on the gossip from dear old Blighty, but I was supposed to start DJing about ten minutes ago, and any minute now, the mixtape is going to run out, and I have to go and rescue my friend.” I pointed to the booth, where Dawn was stabbing faders in a panic. “So… nicetomeetcha, bye!” Picking up my drink, I dodged under his arm and slipped away back to the DJ booth.

Carefully, I rescued my good DJing headphones from Dawn’s head, pulled a 7” out of my record bag, and cued it up on the turntable. The Monster Mash – kind of a signature tune for Groovie Goolies nights, one of the few tracks that really united both Goths and Psych-Heads. As the shuffling drumbeat kicked in, I pumped my fist in the air and looked out over the room to check the reaction as I sung along. “I was working in the lab late one night, when my eyes beheld an eerie sight…”

The regulars were already on their feet as I boosted the bass on the sound system to make the tinny 60s production pop. Toni always shoved back a clutch of tables to make room for people to dance, but half the time people ended up dancing on top of them anyway. It always gave me a thrill the way the right track could instantly lift a room, the crackle of magnetic magic as a group of milling strangers coalesced into a dancefloor.

On the other side of the room, I could see the tall rivethead circling back from the bar, trying to negotiate the heaving dance space with several drinks balanced carefully between his hands. I was about to laugh as he dodged a coked-up goth girl who nearly sent two glasses of beer flying, but just then he reached his table, set the drinks down safely, and plonked himself down, turning to bellow into the eagerly cocked ear of the blond boy in the gold-threaded paisley shirt.

Fuck.

Fuckity fuck fuck. The one time in recorded history, there really is a mate, and he is that fit?

Chapter Text

But Boris and the Crypt-Kickers were already winding down, so I had to snatch the next record from the case. The Rattles – The Witch. The goth chicks always loved that one. I was dimly aware out of the corner of my eye that someone was staring at me, but the track was only 2 and a half minutes long, and I had to find something else. Dammit, why had I gone chasing off after a boy when I should have been setting out the first few songs of the set? I needed something long. Loop – Mother Sky. Fuck it, that would have to do, but at least it would buy me ten minutes to sort out the next few records. I bumped the speed up to match the manic pace of The Rattles, then faded it in. Only once it was going did I risk a glance out at the room to see whose gaze was prickling the back of my neck.

From my raised position up in the booth, I had a clear view across the now-crowded dance floor, to the overstuffed purple sofa where the out-of-towners were sprawled. And the little blond boy was fixedly gazing at me, his face an odd mixture of absolutely fascinated and slightly forlorn, nervously working his teeth back and forth across his plump, berry-coloured lower lip.

Safe in the castle of my DJ booth, this time I risked a jaunty wave. Panic flashed across his face like he’d been caught shoplifting, as he immediately dragged his eyes away from me, shifting quickly from the floor to the glowing stained-glass windows to the lights and back to his friends. As if noticing his distress, the Buckinghamshire pal leaned over and whispered something in his ear which seemed to calm him.

I turned back to my record bags, and quickly sorted things out, getting all my vinyl ready and my ducks in a row. Now that the crowd seemed to be grooving along with the music, I thought I’d try something a little more modern, so as Mother Sky droned along its insectoid guitar solo, I lined up Seefeel’s Plainsong, mixing in the electronic throb with the vintage drone. Across the room, the blond boy’s head shot up at the sound of the drum machine. This time, he met my eyes with a wide grin, but instead of waving back, he pointed quickly up at the speakers, then gave an extravagant thumbs up. At least the gesture for ‘COOL CHUNE, mate’ seemed to be international. I smiled back and took a gracious bow but he was already digging through his bag. When he pulled out a small notebook and started scribbling away at it, I gave up on him and bent over to dig through my vinyl again.

Someone touched my elbow and I jumped, about to be furious at the invasion of the sacred sanctuary of the DJ booth, but I was relieved to see it was Dawn, back with another two drinks.

“Let me help you. Tell me what record you want next, and I’ll find it. You concentrate on the decks,” she told me as she handed me another gin.

“OK, just try not to alphabetise them again – I have a really careful system by genre and BPM in there.”

She laughed and picked out a Cocteau Twins remix, pushing it towards me. “Trust me, by now I know your system.” But as she spoke, a shadow fell over the booth.

This time, we both turned to snap at the interloper, but to my surprise and relief, it was the blond angel, though this time he had brought a mate for backup, a taller, darker Japanese boy in skin-tight black jeans and a body-hugging techwear vest. For a moment, Blondie just stood there, gazing dumbly, but then the dark-haired boy gave him a little push, as if shoving him towards me physically. Blondie smiled at me nervously, dipped his head in a slight bow, and extended his hand. For a second, I thought he wanted to shake, but then I realised he was holding a piece of paper.

Tentatively, I took it. The sheet was covered with a mixture of English, Japanese and little cartoon characters. At the top, it said “HELLO!” in big bubble-writing. Then below that, “COOL MUSIC” all in caps, with a few scribbles that conveyed musical notation. Below that were three Japanese characters, with an arrow pointing to the top of the page.

Dawn’s head appeared at my elbow, peering down into the mysterious script. “Let me try, some of those characters are the same as Chinese.” But as she reached out to trace the figures, she started to laugh. “Now… Well… Long-life. Haha, what is this, a brand of UHT milk? I swear, my Mom always keeps a tin of Longevity Milk with this logo in the cupboard for emergencies.”

But the boy frowned, looked annoyed, and held out his hand to take the paper. Reluctantly, I handed it back, and he carefully scribbled out another line in blocky print, “imai hisashi” then returned it to me. He pointed to the bridge of his own nose for emphasis, and managed to spit out the words aloud. “Imai. Imai Hisashi!” His voice was so soft I almost didn’t hear him over the music, but at last I understood he was trying to tell me his name.

“Imai Hisashi,” I repeated aloud, and thankfully, he smiled with relief, meaning I hadn’t mangled it too badly. “Nice to meet you. I’m Alice. Alice Erskine.”

He frowned in concentration, cocking his head to listen, so I repeated myself a little louder. Those tantalising lips twitched up in a playful smile. “Lizard skin,” he pronounced carefully and looked up at me playfully from under ridiculously long, soft-looking eyelashes. Up close, he was somehow even prettier, with a mischievous sparkle to his warm, amber-brown eyes that was not just the glitter in his eye shadow.

“Alice,” I repeated slowly. “Erskine.”

He grinned and nibbled at his lower lip as he considered this, before insisting, “Lizard skin.” Was he high out of his mind, or was he actually just playing with me?

“Alice. Like in Wonderland,” I told him, scrabbling around for something to write on. Luckily, I found a couple of Groovie Goolies flyers on the edge of the decks. This one actually had a photo of me, in full psychedelic Wonderland regalia, standing between two ravers done up to look like the White Rabbit and the Caterpillar. He looked at the photo approvingly, then nudged his mate and showed it to him.

“Lizard skin girl,” he repeated once more, with such a smirk on his face that I knew he was fucking with me. His pupils were pinholes; he was high as a zeppelin.

As the two of us smiled goofily at one another, Dawn elbowed me and pointed at the record, which was rapidly running down with less than a minute left. Racing back to the decks, I looked around wildly for something to match the dancey-shoegaze vibe, and came up with Medicine’s Time Baby III. The goths loved that one, due to its inclusion on the Crow soundtrack, so the dancefloor immediately picked up.

I turned to pick up where I’d left off with the Japanese boy, only to find him half a step behind me, heading towards my vinyl with an all too familiar look on his face. Fortunately, Dawn stepped between the wannabe crate-digger and crate. “Ee-yay!” she spat, then followed up with a brief tangle of Asian invective.

The boy immediately stepped back, holding up his hands in defeat. “Sorry, sorry!”

I looked over at Dawn, suddenly impressed. “I didn’t know you spoke Japanese?”

“I don’t,” she snorted icily. “But living in New York, I can tell creepy guys to fuck off in eight different languages.”

“I don’t think he’s being creepy, per se…” I glanced back towards the now slightly hangdog lad, exchanging urgent whispers with his mate.

Dawn rolled her eyes and straightened up. “Wow, you must really like him. It took me how many years before I was allowed to touch your DJing records?”

This time it was the other boy that stalked over and coughed politely to get my attention. “Excuse me miss, but I believe Imai-san wanted only to make request?”

“Oh! OK…” I brightened at being back on the safe ground of the business of DJing. “Sure, I can try to do requests. But I’ve got to warn you, I don’t have a lot of Industrial music. If you want the rivethead stuff, you gotta go downstairs. EBM and Industrial are usually playing in the basement.”

The dark-haired boy shook his head. “No. He like music here.” This time he prodded his blond friend back towards me. “Talk! Hisashi-kun understand just fine. Really, he speak better English than me. He just… weird, around native English speakers.”

Hisashi smiled shyly and twisted his arms behind his back, twirling his hips nervously. “Can you, please, eh… maybe, eh… play Aphex Twin?”

That stopped me in my tracks. I loved Aphex Twin, but he was not well known enough among the NYC goth-crowd to justify bringing any 12 inches. But clearly, Hisashi misinterpreted my hesitation, because he sighed in frustration and pulled out his marker again. This time, he very clearly drew out an Aphex Twin logo on the back of a flier, then held it up and pointed to it with a hopeful expression on his face.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I have any with me…” I racked my brain, then brightened. “Oh wait, actually I know what I might have.” Turning to Dawn, I pointed at the other record bag. “Shoegaze section, towards the back where it blends into electronica. Curve – Falling Free. There’s an Aphex Twin remix on the B-side.”

Dawn located the record quickly, and Hisashi brightened when he saw the cover, giving me another enthusiastic thumbs up. As the twitchy glitch of the beat started up, the dark-haired lad jerked his head back towards the dance floor, but Hisashi shook his head and stayed put. The other boy shrugged. “Fine. You stay here; I dance.” With a polite bow, he hopped out of the booth into the crowd and started throwing shapes, which was quite a relief, as the floor was emptying out slightly. Only the hardcore ravers were bouncing around to Aphex Twin; the goths had headed for the bar. I had to work hard to get the mood back, segueing Curve into Siouxsie’s Kiss Them For Me, which always got the goths going, then bringing back a slab of garage-psych as Dawn handed me some Naz Nomad and the Nightmares.

