i don’t know who kelly is but I bet she isn’t even, like, a real genie. the fact that she’d totally misinterpreted what jude just said would usually cause a roll of his eyes, except for the fact it was lana, which only served to make the comment endearing. sickening. his sickly sweet affection for her would surely give him cavities if he let it, and he felt the sudden urge to downplay what was surely just drunken adoration. “don’t joke about that, lana,” jude started, sombre as a catholic burial. “my nan had cataracts and i find it personally offensive.” distracted by the fingers that climbed the rungs of his jeans, his hand darted out from instinct, met her wrist as his eyes locked on hers, and abandoned it just as quickly. a flinch, but his withdrawal was a silent plea to continue, lower lip rolling inside his mouth as he swallowed a gulp. “i mean, i never met her,” it felt crude to talk about his dead nanna while lana had her hand on his thigh, but when had lana and jude ever cared about what was appropriate? “but still… could be me one day. blind old jude, the parkour pensioner.” he could picture it too — white haired and wrinkly with black out shades, but the same signature jude hoop earring and patched leather jacket — a regular johnny knoxville. “better get a good look at you now just in case.” fingers were held up like a cinematographer lining up his shot, although with his questionable facial hair the result of two days without a shave and a string vest, jude looked more like an amateur porno director. “yep. still fit. good work, rich and vic.”
if he’d been stirred before, her hand at his belt only heightened it, the phantom pulse of a hand against his abdomen, skin inventing the contact before her fingers could even reach him. “lana—” her name, spoken like the bright yellow slap of a warning sign, his eyes wide as his fingers looped her wrist. what he didn’t say was be careful. the line they were treading was a tightrope suspended fifty-feet from earth, and still she pressed on, toeing the high wire in satin pointe shoes, a wobble feigned to make the crowds eat their own hearts. if she was the acrobat in the big top tent, jude supposed that made him the clown. you wouldn’t fuck me from behind. a tightening in his stomach that licked down into his groin. wanna see my face when you’re inside me? “yeah, maybe,” he hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but when he imagines it ( against the sink with the cutlery rack shaking, in a bathroom stall with his fingers in her mouth, spread-eagle on the hood of a car that doesn’t resemble something the inbetweeners might drive ) she’s always facing him, heads pressed, an imagined intimacy that he doesn’t look for in post-gig sex with an instagram mutual, the kind of fuck when he’s out the door before they’ve even pulled the condom off. “from behind works too, though. whatever you want. what’s your favourite?” asked like they’re discussing an ice cream brand, feigned nonchalance that only runs skin deep. there was nothing casual about the want he felt for lana, still mentally inside her when her teeth caught his finger ; there’d been no eyelash, but he let her wish on it anyway, swallowed when she cast her wish and kicked her cowboy boot over their line in the sand. “sure,” he spoke, when he trusted his voice enough to know that it wouldn’t shake, gooseflesh ripe with hairs stood on end as she looped her fingers through the holes in his vest. “—but only if you promise to help me, too.”
shrugging her hand away, jude shifted to the other end of her bed where he pulled her boots off one by one. next came her socks ( mismatched and sweaty from a night on the dance floor ) one of which jude balled up and tossed towards her face in some backwards rendition of a strip tease. her dress was last to go, jude kneeling before her on the bed as if in homage to torvil and dean, the two of them about to start scooping their arms in a bedside rendition of the boléro. his fingers fastened around the hem of her dress, tugged the slip of silk up ( over her thighs… over her hips… over her chest… ) his stomach tightening as flyaway strands of her hair lifted up with it as it brushed over her face. he tried not to look at the prick of her nipples, though his eyes fell to them anyway, an ache ripping through him as he imagined how it might feel to roll them between his teeth. her nakedness was both startling and entirely serene. jude’s hands met her thighs, sunk to clasp beneath her knees, and tugged her legs to pull her flat against the mattress. sinking back down, jude pressed his mouth to her stomach, kissed her belly button, and couldn’t resist the urge to dart his tongue out to swipe against it. “gross. i just scooped out all your belly fluff like a starving cat.” he could see the shimmering imprint of his own saliva glistening against her abdomen. “you know, when cats drink, their tongues turn into like, little spoons? it’s so cool.” nervous and thrumming with a chemical kind of electricity, he resorted to useless information, chewed on the inside of his cheek as he tried to calm the want that swelled in his base. settled beside her, jude let his head fall flat against her pelvis, a hip bone digging against his ear as he turned his gaze to look up at her, the startling bareness of her undressed skin. “weird seeing you like this,” jude eventually spoke, if only to break the tension her state of undress had prompted. his breath was hoarse as he spoke, a sudden urge to have a cigarette prompting him to pull a packet of marlboros from the pocket of his jeans. “i kinda assumed you’d have scales.”
