Channeling a Romance of Allusion by Amy Lane
She sat at the bar on a Friday night, shaking her leg in time to the music, humming to herself. Witchy Woman.1 It was an old song, but a good one. The leg wasn’t bad either. She smiled into her drink—one of those frou-frou peach colored things that was choc-full of yummy brain-cell assassins, but didn’t taste like it. She turned her head, just a fraction, and the drink was purple and the alcohol was toad-wort. She turned her head back, and it was just an overpriced drink. Witchy Woman. How appropriate.
She shivered deliciously. Was she ready for what was going to happen tonight? She cocked her head, again, just that fraction of a degree, and looked around the bar. In place of the Juke Box were a couple of minstrels, dirty, but sublime. In place of the polished brass and dark wood was a bare board. The seat beneath her bottom grew hard and splintery, and she smiled charmingly at the drunken bar-keep, who blinked owlishly, surprised as she faded in and out of his vision. She smiled at the young man in the striped shirt, now, and he blinked once or twice and smiled back. Yeah, she thought, she was ready.
Johnny slid onto the stool next to her, but she didn’t look up. It was imperative that she not look up.
“Hey, hon…” He said, pleasantly surprised, and then, she looked up.
“Johnny…” She smiled then, looking into his fathomless eyes, and the pleasure was genuine, if the surprise was not. Johnny Heartbreak, drinker, gambler, player… all around bad boy. And beautiful, of course. Handsome, blue eyes, dark blond hair—a lithe body that swayed in time to a distant sea. He’d been in the Marines before he went into advertising. He’d been working for her firm for ten years—was, in fact, twelve years older than she was, which was why, she was sure, he hadn’t hit on her yet. Hadn’t hit on her ever. She was attractive enough—sweet faced, all dark eyes and curly hair. Her body was the tight side of all right, and she was blessed with a fair amount of charm and wit—and he liked her. She knew he did—he sought her out at lunch, consulted her on his accounts, made it a point to see that she was invited to parties that, as the new kid, she would normally be left out of… dammit, he should have hit on her by now. He was protecting her. He was guarding her innocence. A chivalric act, a hint of the goodness beneath the debauchery. All that, and a cleft chin—it pretty much sealed his fate.
“What’s new, Pussycat?”2 He asked, semi-facetiously, and she leaned right into the segue with “whoa whoa whoa” And they both laughed a little. It was a game they played, both of them in the advertising game and all, wherein they channeled various poems, songs, and movies—playing tag with pop-culture allusions, daring the other to keep up. All the people in their group at the office did it—but Cherry and Johnny did it exceptionally well.
“I went out for a ride…”3 She said, which was partially the truth, but it fit into the game.
“Are you going back?” He asked, and she blessed their secret passion for Springsteen.
“Waiting to take that wrong turn.” She responded, and he widened his eyes a little as he frowned, and called the bartender for a Dewars and water.
“Now see,” he said, “I never got that. You know, you take a wrong turn, and you usually turn around and go back.”
She smiled briefly at him, over her frou-frou drink. “I used to think so.”4 She said it channeling Baby from Dirty Dancing, and he squinted at her for a moment… frizzy hair, peasant blouse… nose before the job…but he couldn’t place her, so he shook his head and shrugged.
“Lost me.” He said, looking at her pleasantly and waiting for her to tell him.
She shook her head. “Nope. You won’t get away that easy…”5
“You think that was easy?” He sprang back, then looked surprised, as though uncertain how Aladdin had slipped from his mouth.
She laughed in her throat, a low sound, designed to seduce, and then she began to sing, “You’ve gotta stay, one jump, ahead of the hit man…”
“One swing ahead of the sword…” “I steal anything I can’t afford…”
“That’s everything.” They said simultaneously, and she looked directly at him and giggled. He shook his head again, disoriented. For a moment, she knew, everything had been Disney-colored, and she’d been wearing a fez and an interesting vest thing that didn’t cover nearly enough. She smiled at him, all innocence, noting that his eyes dilated and his breathing quickened. She was reasonably sure that, should she check, she’d see a bulge in his groin as well. Perfect, she couldn’t have planned it better if she’d scripted it.
“Whoa…” Johnny said, blinking at his Dewars as he took a sip. “What’s in this stuff…”
“Chicken lips and lizard hips and alligator eyes…”6 She sang, then clapped her hand over her mouth. Oops…
“Eewww…” He spit out the scotch all over the bar, and she knew that for a moment it had looked just awful. Mentally she slapped her head—way to kill a mood. She was tempted to hum just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down 7…but the damage had been done and the bartender was on his way to see if everything was okay.
“Actually,” Cherry said, when Johnny looked like he was going to complain about chicken lips in his scotch, “I amhungry like a wolf…” 8 Johnny turned to her, surprised, and suddenly hungry in a way that had little to do with the buffalo wings and quesadilla she ordered for them both.
“A little young for Duran Duran, aren’t you?” He asked, sipping at the water she’d gotten from the bartender.
“Isn’t eighties music forever young?”9 Ah… that had been a good choice… she could take a guess from they way her was looking at her that suddenly it was not that she looked older, but that he felt younger. Good.