As the level of drink in my glass grew lower, my energy level grew higher, spurred on by the bodies throwing themselves about on the dance floor. I dropped in a couple of more modern tracks, a recent Future Sound of London single followed by one of Quickspace’s more danceable rave-up, then swerved back to the 60s for a couple of amazing bangers on obscure 7”s by The Factory and Fenwyck, trying to build up a groove. I even got away with a few minutes of an Autechre track, segueing it into Meat Beat Manifesto, before spinning out into the latest Massive Attack single. Dawn gave up on playing my record librarian and threw herself into the fray, though I noted she made her way through the throbbing bodies over to the dark-haired boy and his English mate. Even the body beside me was dancing, as I looked over to see Hisashi shimmying right along, swinging his hips and shaking his bony ass in those tight leather trousers.

“You don’t have to stay here. If you want to dance, you should get out on the floor and dance!” I had to bend over to shout in his ear.

He shook his head and stayed put, sipping tentatively at his drink as he watched me carefully. The next track I put on, I saw him craning his head to see what it was – a Shamen 12” – so I handed him the sleeve to show him the credits.

“I like… way you mix. Old and new.” He pointed at the sleeve of one of my Electric Sugarcube Flashbacks compilations, then pointed at Future Sound of London. “But all psych. Is very good.” He really seemed to struggle to get out the words, as if overcoming his own shyness as much as the language barrier. “Lots of DJs – only old records. Or only new records. But I like both. Acid rock; acid house.”

I grinned at him from under my fringe. “Exactly! That’s what I love, too. Like, the psych scene in NYC is so stuck in the past, they only want to play stuff that sounds like the 60s. It’s totally different in London, where I’m from. 60s psych and modern psych all mix together.”

He nodded enthusiastically. “Music scene in London… so exciting. Modern technology.”

“That’s exactly it, though!” I insisted. “Everyone in NYC worships the Beatles and the Stones and Beach Boys, but they treat them like museum pieces from the past. When, like, Brian Jones and Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson – they were all desperate to use the most modern technology to create their psychedelic masterpieces! Things like mellotrons, and Vox tremolo pedals, and theremins that sound so retro now… they were as State of the Art back then as a sampler or a drum machine is these days.”

A dreamy little smile came over his face. “I love theremins. Such beautiful, sci-fi sound!”

“God, yes! Me, too.” I grinned back at him, picking up a Jessamine record and showing him the photos on the sleeve. “To me, psychedelia isn’t about duplicating a sound from the past. It’s about keeping your mind open, keeping your musical horizons expanded. Like, drone can be psychedelic. Techno can be psychedelic, if it’s about transcendence as well as just repetition.”

“Yes!” he insisted, watching me carefully, echoing my motions, taking a sip of his drink as I took a sip of mine. “I love it!” But the moment I tossed down the last of the gin-flavoured ice cubes and discarded the empty glass, he pounced on it, seizing it and holding it up triumphantly. “I buy you drink now, yes?”

I laughed aloud, and leaned back towards him, shaking my head as I shouted over the music. “You don’t have to buy me drinks. I get them for free as a DJ.”

His face crestfallen, he looked totally perplexed. In a small voice, he said, “You don’t want drink wit me?”

Something about that voice made me stop and look at him more carefully. “What?”

“I thought…” Putting the glass down, he looked away, scanning the crowd until he caught sight of his English friend, and frowned deeply, sticking his lower lip out in a delectable sulk. “Oh. Sorry. Very sorry.”

I had never seen anyone look quite so cheated at the thought of not having to pay money for a drink. “Hisashi…” His head snapped back towards me, his eyes picking up their sparkle again. A moment ago, he had been sullen, but now he looked as if he were about to laugh. Sudden panic at the thought I’d offended him. “What? Oh god, did I say that wrong?”

A brisk shake of the head as the twinkle of his smile brightened. “No, is fine. Your Igirisujin accent is so cute. Say again?”

A sudden gust of insecurity shook me as I faded out a Lush track and faded in a long Orbital track that was built around a sample of Lush. Turning to face him, I put my hand on my hip. “What does that mean?” He shook his head mock-innocently. “That word, Hickory-Sue Chin? What does it mean?” Screwing up his eyes, he suppressed a stream of giggles with his hand over his mouth, but otherwise remained quiet. “What?”

“You even say Igirisujin with Igirisujin accent. Is so adorable,” he confessed.

“What. Does. It. Mean. Are you insulting me? I’m not American, you know.”

“I know!” he protested, and started digging through my records. First, he picked up a 60s biker soundtrack compilation with a chopper painted in the American flag on the cover. “Amerikajin,” he insisted, then held up an early Who single with Pete Townsend wearing his Union Jack coat. “Igirisujin. Alice in Wonderland. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. You. Igirisujin.” And then he beamed, looking inordinately pleased with himself.

“Are you a fucking Anglophile?” Just my luck, this cute boy is from halfway round the fucking world, and he is fetishising my accent as badly as any American.

He stopped laughing and looked up at me sheepishly. For a moment, I cursed my decision to wear stack-heeled knee-high go-go boots, but abruptly I decided I actually liked being a couple of inches taller than him, because I wanted him to feel slightly threatened.

“I grew up on Igirisu music. Bauhaus, Depeche Mode, New Order. Just really like accent,” he finally confessed. He sounded so serious as he mangled the names of my childhood faves that it was my turn to suppress laughter by sticking my knuckles into my mouth. OK, sir, turnabout is fair play. But as I smiled at him, he smiled back at me hopefully. “You sure you won’t drink wit me?”

I stared at him, trying to figure out what part of this he was sticking on. “Wait. I said you don’t have to pay for drinks. What do you think you’re asking when you ask to buy me a drink?”

Hisashi frowned, his eyes flickering across the dancefloor, to where his English friend was currently doing the Bat Dance with Dawn. “OK, I asked advice from Raymond. Igirisujin girls are so confusing. OK… ehhhhhhh… Sure. All girls are confusing. But Igirisujin girls? Are say being rude? Are say being funny? Do say like you? Hate you? So hard to tell!”

I had to stick my knuckles in my mouth to stop from laughing. Suddenly, I felt for the little guy. To be fair, I found American blokes so bloody earnest, and in return, I knew they found me bolshy and impossibly rude, because they were always telling me so. Often quite angrily. I couldn’t imagine trying to negotiate that cultural gulf in a second language. “Sorry,” I chirped, trying to reassure him. “We are like that.”

“OK, so Raymond say: here’s how to pull Igirisujin girls. Ask to buy her drink. She say no, not interested. Leave alone. She say yes, she like you. Go for it.” He peered at me so openly and curiously, without a hint of guile in those twinkly bedroom eyes, that I had to admire him, putting all his cards on the table like that. Sure, I was going to kill this Raymond fellow on behalf of all English girls the next time I talked to him, but the honesty at least was refreshing.

I took a deep breath, made a big, expansive shrug that rolled my shoulder blades back, and decided to go for it. Might as well milk the accent for all it was worth. “Hisaaashi. Alright, if you think you’re following some weird, British mating ritual… yes. I’m interested. Please buy me a drink. Gin and bitter lemon.”

He looked so pleased with himself as he strutted back across the dancefloor, and I swear, he actually paused when he drew even with Raymond, and did a little fist pump. Raymond pulled away from dancing with Dawn, and followed him to the bar, where they conversed for a few minutes, while Hisashi got the next round in. Then Raymond dug in his pocket, extracted something, and passed it to Hisashi under the table before I got a close look at it. A shiver went down my spine as I turned away to cue up the next record, resolving to dispose of the drink down the nearest potted plant.

But as Hisashi let himself back into the DJ booth, I turned to him, eyeing the drink suspiciously. “Did you put roofies in my drink?” I blurted out.

“What?” He just looked confused as he proffered the drink, then left it by the mixing desk when I didn’t take it.

“Roofies. Rohypnol. What did you put in my drink?”

He looked at the drink and just shook his head. “Nutting.”

“I saw Raymond pass you a bag of drugs. What the fuck did you put in my drink?”

At that, he had the gall to look irritated. “What? No!” Digging his fingers into the pocket of his leather trousers, he showed me the top of a small plastic baggie. “You spoil surprise.” But then his lips curled up in that naughty smile, as he looked up at me like Mephisto tempting a soul. “You want drugs?”

“Why. What have you got?”

Ducking down behind the DJ decks / altar, he pulled out the bag to examine it. There were a scattering of pills, and a tiny envelope of powder, which he licked his fingers and dipped into for a few grains, tasting it tentatively. “Supposed to be Ket. Bad quality, taste like chalk. Maybe no good.” Shaking the pills into his hand, he poked at them. “Pills look OK, so... Maybe E, maybe speed? Candy, for sure. Want?” He extended his hand, palm up, towards me, offering me first pick.

You’d have thought, after nearly a year of DJing at Limelight, that I would be inured to open offers of drugs. To be sure, the first time Toni offered me the job, she’d sealed the deal with a line of coke. But had I lost my ever-loving mind, that there I was, down on my knees behind a deconsecrated altar, doing a bump of veterinary anaesthetic with a man I’d just accused of slipping me roofies not two minutes before? Answers on a postcard, please, because both of us were giggling like children, rubbing our noses as we straightened up and knocked down a couple of unknown pills with gulps of gin.

The first effect was just speedy, the time dilation effect where everything seemed to slow down, and I felt that hyperfocus kick in, where every beat of music seemed to last about a minute. The dancers were so beautiful, their clothes shimmering under the coloured lights. Hisashi was so beautiful, the circuit boards on his shirt seeming to flicker with electricity, that quick, mischievous smile of his, the little moue of disdain when the sound dropped between songs, the way his eyes crinkled or widened with pleasure at the music. He must have been feeling it, too, as he seemed to be sucking on his teeth, running his tongue back and forth under his lips, making his pout even more pronounced. Something coiled at the base of my spine, whenever I looked at those lips, like I couldn’t help but try to imagine what it would be like to kiss them.

I was choosing longer and longer songs now, mostly because it was getting hard to concentrate on the work of changing records. Somehow, I had turned around so I was no longer facing the crowd, I was facing Hisashi, and the two of us were kind of gently bouncing back and forth together, like we desperately wanted to dance properly, but there wasn’t the space in the cramped booth. My mouth tasted strange, dry, so I reached for my drink, but the gin was so intensely sour it didn’t help. Instead, I tipped an ice cube into my mouth and sucked on it and Hisashi made an almost agonised face, pursing his lips like the thought of me sucking something was causing him physical pain. We were moving closer and closer together, our hips swaying in unison, and the leather waistband of his trousers was so enticing, I just wanted to hook my fingers through the belt loops and pull him towards me. I swallowed the ice cube with a wet sound and a distinct tightening of my lips, and the muscles of his face flickered with palpable desire, as his mouth moved towards mine, but dammit, the record was ending already and I hadn’t even thought what I wanted to play next.