“Don’t say that,” Lana protested gently, eyebrows sloped like a dog denied a treat. Suddenly she had the urge to reach out and touch his eyelids, hands like twitchy, trapped moths as they struggled to resist -- she wasn’t sure what she planned on doing, like she might’ve popped them from their sockets and held them in carefully cupped palms, stowed them in a jewellery box with a wind up ballerina and a tinkling chime that alerted of intruders, the ultimate safekeeping. Lana snatched lightly for his hand like she was chasing the string of a balloon before it drifted above the trees, sky bound forever, attempting to knot this hypothetical fate to a bench or lamppost -- either that, or she was just hellbent on contact, no matter the context. “I’ll describe all the stuff you can’t see -- you know, like, remix the world a little, give people purple eyes and three tits. It’ll be fun.” There she went again. She could be handed a steaming shit on a soggy paper plate and she’d still find a way to spray paint it gold and dress it up in tinsel. Still, she couldn’t help but feel briefly forlorn at the thought of him no longer able to look at her. It felt like imagining all of the flowers in the world losing their perfume at once. Butterflies across the globe gone grey like they’d fluttered out of a black and white television. Lana liked it, Jude looking at her. In fact, she was so consumed by the thought, wriggled an inch closer as if to better soak up the buzz of his current gaze on her skin, thriving in it, that she almost didn’t hear what he said. Almost. Rich and Vic. For a moment, Lana blinked, confused, like she couldn’t put one and two together. Then, oh, they’re supposed to have made me. Victor Frankenstein still got credit for animating the monster, even though he’d left it to roam the dark alone. Lana never understood that part. Weren’t the shadows his family? The wet and scratchy leaves? The hunger scraping at the pit of his stomach? “Yeah, good work,” she practically hummed, newly struck with an itch, the kind that drove cats to nuzzle calves and desperately slink tails, hungry for an owner, a smile with something beneath the surface like a glimmer of orange koi in pond water. “They say I popped out her cooch with a hand on my hip wearing my umbilical cord as a feather boa, so.” Void of eye contact -- on her fingers, instead, picking idly over stitches, deliberately applying pressure, wanting another rise out of him. “Serving from the start.”
“Jude,” she parroted, grin hot on her lips as the tip of a blue flame -- she had a dream once where every time Danny’s thumb brushed the bottom of the two, it left a pink welt on his skin, one she tried desperately to soothe with a kiss, the wet of her tongue. “Nah, you don’t need to,” he’d dismissed, grabbing her by the chin with television static for eyes, nothing behind them. “You’re like me, now.” The memory sloshed in her brain like a ship yet to be fixed in a bottle by glue, mast lopsided, capsize looming on the horizon. Rather than give in to it, Lana’s eyes found his, peripheral softening like a camera slightly out of focus. She wet her lips, considering the question, archiving memories accordingly. Once, she’d fucked one of the staff at PetCo in a back room when he was meant to be feeding the fish, pressed over an open tank with the tips of her hair sucked at like spaghetti by gaping mouths, a palm flat on the wall to keep her bearings and a sharp bite of discomfort with every smush of hip-against-glass. Another, her cheek pressed hard to a tall mirror, belt buckling her neck so tight that every yank of Danny’s hand made her knees tremble, consciousness white and prickling in her temples, the dizziest she’d ever felt without too many spins on a merry-go-round. There was a certain lack of intimacy in that, never bothered about Lana specifically, more so a body with a smudgy, barely legible name tag they didn’t bother reading, “I like...” Smile flickering, Lana diverted from her standard issue answer last second, abandoning script. “I mean, I like surprises, so there isn’t really just... one. But, I like... being on top, I guess -- sometimes. But not just, like -- I wanna be close, like, you’re sitting up,” she explained, brushing an index beneath his chin as if positioning an easel, better aligning their faces, “and I’m in your lap, and every time I move my hips, I can feel how much you want it by the way you breathe against me.” Saying so plucked a guitar string in her abdomen that wouldn’t stop thrumming long after she’d finished, melody forced back down her throat with every hasty swallow, and her eyes hovered between his features like a bee overwhelmed by buds to pollinate, unable to settle on one. “What’s yours?”