“Shit,” I swore, rushing back to the decks to try to line something up before the next track started. We moved with one purpose. He went to my record bags, and somehow pulled out Kraftwerk, extracted it from its sleeve and handed it to me. I fumbled for my headphones. Autobahn – yes, all 22 minutes of it. Sure, that would work if I sped up the lazy groove a bit. The lights were strobing as I tried to cue up the vinyl – no, that wasn’t even the drugs, someone was doing some kind of lightshow – and my fingers wouldn’t quite do what I wanted.

He was standing too close to me, still dancing, swinging his hips a little too close to mine. “Knock it off,” I said, slapping him away and trying to concentrate as I wound the record back to play the distinctive car door slam during the fade-out of the Underworld track.

Laughing, he pulled away from me, did a few dancing steps, then twirled around 360 degrees on the ball of one foot and slipped back towards me, bumping his hip against mine just as I released the record and brought up the fader to try to mix them together.

I missed the beat, and trainwrecked for a good few seconds before I managed to fade out Underworld and bring up Kraftwerk. Embarrassed, I felt my face grow hot, glancing up and out into the room to check if anyone had noticed.

But Hisashi danced out of the way, another twirl, another slide, before circling back to me. This time, he stood right next to me, and gave me a very insistent nudge with his hip.

“I said, knock it off,” I snapped, furiously pushing him away. He must have thought I was just playing, because he just capered back towards me again. This time I grabbed him lightly by the arms and shoved him back.

I don’t know if I misjudged my strength because I was high and slightly drunk, but Hisashi’s body was unexpectedly light, almost fragile. His slight frame offered no resistance, as my sharp push thrust him backwards. A moment of freefall as I struggled to regain my balance, then suddenly I had pinned him roughly against the wall. As his body connected with the brickwork, he turned his face up towards me in surprise, his eyes wide, his lips parting with a tiny gasp to reveal the bright flash of metal from a gold tooth.

My fury diminished as quickly as it had risen. I was about to release him and apologise, when I realised he was breathing hard, and I could feel his pulse speed up through the thin fabric of his shirt, though with arousal or fear, I couldn’t quite tell. For a long moment, he just stared at me, his eyes wild, his cheeks flushing, but the look in his eyes now wasn’t fear, it was pure excitement, and as his gaze slipped down towards my lips, his whole body seemed to curl towards me with longing.

He was so close I could see his pores under his makeup, could see the faint spray of moles dusted across his forehead and down his cheek, could see the tiny, braided streaks of gold and red-brown that made up the amber colour of his irises. I could feel his breath warm on my face, the faint smell of boysweat and cigarette smoke, and something sweet underneath, like hairspray or cologne. Beneath the silk of his shirt, he was so skinny I could feel the bones of his arms, but his sinewy muscles were tensed with desire.

As Autobahn’s insistent beat pulsed and grew and surged around us, I pushed him harder against the wall, slamming him a little, just to make sure he stayed put. His breath caught in the back of his throat as he bumped roughly against the brick, and looked up at me with melting eyes as he almost whimpered, “Kiss me.”

Chapter Text

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, as he tilted up his mouth towards me, his lips gaping slightly as I held his arms firm against the wall and brought my mouth down onto his. Our lips touched with a faint spark of static, his skin almost unbearably soft as I seemed to sink into him. Releasing his arms, I gave in to the urge to put my hands on his hips and tug his body towards me. His eyes were shining as he stared at me, half terror and half yearning, as he raised his arms and draped them around my shoulders, just as I reached around his waist and clenched our bodies together.

A sensation like piercing the skin of a perfectly ripe peach as his lips gave way and admitted my searching tongue. His hands went to the back of my head, tangling his fingers in my hair to pull me closer, like he was trying to physically force me inside him. His mouth felt like a pussy, tight and wet, as he sucked my tongue inside and held onto me like he wanted to swallow me whole.

I grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him back again, ramming my knee between his to part his legs, and he just let me push up into the cleft of his thighs, clinging to me, as limp as a ragdoll. His hands were moving in my hair, his lips urgent against mine, his tongue twining against mine like a snake, but his whole body seemed to acquiesce to me, quivering like a girl everywhere I touched him. The small of his back. The impossibly tiny notch of his slightly girlish waist. The flattened curve of his arse, so tight against the smooth leather of his trousers. As my tongue explored his mouth, the sudden roughness of his teeth, the sharp taste of metal, I felt my fingers climb past the sentries of those studded belts, and search insistently into the tiny gap between leather and skin.

But just as I achieved my aim and my fingers penetrated his boxers and curled around the soft peach skin of his arse, I heard the last chords of Autobahn fade out, and the run-out groove of the record start to click.

“Fuck!” I pulled away from Hisashi sharply, extracting my hands from his pants, and ran back to the decks. How had we been dancing and kissing for twenty solid minutes?

Grabbing wildly in my record bag, I pulled out something almost at random and slapped it on the deck. My eyesight was pulsing oddly, strobing lights that made it hard to read the label. The Velvet Underground? I glanced at the cover and saw a lurid 70s painting of an exposed arse nearly as pert as the one I had just been groping. Side A, Track 3 – What Goes On. That would work. Somehow I managed to get the turntable revolving and the needle on the record, and the sound system chugged back to life to the sweet chiming tones of Sterling Morrison’s guitar.

Screwing up my courage, I glanced out at the crowd, terrified to think they might all be standing, staring accusingly at the booth, their eyes bugging out to find the DJ molesting a cute Japanese boy instead of playing records. But to my relief, people were mostly just milling around, and as soon as Mo Tucker’s backbeat kicked in, the dancers started to move again.

As I pulled off my headphones to dig in the record bag again, there was a slight noise behind me, something like a whimper. I turned to see Hisashi still standing against the wall where I had left him, his legs spreadeagled to show a rather obvious hardon through the leather of his trousers.

“I’m sorry,” I mouthed back to him, looking him up and down, genuinely torn between continuing my set and rushing back to the wall to grind him into the brickwork with my hips. He whimpered again, and briefly shifted his pelvis, thrusting the prominent shadow of his cock into the light, almost making up my mind for me, had the gate to the DJ booth not unexpectedly slammed open, making us both jump.

“Hey,” called out Toni. “Everything alright in here?”

“Fine,” I almost yelped, lining up the extended Andy Weatherall remix of MBV’s Soon for the next track.

“Did I hear the music cut out? Was there a power cut, or…?” Coloured lights were playing across Toni’s face in a way that made it seem like she was alternately shrinking and growing.

“No, sorry. I just got distracted. Won’t happen again.”

Toni glanced down at her watch and frowned. “Christ, I’m not surprised. You’ve been DJing for two solid hours without a break. Where the hell is Morticia? Do you want me to take over for a few records, so you can take a bathroom break, catch a breath of fresh air or anything?”

I glanced back at Hisashi, to see if that sounded like a good idea to him, and Toni’s gaze followed mine, coming to rest on him just as he straightened up and tried to pull himself back together. His shirt was half-untucked, his face a mess of confusion and lust and smeared makeup.

“Oh hello. Didn’t see you back there. You having a good time?” That was Toni, ever the gracious party host.

Hisashi bobbed his head in a brief bow, and did his best to nod. “Mmm! Yes. Tank you. Music is good. Very good!”

“Yeah, she’s a great DJ when she’s paying attention, isn’t she?” quipped Toni. Hisashi abruptly flushed bright red, as if remembering what had caused my lapse in attention and started to stutter something, covering his face with his hands. It really was adorable how flustered he got when put on the spot, as even his limited verbal skills seemed to desert him. But as Toni stepped up into the DJ booth to take over, she looked a little more closely at Hisashi. “Hey, have I seen you around before? You look really familiar.”

Hisashi shook his head quickly. “Never been to club here before. I from Tokyo.”

Toni peered at him curiously in the dark.

“This is Hisashi,” I explained, by way of introduction. I couldn’t really add anything further given I’d only just met him. In fact, I’d already forgotten his family name and had to check the crumpled sheet of notepaper he’d written it down on. “Imai.” Was it bad that I’d just had my tongue rammed down the throat of a man I knew literally nothing else about?

“Hisashi Imai,” mused Toni. “Why does that sound ridiculously familiar?” Toni was one of the few people I’d ever met who had an even more encyclopaedic memory for obscure music than I, though her speciality was more shouty German bands and obscure experimental acts from Japan, than my stomping ground of British pop and psych. “Maybe I’m just having one of those nights when everyone looks familiar. I swear that earlier, I saw someone who looked exactly like Raymond Watts making a beeline for the toilets with PCPete.”

Hisashi let out a snort of laughter. “You know Raymond? He is here, in New York, wit us.”

Toni stared at him, gobsmacked. “No way! I haven’t seen Raymond since that first Einstũrzende Neubuaten tour, oh, nearly 10 years ago now. How do you two know each other?”

Hisashi furrowed his brow, straining to concentrate, like an android searching his memory banks for some forgotten information. With his smeared makeup and his electric-shock blond hair, he did look more than a little like the sexbot from Blade Runner. Finally, he produced some English words. “Music. Eh-toe… Raymond and I… do band together. Just finish recording in London.”

“Oh no way,” enthused Toni, as I could see the mental rolodex of her music knowledge filing that piece of information away. “Awesome! Any friend of Pig’s is a friend of mine. What are you doing in New York?”

Biting nervously at his lower lip, Hisashi pondered deeply on this one before replying. “Raymond want… American deal? How to say – license?”

“Oh god, why didn’t he call me? I know people! Where is he?”

Hisashi gestured towards the dance floor, where Raymond was currently bent over backwards, allowing Dawn to mime whipping him to the Velvet Underground.

“Oh my god, I’ll go and get him – we can talk shop. Let me get a round of shots in and I’ll dig out some names and numbers for you!” Just as abruptly as she had arrived, Toni took off again, intent on networking and music industry business.

Turning towards me, Hisashi nervously licked his lips, gazing at me with those soft brown bedroom eyes of his, but I felt suddenly very self-conscious and exposed. “So you’re a musician, huh? What do you play?”

“Guitar”, he supplied shyly.

“Oh, cool. I play bass,” I responded, and suddenly remembered the band fliers I had in my bag, digging one out and handing it to him in the time-honoured NYC musician mating ritual.

His eyes lit up as he studied it. “Clockwork Sky… What kind of music?”

I shrugged lightly, always dreading this question. “It’s like… hmmm. Think, like, The Kinks meet a psychedelic H.G. Wells, but over a more Finitribe / Shamen future rave beat?”

His eyes widened. “Kakkoii!”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Oh, very very good.” He nodded approvingly. “You like William Gibson, The Difference Engine?”

My ears pricked up, impressed that he knew the reference. “Oh god yes, that’s a huge influence on our main songwriter. Most people don’t even know him.”

His lips crinkled up in a nerdy smile as he gazed at me hopefully. “You know Inagaki Taruho?” I shook my head, and his face lit up. “Eh… is crazy old sci-fi from Showa Era. You would love. I could, eh… borrow to you, but… oh… in Japanese, you probably cannot read.” He shrugged helplessly, and fell dumb again.

“What about you, what kind of music do you make?” I probed, trying to keep the conversation going.

“Eh… is so difficult to describe, yeah?” He smiled at me hopefully, even as he hung back slightly. His eyes and his whole body were still twitching towards me like iron filings to a magnet, but he kept stuttering like he couldn’t quite get his mouth in gear. “Dark, eh… heavy, mostly guitars, kind of punk, kind of goth, but… Eh-toe… Is varied. Very varied! I get more into synths, programming, computers now. Expanding, eh… horizons. Bit of industrial, bit of techno, even little of hip-hop. Fun to experiment, yes?” It was the most words he’d ever said to me, in one go. But then the veritable torrent of words (for him, at least) dried up, and he just gazed at me shyly from under his long lashes.

After all the earlier snogging, something seemed to have broken between us which I wanted desperately to retrieve, so I lined up the next record, then reached out and touched him gently on his sharp, leather-clad hip. His body twisted towards me again as his face melted with relief, then he quickly bent over and left a tiny kiss on the tip of my shoulder. My finger hooked through his belt loop and pulled him back towards me.

But before we could get back to the serious business of kissing, the DJ booth was suddenly full of people. Dawn, Raymond, and the dark-haired boy, followed by Toni, bearing a metal tray covered in shot-glasses and a tequila bottle. Everyone was talking at once, leaving Hisashi frowning with alarm, torn between running away and burrowing further into my shoulder.

Toni was rattling off a long list of independent labels in New York as Raymond liberated the bottle and started splashing tequila into glasses. She was really excited about something, as she kept gesturing towards the dark-haired boy, insisting, “I can’t believe it. You’ve got one of Soft Ballet, and one of Bakuchiku…” She pointed directly at Hisashi. “You’ve changed your hair again. That’s it. You used to have long hair with pink streaks, didn’t you? And I didn’t recognise you without the…” Here she gestured towards her own cheek. “But holy shit, you and Maki working together? That’s so awesome!”

I did my best to look blank, just wishing they’d go away again so Hisashi and I could get back to snogging, but nevertheless I found myself accepting a shot from Raymond. The liquor was strong, and burned my throat on the way down, but at least the tequila seemed to calm the manic throbbing of the drugs a little.

“Alice, you have no idea how cool this is,” Toni was babbling on. “Imagine if you walked into a bar in Tokyo and found, like, Martin Gore of Depeche Mode and, like… Daniel Ash of Bauhaus talking about doing a solo project together. This is like the Japanese equivalent of how exciting this is. Raymond, you gotta get me a demo. I’ll get it added to the rotation in the bar downstairs…”

But Raymond looked over at Hisashi and me, still shooting one another surreptitious glances loaded with secret meanings of what we wanted to do to one another, and started to laugh. “Haha, I think Imai’s got other things on his mind right now. Can you just find these two a dark corner they can slope off to, give our boy Imai the good-seeing-to he clearly needs?”

Hisashi flushed bright pink as Toni stopped babbling and looked over at us. All at once she seemed to clock our body language, my finger still hooked through his belt loop, his chin resting gently on the edge of my shoulder, the faint smear of my gold glitter lipstick across his chin from where we had kissed. “Oh.” Suddenly she burst out laughing. “Look, I’ll take over DJ-ing until Morticia gets here. You guys go. Dance. Screw. Whatever. Have fun.” Grabbing her AAA staff pass, she pulled the lanyard over her head, and draped it around my neck, moving close to whisper in my ear as she pushed something small, square and flat into the cleavage of my bra. “Here. Take a condom. Do all the things I wouldn’t do.”

For a moment, I just stood there, torn between leaving my records unattended, and the beautiful boy currently glued to my hip. “Take care of my records OK? I trust you, but don’t let anyone else touch them.”

Toni just laughed, and practically pushed me away from the decks. “Don’t worry, I’ll lock them in the staff room the minute Morticia gets here.”

Hisashi still looked confused about what was going on, until I grabbed him by the hand and tugged. “Come on,” I urged. “You said you’ve never been to Limelight before? Let me show you around.”

Hand in hand, we plunged into the throbbing crowd. As soon as we were out of the comparatively well-lit DJ booth and into the dark, he giggled, and pulled me off into a dark corner. At first I thought he wanted to kiss, but no – he reached into his pocket and pulled out the drugs again, extending them towards me in an open offer. I was already buzzing, but what would another bump hurt? So the pair of us indulged again, giggling like schoolchildren.

“Come on, I want to dance!” I took his hand again, the cool of his palm a surprise in the sweaty warmth of the club. Urgently, I tugged him along, until I found the right door – and we stepped out into a huge chasm of nothingness, buffeted by pulverising winds of bass. Hisashi’s breath caught in his throat as we stood right at the top of the church, suspended on a high metal scaffolding above a massive, roiling ocean of dancing bodies, pulsing and swaying in time with pounding techno. The main dancefloor was an immense, cavernous space, smoky with dry ice, lit only by the soft glow of stained glass windows, the darkness punctuated by stabs of spotlights and unearthly green-glowing lasers shooting up from below. Metal staircases and catwalks threaded the walls like the bowels of some great ship, while giant cages dangling from the rafters held flashes of skin and writhing bodies throwing shapes under strobe lights.

I tended to avoid the main dance floor because of the heat and crowds, but seeing the space through Hisashi’s wide eyes, like some kind of bacchanalian Hieronymus Bosch nightmare, I found myself falling in love with my adopted home city all over again. His body was already moving to the beat, his hips jerking like he couldn’t control himself.

“You want to go dance in a cage?” I offered with a wicked grin. “Give the crowd a show?”

For a moment his eyes flashed like he was tempted, licking his lips, but he stepped back from the brink and shook his head quickly. I just laughed and surprised him with a quick, urgent kiss, then tugged at his hand to drag him down a series of clattering metal staircases towards the dance floor.

We moved with one idea: to lose ourselves in the crowd, pushing between bodies until we found a space. I was really coming up on the pills now, and the fizzing bubbles of joy in my head seemed to elevate the thudding bass to a tidal current that pulled me irresistibly along with it. Our bodies moved of their own accord, Hisashi kicking up his heels, writhing like a snake, taunting me with his hips as he danced towards me, but try as I might to reach out and circle his tiny waist with my hands, he darted out of reach again, grinning and laughing and daring me to pursue him. Following him in the chase, I teased him with hips and hands, dancing at him, pretending to catch his face, his arms, his chest with my writhing hands before snaking away, until he was following me as I followed him.

As the grinding techno wound down, and a thudding house track started up, its bassline shaking our very souls, I finally caught him and held him, our bodies swaying together as we stared wondrously into each other’s eyes. Electricity seemed to crackle along his eyelashes, his eyes great black pits of energy and emotion in the dim light, fields of flicking golden gridlines extending out to captivate me, like I could fall into their writhing starfield depths and be lost forever. His lips touched mine and the illusion broke, the solidity of his flesh, the texture of leather as his hips finally met mine and we started to grind together, arms and legs entwined in the midst of writhing bodies. My hands in his hair, thick and roughly textured, slightly silky but stiff with hair product and dried sweat. His hands on the small of my back, tapping out polyrhythms against my spine as we swayed to the beat.

Someone bumped against us, not roughly, but still urgently enough to make us pull apart, as we realised we had drifted, twirling, through the crowd to the other side, and we were now half-blocking an exit. I pulled away from him, grabbed his hand, and dragged him through into the next room, a long, narrow vault with an arched roof like a side chapel and an old-school goth theme. The music here was slower and less bass-heavy, but more insistent, long spidery filaments of skittering hi-hat pulling us into the depths. As a bat shriek of guitar feedback fluttered past our heads, he snapped to attention as we both simultaneously recognised the tune and cackled with delight. A three-dimensional slab of bass cascading down our spines confirmed it was Bauhaus as we spun together in a manic spiral of glee. We had the dance floor almost to ourselves at first, as we circled one another, twirling and capering until the floor slowly filled up, as the old school goths finally recognised the classic anthem and started to dance.

Both of us were singing along, shrieking with delight as we surged together and flung apart, foolishly play-acting out the lyrics. As the maelstrom of sound built, he teased me by throwing his head back, revealing the pale expanse of his throat as if daring me to nibble at it. As the last chords faded out the chorus of “Undead, undead, undead…” still echoing across the chapel as the next song cued up, I pulled him backwards into the dark of a doorway, and pushed him against an old, cold stone wall.

His eyes glittered in the dark as I moved closer, tilting his chin and tugging his dog collar to the side to show me the veins throbbing in his neck. “Take me,” he whispered, half dare, half wish.

“What?” I breathed, as he grappled with the dog collar, unbuckling it and wrapping it around one wrist.

“Bite me,” he insisted, one hand on each of my hips as he pulled me roughly towards him.

I teased him instead, flicking him with my tongue, running it up along his neck and around the lobe of his ear, licking gently and breathing into his eardrum until he shivered. I sucked at his earlobe, then moved gently lower, nibbling along the soft part of his neck until I found flesh. I nipped and he moaned, writhing against me, his hands moving down my back until they rested on my arse, pulling me towards him. With all my weight, I leaned into him and drew his flesh into my mouth, teasing with my teeth, but careful not to break the skin. His breath was shallow and fast, his muscles tensing and relaxing as I sucked harder, raking my teeth over his skin as he thrust against me in the dark. Everywhere he touched me, I could feel his heartbeat, echoing the music racing in the background, old school goth like Christian Death or something from one side; something more industrial and EBM, echoing harder and faster up the corridor from the other.