Lana only nodded and beamed at his conditions, already wiggling her feet to make his job difficult, squeal of laughter stifled by a tongue pinch. Lifting her arms to help him pry away silk that might as well have been tissue stitched with spun sugar, when Lana blinked she imagined it with button eyes, hair like fine yarn spilling over shoulders, stitches marking joints like seams. She realised, studying him in the dim pink sunset of her room, that she wouldn’t mind being his doll, so long as he loved her until she came undone. That’s what real felt like, anyway, according to the Velveteen Rabbit -- sacrifice, unravelling. Sinking with his tug, Lana laughed again, inflicted with the sound more often than a sentence bears punctuation. Eyes slipping shut, her fingers roamed to briefly appraise the timid curls at the back of his head, a position that would’ve been wholly more familiar if he’d just sunk a little further and dipped his mouth, realisation of which had a warm sigh dropping her lips ajar. A Kinder Egg of hot maple syrup might as well have been cracked open in her belly when he kissed it, grin wriggling with both the urge to contain a laugh and the desire to ask him to do it again. Even as he settled, Lana crackled and snapped like a toaster thrown live in a bathtub, eyes back open and seeking. “Ugh, that’s, like, the hottest thing you’ve ever said.” Sarcasm tugged her lips upright, already reaching to thumb idly at his temple, an index wandering along the path of his hairline. “I was a mermaid, once,” she began, casual, as if that was just a regular job listing you’d scroll past on Indeed. “At this water park, for the summer. I got to wear a fin and swim and brush my hair with a seashell. Kids loved me, I was a total sensation.” And their dads. Lana didn’t mention that part. Instead, she snatched at his Marlboros and slipped them beneath her tailbone, held prisoner -- kept her hands behind her back, too, afterwards, as if they’d been bound that way. “Not so fast! We’re not even, yet. No, like... dallying. I run a tight ship.” A slight breeze with the loss of fabric coaxed goosebumps over her ribcage, and as Lana shifted slightly the shadows revealed more, shivery and bare -- except she wasn’t cold, it was more just the feeling of his eyes on her, taking in everything. “You know,” Lana started, playfully nudging his head from her pelvis to get upright. By the unsteady way she crawled to plop onto his lap, eerily reminiscent of the position she’d mentioned earlier, anyone would think the mattress was bobbing on the ocean. Apparently she’d forgotten all about her Marlboro hostage. “When I was little,” came as she slid up the hem of his string vest, fingertips exploring the soft jutting V of his abdomen, already distracted, “I used to think goosebumps were, like, the way your body spoke to you.” Swallowing, she urged the vest higher, lone note of laughter slipping loose as it hiked to reach his nipples like a sports bra. “So I’d spend all this time in bed just, like... having conversations, with my fingers,” she explained, pausing briefly to poorly wrestle his head out of the neckline, grin fiercely coaxing dimples. Tossing it off elsewhere, she tucked a tendril behind her ear as she sat with her knees splayed, peering down at him. Hands strayed to his buckle, taking her time to ease the button through. “But I’d get kinda sad ‘cause, like, I wanted to understand -- like, what it was saying, and stuff. I figured it’d be, like, sad, or whatever, if no-one spoke your language. I wanted to be it’s friend.” Maybe she’d just wanted a friend, generally. Lana didn’t quite clock what was coming out of her mouth, gently dragging down his zipper with eyes following the movement. “Then I guess I learned, like -- stuff doesn’t always have to speak, for it to say something. Sometimes you just kinda... know. Your hands can understand.” Eyes dawning back on his, a slight smile piqued as she etched out a star on his stomach, leaving him unbuckled but making no moves to shift and allow him to shrug jeans past his hips. “What’d you think yours is saying?” Pressing her tongue into her cheek, Lana studied him like she wasn’t sliding a saucer of milk before a parched cat. Then, a flicker of amusement, a secret wordlessly shared between them -- I know I might be going a little too far, this time, but I don’t care. “I bet I can guess.”