When I finally pulled away, his mouth was open, his gold tooth glinting in the half light, his eyes huge with anticipation and lust. “You’re going to have a mark there tomorrow,” I laughed softly, but he shook his head and nipped at my lips hungrily.

“Don’t care. Again!” And he lolled his head to the other side, showing me the fresh, unmarked part of his neck.

Again, I licked, teased, nipped and sucked at his ear, his throat, his neck. His hands were up my skirt now, rubbing back and forth over the fabric of my thick tights so insistently I thought he might rip a hole in them. His legs had parted to allow me closer, holding me immobile in a leather vice as I latched onto his flesh and raked it into my mouth, tiny whimpers and moans filling my ears as I could feel his cock stiffening against my belly.

Suddenly our dark corridor filled with voices, and there were bodies all around us. Harsh shouts, jeers, as I pulled back from Hisashi’s neck to find a gaggle of Bridge and Tunnel types in NIN and Marilyn Manson T-shirts had colonised the space, gathering round in a huddle to squabble over a wrapper of coke right out in the open. I made a disgruntled face as Hisashi gasped for air, looking at me desperately.

“Let’s find somewhere more private, huh?” I suggested.

“Hai!” he panted, peeling himself off the wall, though he seemed to be having trouble walking a straight line. My vision was flashing and pulsing as we slunk our way down the corridor. We were coming up hard, and the floor seemed to move and shift, neon squares and checkerboards forming and coalescing and sliding away into the distance as we passed. The music had shifted, a driving bassline that tugged us down into the depths of the building towards it, as a girl’s voice echoed up from somewhere far below.

“I live for drugs… it’s great! It’s great! I live for drugs…”

Hisashi and I sped up, slithering off the walls as we tried to make our way towards the source of the sound, though the black and white pulsing checkerboards of the marble flagstones on the floor seemed to twist and writhe and turn back in on themselves as we passed over them.

“I freaked out very, very badly,” sung the girl, her voice hovering in the air like the flying creatures, half-dirigible, half-elf, that were guiding us down towards the staircase. “I freaked out on acid... I'm the white rabbit.”

Grabbing Hisashi around the waist to hold myself up, I ventured one tip-toe onto the black and white pulsing stairs, spiralling down into the depths of the building. “I’m the white rabbit,” I repeated solemnly.

“No,” insisted Hisashi, his strawberry-shaped lips peeling back in a lascivious grin. “You’re lizard skin Alice. I’m zuh white rabbit.”

“The spiral staircase,” I whispered. “It’s moving. It’s all black and white flashing patterns, moving!”

“I see it! I see it! Just like your dress,” he countered, touching me tentatively. “Your dress is our map. Will guide us. Show us zuh way.” As he spoke the op art patterns of my dress seemed to radiate out from me, painting a black and white path through the riotous spiral chaos of the staircase. Grinning like the Cheshire Cat, he nodded towards the stairs. “I’m zuh White Rabbit. Come on – chase me!”

Chapter Text

With a laugh, he was off, bounding down the stairs. A heartbeat later, I followed him. We seemed to run forever, each step taking an eternity to traverse, though he was always two or three steps ahead of me. Finally, we reached a landing – I knew at some of the landings, there were alcoves, benches, small private rooms, so I stopped, grabbed him by the hand and pulled him off towards the corner. Yes, there was a tiny, round, phonebox-sized alcove, but it was already full. It took me nearly a minute to work out what the two pulsing, shaking, rutting bodies inside were doing, trousers around their ankles as they coupled. But Hisashi cottoned on in a moment.

“Occupied,” he announced, took me by the hand and dragged me down the next spiral of stairs. At the next landing, there was a small table and a bench, filled with drunken party girls snorting something off a curved sheet of something peach-coloured – it took me a moment to realise it was a man’s stomach. “Occupied,” sighed Hisashi and pushed on.

At the very bottom of the stairs, there was a low stone doorway giving way to a long, narrow, dimly lit room wallpapered in deep red and gold flock Fleur de Lis. As we peered in, we saw two decadent oxblood leather sofas. One was occupied by a tall, beautiful Black man with waist-length dreadlocks, wearing a mesh shirt and almost transparent, blue plastic trousers. Between his legs knelt a young man, his curly green hair pulsing like tentacles as his head bobbed up and down at his groin. To his left sat a gorgeous red-headed girl, her skin as pale as his was dark, her shirt open to the waist to reveal milk-white breasts with perfect rhubarb-coloured nipples that the man was enthusiastically sucking, one of his hands jammed knuckle-deep between her thighs.

The other sofa was empty.

Hisashi and I hesitated on the threshold, looking back and forth between the empty chesterfield and each other. Hesitation flickered across his face, a hint of fear, followed by curiosity, desire, wonder. As we looked into each other’s eyes, we suddenly fell into a place beyond words, as our thoughts seemed to burst forth and become visible, hanging in the air between us.

He spoke, a short string of unintelligible words that I consciously knew must be Japanese, but without knowing how, I seemed to understand what he was saying. “What do you think? Shall we risk it?”

“Hang on, I can hear what you’re thinking!” I blurted aloud.

“Yes!” he laughed and smiled, reaching out to touch my forehead. “Been happening for a while now. Guess those drugs were good after all, huh?”

Wherever he touched me, my vision seemed to explode with stars and moons and comets streaking trails of electricity, cartoon girls and racing bullet trains, computer screens and long strings of Japanese characters falling like rain across a William Gibson sky. “Is this really happening, or is this a hallucination? Can you also hear what I’m thinking?”

He nodded fiercely, his lips twitching up in a naughty smile as he pressed his forehead against mine, as if our brains could merge through our skulls. “You’re thinking dirty thoughts about me, about what you want to do to me on that sofa.” Of course, what he said was in Japanese, and I knew it could have been anything, but his eyes flashed with mischief and he glanced across to the sofa as he spoke.

“Yeah, that’s an easy guess,” I teased, but he gazed at me dreamily.

“Your mind is so foreign, so strange – it’s like a Doctor Who episode in there.” Amidst the stream of Japanese, I heard the words ‘Doctor Who’ very clearly.

“I love Doctor Who,” I confessed.

“I do, too.”

For an eternally long moment, we just stared at one another, our hearts beating in sync, dirty and strange thoughts floating in the visual bloodstream linking our skulls. But finally, I gestured with my head towards the sofa, and he nodded, taking my hand as we crept together into the room.

He sat first, in the centre of the sofa, but I felt too self-conscious to sit next to him, staring across at the lovers on the other side of the room, so I paused. As I hesitated, he held out his hand to me. “Is this really happening? It’s like a book I read many times, when I was young and impressionable.”

Turning my back on the others, I took his hand and moved towards him, climbing onto his lap and kneeling, straddling his thighs as I took his stubborn, pointed little chin in my other hand. He gazed up at me, trepidation and excitement flickering back and forth across his face as I let go of his face and reached back, digging my fingers into his hair, yanking it roughly to tilt his head back. He gasped aloud, his whole expression glowing with lust. He was struggling to speak at all, but this was clearly English. “I… love… when… you… grab me, and just… trow me around.”

“You like it when I’m rough, huh?” Grabbing his shoulders with both hands, I shoved him back against the leather upholstery.

“Mmm!” His eyes flickered almost closed as his lips parted. Already, I could see two dark bruises blooming in the hollows above his pale collarbones. For the longest moment, I waited, letting him suffer in anticipation, then brought my mouth down on his, hard, just as I ground my pelvis into the leather of his crotch. As we kissed, biting and writhing, he moved his hands onto my legs, running his fingers up and down my tights before searching upwards, pushing my dress out of the way. I slapped his hands away playfully and moved them to my waist before returning to his lips for another bout of kissing, chasing his tongue around his mouth as I rubbed myself wet against his leather trousers.

But his hands wandered again, around to the small of my back, then slowly upwards, climbing the ladder of my spine until he reached the top of my dress, and located the zipper. Slowly, inexorably, as I bit his tongue, nibbled his lips and dropped tiny kisses over his eyes and cheeks, he pulled the zipper down. I only realised as I felt my dress flop down, and he pulled away from me, peeling the fabric back to reveal my breasts nestled in a purple lace bra.

He looked up at me in wonder, bending down to rub his cheeks across my nipples. “Drown me,” he begged as he pulled me towards him, burying his face in my flesh. “Suffocate me.”

I arched my back and crushed him against my chest as his tongue found my nipples and sucked through the lace, sending shooting stars of desire up and down my spine. We writhed together, limbs entangled and entwined. Nothing mattered but all the places where skin touched flesh, where lace touched leather and his tongue teased tiny electric shocks from my breasts. His fingers had found a hole in my tights and were working their way up my thighs as we toppled over together in slow motion.

“Not fair,” I said as his fingers reached wet, and his mouth worked one breast out of my bra. “You’re still fully clothed.” Reaching out, I unbuttoned his shirt and slipped my hands inside, snaking up his vest until I found his nipples. As I pinched, he moaned aloud and arched his back, twitching his leg against me. “Oh, you like that, do you?”

“Wait, no,” he panted. “You go on top.”

“I’m taller than you,” I warned. “I might crush you.”

“Don’t care. Crush me. I stronger than I look.” Twisting out from on top of me, he flopped down against the leather cushions, pulling his vest up out of the way to show me the two pale perfect nubs of his nipples, almost white against the brown smears of his areolas. I moved with him, slithering up on top of him, following with my mouth as he pointed to his chest. His nipples were so sensitive he twitched each time I touched them with mouth or teeth or fingertips, as I raked my tongue back and forth across his pale, perfectly hairless chest. Skin. Ribs. More moles. Tiny freckles that led me down as I nibbled at his sinewy muscles, and sucked at the hollow places between his bones. His belly, worm pale, ever so slightly convex, I covered with kisses, working my tongue into his navel as he writhed and started bucking against me.

I raised my head to look at him as my cheek touched the leather of his trousers, rubbing my face back and forth across the flies, feeling his cock rolling just beneath the cowhide. His eyes were glittering slits as he raised himself up on his elbows to watch me as I teased him through the fabric. And finally, after he’d writhed and bit his lips and arched his back with agonised longing, I moved back, and with my teeth, gingerly unfastened the zipper of his trousers. He was already falling out of his black boxers, but I pushed them out of the way to bring his rock-hard cock out into the dim half-light of the red room, tormenting him with lips and gentle nips, digging my nose into his dark, neatly trimmed pubic hair to drink in his smell. His balls were small, but the skin very taut, as I sucked each into my mouth in turn, provoking sharp moans and sudden exhalations of “Ehhhh!”

And then, when I thought he could take no more, I sucked his length into my mouth. Softly at first, just slipping my lips gently over the tip, running my tongue around the ridge, then riding his foreskin down as I swallowed his whole length into my mouth. He moaned, bucked his hips, dug his fingers into my hair as I tightened my grip, running my tongue up and down the underside before sucking him as far down into my throat as I could stomach. Grasping his hips to still him, I shifted my weight to pin him down, and sucked harder, moving my head to slide up and down his length. He was moaning, gasping, mewling like a cat as I devoured him time and again.

I was so intent on his cock that I didn’t notice a shadow fall across us, and I was only dimly aware of shrugging off a stray hand gently moving my ankles out of the way.

But abruptly Hisashi yelped aloud and sat up. All I was really conscious of was his organ suddenly shrivelling inside my mouth, feeling it shrink and flop out from between my lips, even as I tried to chase it, coax it back to life.

When I pulled away, I realised with a start that two more people had entered the room – a drag queen and a blue-ringleted club kid in a sailor suit and bib were perched on the end of our sofa. The club kid still had his hand extended towards Hisashi, even as Hisashi yowled “Ee-yeh!” and shrank back, stuttering out “Da-may!” followed by some kind of invective in Japanese that sounded far worse than whatever Dawn had said to him earlier.

“Hey, hey, be cool – just stop screaming!” shushed the club kid, flapping his hands in the space between us. “What the fuck, why are you freaking out, dude?”

“Please back off,” I urged, as I grabbed Hisashi by the shoulders and pulled him back towards me. As he scrambled to pull his vest back down, I saw an angry red mark across his ribs, and wondered if I had done that, or if the club kid had somehow hurt him.

“What the fuck, I barely touched him,” the club kid protested, but would not keep his hands to himself, gurning and flailing like he was off his face on something even stronger than we were.

“Please stop – he’s very shy and he’s not very confident speaking English. Just back off, OK?”

“Honey, leave it,” said the drag queen, slapping the blue-haired kid’s hands away.

“But I’m so hot for Asian boys, and he’s so clearly gagging to be abused,” protested the club kid. Hisashi shot him an absolutely poisonous look, and even though he had retreated to a completely nonverbal state, I could tell he was ready to murder the guy.

“Don’t play with someone who doesn’t want to play with you,” snapped the drag queen, then turned to me. “Tell him I’m so sorry, honey. Mikey’s been mixing Sildenafil with his Molly, which always makes him handsy.”

I kissed Hisashi’s shoulder gently and nuzzled my nose into his ear, whispering “Are you alright?”

He nodded softly, but still wouldn’t speak, taking my hand and placing it over his lap, though whether he wanted stimulation or protection, I couldn’t quite tell. His cock remained limp, not even twitching under my hand.

My eyes flicked over to the lovers on the other sofa, wondering why the new couple hadn’t bothered them, but the man was now completely prone on the sofa, the girl kneeling on his face while the boy continued, utterly supine and half hanging off the cushions, to slurp at his groin.

“Come on, I thought you said you had coke?” demanded Mikey petulantly.

“I don’t think you need any more if you’re going to be such a bitch,” shrugged the drag queen, then looked over at me apologetically. “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt your fuck.”

“I think it’s a dead loss now,” I sighed. Hisashi looked down apologetically at his lap, then shrugged, unable to meet my eye, let alone anyone else’s.

“Oh no, we’ve embarrassed him. Hang on, I’ve got something that’ll fix that.” The drag queen dug in her purse for a minute and produced a small, brown bottle of liquid. “That’ll sort you out.”

Hisashi extended a cautious hand and tentatively accepted the bottle, even as Mikey protested, “Hey, that was mine!”

“I think you need to make up to these poor kids since you ruined their blow job,” snapped the drag queen, before leaning towards Hisashi, who was examining the bottle curiously. “You sniff it. Just hold it up to your nose and inhale – it will sort out your erection.” She mimed unscrewing a bottle and holding it to her nose.

Hisashi risked a swift, slightly furtive glance towards me, then complied, inhaling a massive dose. For a moment, nothing happened, as he just sat there blinking, still holding the bottle in one hand. Then abruptly, his whole face went slack, and his eyes rolled back in his head until nothing showed but the whites, as his neck flopped back against the sofa, completely limp. As he lolled back, completely detached from consciousness, I had to lunge forward and grab the bottle before he dropped it.

“Hisashi?” With my free hand, I touched his face lightly, but he was completely out. “Hisashi!” I tapped him a little harder on the cheeks, then slapped him almost roughly. “Imai?”

“Oh for fucks sake, Miss Apprehension, have you killed him?” sniped Mikey. “You know Gatien’s going to pitch a fit if there’s another dead Asian in one of his clubs.”

“Shit. Some coke might bring him round,” Miss Apprehension suggested, digging in her bag again.

“Oh, so the dead Asian can have coke, but I can’t?”

She paused. “Or is that smelling salts? I can never remember the difference.”

As they squabbled, Hisashi’s eyes flickered, and he twitched, starting to show signs of life again. Again, I slapped his face lightly, trying to wake him up, until finally his eyes reopened, and his pupils rolled back down from his forehead. “Wow,” he panted, gasping for breath. “Amazing.” Finally, he managed to focus his eyes, and turned his gaze on me. “Again?”

“Do you think that’s wise?” I glanced down at the brown glass bottle, wondering what he’d just experienced.

But he smirked, his lips twitching up in a filthy smile. “No. Not dat. Slap me again.”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you,” I laughed, with relief more than anything, as I risked a playful sparring pat on the cheek.

“Kiss me,” he insisted, tiny devils dancing about the tips of his blond hair under the red lights as he glanced down at his lap. “I sink it’s working.”

My eyes flickered over to Miss Apprehension and Mikey as I prevaricated.

“Oh, don’t mind us,” cooed the drag queen as she gave in and chopped out four lines of coke. “You crazy kids go right ahead and enjoy yourselves.”

Hisashi and I exchanged glances, but I could see reluctance on his face, mirroring my own. Miss Apprehension was alright, but I was getting serious bad vibes from Mikey and did not want to turn my back on him again. “I think we’ll move on, but you’re welcome to the sofa.”

“Your loss – more coke for us,” crowed Mikey as I climbed off Hisashi’s lap and struggled to my feet.

“Oh honey, come here – your dress,” warned Miss Apprehension as I tried to pull my frock up. Stuffing one of my tits back into my bra, I knelt down in front of her and presented my back, as she zipped me back up. “Hang on, sweetie, what’s this you’ve got?” As she adjusted the back of my dress, she picked up my lanyard and peered at the Access All Areas staff pass. “Honey, what are you doing down here in the public baths if you’ve got the fob to the VIP rooms?”

“The what?” I stuttered.

Miss Apprehension had to show me, pointing out a small lump of plastic and metal dangling from the bottom of the lanyard. “This is a passkey that will get you into the dressing rooms at the back, under the stage. If you two are after privacy, that is…” Her eyes flickered across to the threesome on the other side of the room, where the red-headed girl was now getting absolutely railed by the tall Black dude while the green-haired boy abused his arse with a Hello Kitty vibrator.

“Dressing rooms?” I asked, confused.

“Go around the Bubble Room, and down the back corridor. There’s a row of them, just where the stairs from the stage come down. They should be empty tonight as there’s no band on.”

“Bubble Room?” asked Hisashi as we made our way out and back down the pulsing checkerboard corridor, though it was nowhere near as psychedelic as the first time we’d traversed it.

“No, there is no way we are going anywhere near the Bubble Room in this state. We’d never find our way out.”

“You want time to fuck me?” he teased as we rounded the corner and found the row of doors that Miss Apprehension had described.

“Are you kidding me. OK, choose, left, right or centre?”

“Left,” said Hisashi without a moment’s hesitation. “Always left hand path for the Leftie.”

“Are you a leftie?” I stopped and puzzled over the door, noting the keyhole and standard lock, but unable to find anything that fit the fob.

“Well, I play guitar left-handed. I write with right hand.”

“I know, I’ve seen you do it.”

“But I put on my makeup with my left hand. And I finger girls with my left hand.” Again, that wicked grin as he lent against the wall, undressing me with his eyes as he smirked up at me.

“Oh, you’re a fucking filthy one, you are!” I laughed with mock horror.

“You know I only started band to impress girls,” he laughed, swinging his hips from side to side.

“Yeah. Same.” I finally gave up and touched the fob to the little metal plate on the wall. There was a click and the door sprung loose. It was dark inside, so I flicked on the lights, looking about carefully to ensure we were alone. Then, breathing a huge sigh of relief, I grabbed Hisashi by the waistband of his trousers, yanked him in and pulled the door shut behind us, bolting it from the inside for good measure.

Chapter Text

For a long moment, we just stood there, blinking in the sudden bright light of the dressing room, dazzling after the dim of the club. It was the first time I’d seen him in anything resembling daylight, and to be honest, I was surprised to find he was even prettier in full light. He was so pale he almost glowed, his blond hair sparkling under the too-bright light, the pupils of his amber eyes contracting to show a rim of gold right around the centre. When he smiled, tiny lines appeared around his eyes and mouth, as I realised he was actually older than me. When I’d seen him on the stairs, I’d thought he was maybe 20 at most, but it was clear now that he was a grown man, under the powder of his makeup.

And he was studying me in return, smiling as he took in my clothes, my hair, my face in detail.

“What?” I asked, as he grinned and grinned and grinned, covering his mouth with his hand as he started to laugh.

“You so beautiful, Igirisujin.”

I blushed and turned away. “I was just thinking the same thing about you.”

“You want more drugs?” he offered, digging in his pockets. “English so hard. I miss brain-synch sing with you.”

“That was weird.” Shaking my head, I moved back into the room and looked around, taking in my surroundings. The room was painted hot pink, with splashes of black leather and leopard print spots everywhere, like a 1980s nightmare. There was a styling chair and a gold-framed make-up mirror with a sink on one wall, a couple of comfortable easy chairs, and a large daybed draped in a fuzzy leopard print comforter at the back of the room. “I mean… I like the inside of your head, but… I think I need a little break for a minute. I don’t know what that shit we’ve been snorting is, but it is not ket.”

“How you know?”

I shook my head slowly. “Ket is much slower to wear off. When you get lost in the K-hole, it takes hours to find your way out. It’s only…” I glanced down at my watch, astonished to find that only half an hour had passed, though it felt as though we had been wandering around in the bowels of the building for centuries. “I mean, I’m still getting flashes, traces… but I think that’s the pills. That crazy rush has gone. I haven’t seen a machine elf in a while.”

He turned, pausing in his exploration of the room to smile at me, raising his faint eyebrows. “Machine elves were good, so, yeah?”

I just stared back at him, drinking in the shape of his beanpole-thin legs in the form-fitting leather trousers, the unexpected breadth of his slight shoulders. As we’d rushed from one room of the club to another, I had been so desperate to get him alone, to start tearing his clothes off to fuck him, but now we were alone, all I wanted was to sit and just look at him, drinking in his ethereal beauty.

He frowned slightly, as I saw insecurity flicker across his face for a moment, before his cocky bravado resurfaced. “You still want to fuck me, no?”

My face grew hot as I felt myself flushing. His emotions always spilled all over his face, but I found his honesty so refreshing. “Of course I do, yes. Just give me a moment to catch my breath.”

Slowly, he moved over towards me, and stood in front of me, tilting his head slightly to look up into my eyes before stepping back and peering at my feet. “You so tall. Take off shoes?”

I looked down at his engineer’s boots, realised that they, too, had nearly two inches of heel on them, and started to laugh. “OK,” I conceded and sat down on the edge of the day bed, unzipping my boots and peeling them off like two snakeskins. “Now you.”

He plonked himself down next to me, and wrestled to pull off his boots, then stood up again, and reached out his hands to haul me to my feet. As he pulled himself to his full height in stocking feet, he was still shorter than me, but not by much – maybe half an inch at most.

“That’s better,” I sighed, and gazed into his eyes, wondering how he’d react if I kissed him again, if I grabbed him by the shoulders and flipped him down onto the bed to pull off the rest of his clothes and ravish his bare skin, but he laughed and sat down again. Before I could stop him, he had picked up my boots and was zipping them up over his leathers – to my surprise, they seemed to fit him perfectly. When he stood up again, he towered over me.

“No. Now dat’s better,” he asserted with a nod and giggled. When I didn’t respond, he looked down at me loftily and tilted his head to one side. “You OK?”

“I don’t know. I’m feeling suddenly very shy with you. I like you so much.” I confessed and paused, looking about the room. “Maybe we should do more drugs, after all.”

“Is OK. I like you, too.” Shrugging, he also looked about us, then frowned. “Is too bright. Let me see… change lights.” He stomped off towards the makeup mirror in my big boots, found a dimmer switch to bring up some low light, then turned off the overhead lights. I breathed a sigh of relief, and swung my legs up onto the bed, relaxing as he investigated the room further. Behind one of the chairs, he located a tiny fridge and liberated a couple of bottles of beer.

“Drink?” he offered. I sat up and accepted, and we clinked the bottles together as he perched on the edge of the bed next to me. As I drank, he leaned over and started to gently stroke my hair, pushing my fringe out of my face. “Pretty,” he murmured. “So soft.” His searching fingertips found the strawberry birthmark on my forehead that I always kept covered with my fringe, and he bent in to peer at it curiously, declaring “Twins!” before laughing gently and pointing to the large mole in the same place above his own left eyebrow. “Tonight is like dream. I almost scared. Keep sinking I going to wake up, you be gone.”

I felt myself blush, pushing the side of my face into his hand. “If you’re a big rock star in Japan, crazy shit like this must happen to you all the time.”

He laughed and shook his head, cupping my cheek in his palm, rubbing his thumb lightly across my cheek in a soft caress. “Tokyo nightlife crazy, but not like here. Wish I could take you to Shinjuku bars, to Live Houses, show you crazy nightlife, Tokyo style.”

With a wistful sigh, I just shrugged. “As if I could afford to go to Tokyo.” For a moment, a shadow seemed to pass across the evening like some giant bird of prey from the morning after, but I shook off the sudden chill. “Let’s not think about later. Let’s try to enjoy tonight for what it is.”

“Yes,” he insisted strenuously, twisting around to stare down into my face. “Tonight... just freedom. Take drugs. Drink. Dance. Fuck. Like no tomorrow. Fuck tomorrow. Only freedom. Let me just love you tonight.”

I turned away, taking another sip of my beer. Love was not a word I ever used. But he was Japanese, he probably didn’t even know what it meant. When I turned back to him, he had taken out a pack of cigarettes and was trying to light one with shaking hands.

“Aren’t we supposed to smoke after we fuck?”

He rolled his eyes and exhaled a long, elegant plume of smoke before tilting his head and extending his elegant fingers towards me. “Want?”

I took the cigarette, still wet from his strawberry lips, and placed it in my mouth. Despite all the debauched things I had done to him with my mouth, down in the baths, the shared saliva felt like a sudden frisson of unexpected intimacy. Taking a deep drag – ugh, menthol – I sucked the smoke into my lungs and felt the nicotine start to calm me. We smoked in silence down to the filter, passing the fag back and forth between us, just listening to the thudding bass of the riotous techno filtering down like distant thunder from the dance floor upstairs. I wished we had a stereo so we could put on some mood music, something sexy, slightly psychedelic, like maybe Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, but the techno would have to do.

The cigarette finished, he crushed it under his boot heel, and turned to me with an expectant expression. “Sex, drugs, or rock’nroll first?”

“Drugs first, I sink,” I laughed, imitating his accent, and he dug in his pocket. The wrapper was almost gone, but we split what was left, washing down another pill with swigs of beer.

“Now sex?” he suggested with a smirk.

I felt suddenly nervous, sitting on the side of the bed with this obscenely beautiful creature, even as I could feel my mood starting to lift again with the chemicals coursing through my bloodstream. Reaching out, I tentatively placed one fingertip on his plump, strawberry-coloured lips. For a moment, his eyes flashed wickedness, and then he lunged, snapping his teeth like he was pretending to bite me, before wrapping his whole mouth around my finger and sucking it inside. Something twisted inside me as he sucked first one finger, then the next, one after another, until he was cramming half my fist into his mouth, sucking like a baby at a teat, all the while staring at me with those bedroom eyes full of lust and longing.

When I finally withdrew my fingers, wet with saliva, he lowered his eyebrows and glowered at me. “Take off dress.”

“What, so you can steal it, like my boots?”

At that, he burst out into a sudden fit of cackling, and sang a snatch of something in Japanese. “If it turn you on, yeah, sure, I wear dress for you.”

His dimpled face was so irresistible during those sudden storms of giggling that I couldn’t help it, I bent forward and kissed him quickly before offering my back to him and pointing to the zipper. “Help me get out of this?”

Horribly, teasingly, slowly, he nudged the zipper of the dress down, inch by inch, kissing or licking or biting each new square of skin he revealed, until I was nearly melting inside, feeling myself growing wetter and wetter in anticipation. When he finally reached the bottom, I shifted my hips slightly so he could pull it up over my head. He seized it like a trophy, and held it up against his shoulders, as if daring me to take it back.

“Go on, then. It suits you,” I teased, and he actually started unbuttoning his shirt. He stripped off the shirt and vest, then pulled the dress over his head. He had to stand up, to pull it down over his hips, then turned around to allow me to zip it up. Apart from his shoulders, which were slightly wider than mine, and stuck out awkwardly against the neckline, it fit him perfectly, flaring out below his waist to give the illusion of hips, before ending a few inches above his knees to give a flash of leather-clad thighs. “Jesus Christ, it’s not fair – it looks better on you than it does on me.”

He shook his head briskly and laughed as he pulled at the neckline, puffing out the fabric to give the illusion of cleavage. “Nah. Your breasts still better than mine.” Pulling away from me, he strutted about the room, then gave it a twirl, admiring how the fluttering fabric flared out in the make-up mirror.

Feeling a bit too exposed, I reached out for the abandoned circuit-print shirt, and pulled it around my bare shoulders. He was too slim; it wouldn’t quite button over my breasts. But he grinned to see me, circling back to the bed. I could feel the drug coming on again, stronger than before, as the black and white checkerboard of the dress shifted and flexed, expanding and contracting and writhing as he moved. As he moved back down towards me, he knelt beside the bed.

“OK. You be boy now, I be girl.”

I laughed aloud with delight. “OK, then. Suck my dick.”

His eyes flashed with mingled excitement and mischief as he pushed me back against the bed, kissing my exposed stomach, before tugging at the waistband of my tights to pull them down over my hips. I lifted my pelvis slightly, and he pulled them off in one long, fluid motion, kissing my skin as he exposed it, my belly, my hips, my thighs, my knees, my shin, then finally depositing a tiny, sucking kiss on each of my big toes.

Crawling back onto the bed and pushing my legs open, he arranged me as he wanted me, nudging with his nose or his mouth to get me to move and make space for him. He buried his face in my pubic hair, snuffling like an animal, before moving his mouth lower, flicking his tongue along the tops of my thighs to tease me, before darting back to probe my labia with his lips.

I could feel the drug taking off in my mind, my brain opening out to the cosmos, and all the stars and galaxies and cosmic strings singing and humming along with the throbbing music from upstairs, even as my entire body became concentrated with single focus on the white heat of his fingers prying apart my thighs, his nose pressed against the pearl of my clit, as his tongue explored the deep recesses of the wet seashell of my sex. It was like being lapped by the sea, the waves of the cosmic ocean buffeting me, pushing me open, drifts of foam and stardust sizzling up the hot gap between my legs to roll up my spine with intense waves of pleasure that seemed to reach like the tail of a comet all the way up to my brain, caressing my entire nervous system with exquisite gales of almost-too-much pleasure.

Moaning aloud, I writhed, grasping at the leopard-print bedspread before fixing on his hair, seizing tufts of blond and tugging at his head to thrust it deeper into me. Somewhere far above us, I could hear the music change, a steady, purring beat like the engines of a gigantic ship, carrying us deeper and deeper into space. My heart was thudding in time with his, my whole skin alight, as I raised my hips and mashed myself against his face. He got the idea, wrapping his right arm around my waist to raise me slightly, before pushing in first one finger of his left hand, then two, exploring up inside me, leaving waves of ecstasy in their wake as his tongue worked at my pearl. I was bucking wildly as he worked against me, playing me with his fingers, sucking with his whole mouth as I pulled his hair roughly, dragging his head this way and that. Oh Jesus, he seemed to have half his fist up me, teasing and stroking, hammering and coaxing moans and squeals from me like I was his fretboard – fucking guitarists, huh?

I was so close to orgasm that I could feel it hanging just out of reach, and I had to pull away, not wanting to end the ecstasy too soon. “Stop – stop a minute, it’s too much,” I panted, as I jerked away from his searching tongue.

To my relief, he extracted his hand, almost excruciatingly slowly, all of my muscles pulsing and tensing around him, then stopped and grinned up at me, his chin covered in my juices. “Sit on my face,” he almost growled.

“You’re so little. I’m afraid to crush you.”

“Crush me like bug,” he demanded, his eyes fierce. “Suffocate me wit love.”

When I hesitated a heartbeat too long, he put his hands under my buttocks and physically lifted me – he was stronger than he looked – and repositioned me roughly, flipping over so that he was lying on his back on the bed, then pulling me up towards his face. I yelped, and did my best to rearrange myself, one knee on each side of his beautiful face, thighs tensed as I slowly lowered myself down towards him, holding myself just teasingly out of reach.

He thrashed about beneath me, his mouth gurning as he reached for me over and again, trying to lick, to bite, to thrust his tongue into my gap as I teased him, lowering myself for a moment before dancing up out of his reach again. Finally, he tired of the game, reaching up and grasping for my hips, trying to force me down towards him so he could drink me.

“Ee-yeh,” I snapped, and slapped his hands away, grabbing him by the wrists and pinning them back against the mattress. For a moment, he just lay there, dazed, his lips parted and panting, his eyes blazing, then he fixed me with the most wicked smile.

“Crush me,” he urged desperately, his eyes single-mindedly fixed on mine, his soul looking straight out of those two black holes and boring into my own with a longing that terrified me. I heard him switch to Japanese, but I knew exactly what he was saying. “Kill me with love. Destroy me. Grind my bones into the mattress with the force of your desire for me. I want you to wreck me, and leave my body a smouldering ruin from how much you want me.”

Slowly, I lowered myself onto him. I saw his eyes close as he took one last gasp of air, then he dove into me with his tongue as I gently rested the brunt of my weight on his shoulders and face. As he thrust his face inside me, I could feel his tongue searching, even as his body started to writhe. Ten seconds, twenty seconds – how long could he hold his breath? It was hard to judge time with the drug racing around our bloodstreams, joining our minds to the cosmic eternal time of everlasting bliss at the centre of the universe. Behind me, I could feel his legs starting to twitch, then I could feel his chest shudder, his whole body almost convulsing, even as my own genitals were singing, shuddering with delight at what he was doing with his tongue inside me.

Losing my nerve, I pulled back off him to reveal his eyes wide and staring, his mouth open and panting for breath.

“Are you alright?”

He nodded quickly, but seemed unable to speak.

“I don’t want to hurt you, even if you want me to.”

But he looked up at me with a determination that frightened me, muttering something softly in Japanese. “With my face inside you, I am at one with the mother-cosmos. I want to lose myself in you.” The only word I caught in English was cosmos, but his death-wish was clear. He softened his gaze with a smile, as he raised his head from the mattress and licked my clit softly, sending little shivers all down my thighs. “Again!”

He was so beautiful, I found myself complying against my better judgement, slowly lowering myself onto him, and letting him probe the universe between my thighs with his tongue, counting down the seconds, clockwork mechanisms whirring in my brain, flickering cogs and wheels and machine elves that clicked and glittered with each stroke of his tongue, until I could feel his legs start to twitch and his body begin to convulse with oxygen restriction again, and I pulled myself off him sharply, just before I reached orgasm.

This time, his face was even more dazed, his eyes glazed, his lips almost blue. But when he finally recovered words, his desire to do it again and again was clear, even through the Japanese. “Futabi!”

“No,” I said, even as he broke his left hand free from my grasp, grabbed me, and pushed my hand down behind me, forcing it into his groin, so that I could feel how hard his cock was. Christ, it was like a rock straining against his trousers in blind desire, and I suddenly wanted it deep inside me.

“Onegai?” he begged, but I shook my head, and climbed backwards off his shoulders, scooting down his body, pulling his dress – my dress really – up and out of the way. I kissed his nipples in apology, nipped his ribs, carefully avoiding the nasty scratch-mark the aggressive club kid had left across his ribs, and headed downwards.

Crawling backwards, I reached the waistband of his leather trousers and tore them open, grappling with the fabric as I lifted his hips to pull them down, exposing his cock to the light. Digging in my bra, I located the tiny plastic package that Toni had entrusted me with, smooshed right down underneath one tit, then turned my attention to the cock.

Hisashi was clearly still sulking, wiping my juices from his face with his discarded vest before curling his arms behind his head, peering down at what I was doing. I was wet enough already, but the condom was tricky, so I bent down and took him in my mouth, slicking him up a bit with my saliva as I ripped the package open, then carefully pinched the tip and rolled the latex down along the length of his member, sealing it with a dab of saliva at the bottom.

At that, he moaned and shifted, raising his arms as he softly whispered, “Hold me down?”

Stars and moons glistened in his hair, the skin of his belly where I had pushed the dress away glinted pearlescent in the moonlight, a sparkling cosmic jewel of a boy, his amber eyes glittering like comets as I manhandled him this way and that, trying to get him perfectly positioned. He wriggled, tried to pull my dress up over his head, but got stuck on something in the pocket.

“What has it got in its pockets?” he asked himself softly, then extracted the small brown bottle of amyl nitrite. “Ooh! We try dis now.”

“Are you crazy? That made you pass out last time.”

He shook his head insistently. “Did not pass out. Went… somewhere else. Somewhere amazing. Here! Try!” When I didn’t immediately take it, he wrestled his other hand out from under me and twisted the bottle open. Holding it up to his nostril, he took a smaller sniff, and though, true to his word, this time he did not pass out, the skin of his face flickered as his eyes lit up with something that could only be described as beast mode. “Is amazing. Try!”

Reluctantly, I took the bottle from him, and held it up to my nostril. The smell was awful as I inhaled, but at first, I didn’t feel anything, so I screwed the top back on and tossed it back down onto the floor. At that moment, it was his condom-wrapped cock that intrigued me, standing up as stiff as a sentinel, twitching and straining towards me, as if with a mind of its own.

Holding his gaze, I took his cock in my hand, then watched his lips part with a sigh of mingled delight and terror as I put him between my thighs and gently sank down onto him.

It was then, that the Animal Nitrite hit. My body split open, and the universe poured in, sharp pleasure and impossible pain, thousands of spinning planets orbiting round a million suns, a meteor burst of mingled creation and destruction as he entered me and I engulfed him with my whole body. It was the drugs, I told myself, just the drugs, as my body and his seemed to merge. I could feel with his cock the wet warmth of my internal ocean, could feel his prickle of delight as I flopped back against him and seized his wrists in my hands, pinning him against the mattress as I started to move with him, two bodies forming a single machine, all pistons and pumps and bursts of steam and oil as we slid back and forth together like a pounding eternal beam engine. My vagina was the furnace, his cock the coal, shovelled into me again and again as we raced together faster and faster, flames flickering and dancing along his belly, across my breasts, a thousand tiny flame demons lighting our skin with desire, puckering my flesh until my arms flickered like lizard skin and his bruised neck pulsed with leopard spots.

I had no idea how long we rode each other. Time seemed to dilate, slow down, and finally stood still, as we danced out along the spiral arms of the galaxy, pulsing, rotating, spinning, a four-legged space creature, joined only at our genitals in a cloud of cosmic dust. I could see the red-shift effect in his hair and face, the colours stretching and separating out into a prismic vortex of seven rainbow Hisashis thrusting into seven rainbow Alices, as we flew out well past the speed of light. The exquisite pressure was building between my thighs, but still I held on, knowing that as soon as we came, we would come crashing back down to earth. His lips parted, and a stream of cosmic machine-elves came spinning out in the form of writhing Japanese script, caressing my face, my breasts, my belly, assembling themselves into words of love in a thousand different languages, before disassembling themselves back into smoke and whispers and moonlight.

Further and further we hurtled out into the darkness, our legs pumping together like pistons as I slammed into him again and again, until I saw the glittering black hole spinning on the edge of hyperspace. We were going too fast to stop, even had I wanted to, but the jet-black negative-infinity depth of it drew us like a moth to a candle, as our bodies fell faster and faster into its gravity well, sucking us into a terrifying orbit. Round and round, we whirled, his body jack-knifing into mine like a well-oiled machine. It was impossible to sail against the current, so together, we both surrendered, and instead of fighting it, we joined hands, tangling our fingers together, and threw ourselves head-first into the strobing black abyss.

My body exploded like a supernova, waves and waves of heavenly bliss rushing up my chakras like crashing waves, shuddering and throbbing with sparkling, neutron-bomb joy for thousands upon thousands of years. Beside me, beneath me, behind me, Hisashi was burning like a roman candle, his face sloughing off waves and waves of holographic crystalline laser-light as he came, lighting up the cosmos with the tsunami of his orgasm. We pulsed, we burned, we quivered, falling without end, fingertips feather-light touching as the wind rushed past us, slowing our strokes as waves of pleasure buffeted us, tearing through our conjoined body-machine like high-energy neutrinos through solid lead.

For a horrible moment, I couldn’t breathe, white feathers flying everywhere, a burst of impossibly bright darkness as we crashed from the black sun, and I fell, hurtling out of the sky until I landed with a thud, thrown out of the cosmos, collapsing back onto Hisashi’s chest, my whole body shuddering with aftershocks as he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me back to earth.

My muscles pulsed again, tiny rivulets of energy still sparking from my brainstem, down my spine, through my womb and out into the world by way of his still-twitching cock. But Hisashi smiled and took my face between his hands, kissing me gently as my body finally stilled. As I finally lay back against his chest, my orgasm completely spent, he looked down at me expectantly, his lips twitching up in that familiar mischievous smile.

“Again!”