They continued talking, segueing from movie to song to poem in a, he believed, random way. At one point he looked at the neon clock over the bar and realized that it was past ten. “Damn,” He said, “I could do this with you all night, but I’ve got plans in the morning…”
“Plans?” She asked, coyly. She knew he’d planned to go shopping with his on-again/off-again. He’d made noise about it being required in order to fulfill the duties of a steady lay. “You’d leave me alone on a Friday night because ofplans…”
He smiled at her, and, as she had known, his courtliness took over. “Had we but worlds enough and time…”10 He sighed, taking her hand and covering it with his own before bringing it to his lips…
“This coyness, lady were no crime…” She finished off, smiling into his eyes as he did so. And Andrew Marvel was suddenly alive and well between them, urging lovers to action. Beautiful, she sighed happily, beautiful…
But he stopped, holding onto her hand, still, running it by his lips in a way that made her body tighten, her lingerie damp. “Cherry…” He said softly, seriously… “We can’t… I mean…it’s not that you’re not…” And he closed his eyes and sighed, turning her hand palm up. He kissed her palm, then, touched it delicately with his tongue, and then tried to pull away. She wouldn’t let him, cupped his cheek instead.
“You’re honorable, I know.” She murmured, her eyes sure and confident, but her head tilted at a demure angle. “But I could not love thee dear so much, loved I not honor more…” 11 She smiled, stroking his cheek with her thumb. Ah, the cavalier poets, still urging, still urgent… and she began to plan what she would say next if he tried to extricate himself from her now.
“You’re very young…” He said, “And I’m not… I mean, I don’t want to take advantage…”
“but born are the maids to flower an hour in all…”12 she murmured, and he looked at her, surprised again. “e.e. cummings—a lover’s secret weapon.”
“We’re not…” his voice cracked, he tried again, “We’re not lovers…”
“your slightest look easily will unclose me…”13 and it was e.e. cummings again… ah, erotica at its most sublime. She could almost hear the blood thundering in his ears, his breath catch became hers, and she ached, oh, goddess how she ached in the hollow, empty place between her thighs. She knew that with her words she’d given him her ache. She saw his face color, his eyes dilate, and knew that with a push, a nudge, a few more syllables, she could push him over the edge, and he’d embarrass himself, spill himself there, in front of her, standing on the wooden rise of the bar. She eyed him earnestly, entreatingly, only the faint lick of her lips giving lie to the predator she’d worked so hard to be.
“I have a…” he breathed, but she knew the nature of that relationship, and how to disintegrate it with his own pet phrase.
“A steady lay?” she asked. “Is that what you want? I could be a steady lay.” She’d conjured an image, she knew it, but it was one he flinched from, visibly, almost but not quite relinquishing her hand. “No?” She asked, all innocence. “That isn’t what you want?”
His breathing was thick in her ears, the heat welling off his body was syrupy and thick, sweet and intoxicating, deadly and wonderful, like her little frou-frou drink but far more high. When he spoke his voice was scratchy, and he stuck to the game rules because he had no other words. “I want your kiss.” 14 He muttered.
She brushed her hand across his lips and brought his ear down so she could whisper in it. “I want your sex.”15 George Michael this time, and she felt him shudder under the touch of her hand on the back of his head. Without a word he grabbed her other hand and hauled her out the door, giving her just time enough to grab her purse and drop a tip on the bar.
In the darkened parking lot his hands fumbled for the door of his car, and he dropped his keys twice before she took them from him and opened the door. She scooted into the driver’s seat, sending him around the car in a dazed mix of lust and childish trust. She drove smoothly and quickly, knew where his apartment was, had been there for parties. They didn’t speak during the few blocks, but when the car was stopped he got out first, came around and opened her door for her. She was glad he had recovered some of his self-possession—this was, after all, her first seduction and she would need his help eventually.
At his doorway he took the keys from her hands, the contact feeling heated, hurried. She let him open the doors, humming I will be the one to hold you down… underneath her breath. 16 It worked, because he hardly slammed the door closed behind them before he fell upon her, in a kiss that shuddered and quaked with the effort of the two of them to crawl inside the other’s skin.
Their clothes were shed in trembling moments of shaking fingers, and they slowed down for a moment after that, while they marked each other with teeth and kisses and tongue. She rubbed the side of her face against him, like a cat, down his chest and abdomen, over to his sex which was softer in texture and harder in fact than she had ever dreamed. In her head she heard the words of a thousand romance writers, all clamoring with descriptions of desire on the edge, and she felt those words pushing against him, making him throb and pulse, just like it said in the books.17 He was close, so close, and when she moved up to bite his neck (now channeling Laurell K. Hamilton and Anne Rice)18, he took over from her, turning her on her back and crashing against her body bluntly and painfully, so that she lost all her words.
It was better that way, she realized with a gasp, when he had kissed her startled tears and begun to move again. Because this wasn’t her magic, the word magic that she could summon alone. This was their magic, the body magic, that took consensual humans and made them shiver with light and desire. As he took her higher, to orgasm, to freedom, her words left her completely for a time.
When she came back to her body, on her back on the scratchy floor, dealing with both his aftermath and his embarrassment at taking her virginity so roughly, with so little finesse, so little discussion, her words came back. She took his face in her hands and kissed him, sealing the bargain their body had made.
“you are Mine said she,”19 said she. And he was too thoroughly ensorcelled to argue.
Bibliography
She shivered deliciously. Was she ready for what was going to happen tonight? She cocked her head, again, just that fraction of a degree, and looked around the bar. In place of the Juke Box were a couple of minstrels, dirty, but sublime. In place of the polished brass and dark wood was a bare board. The seat beneath her bottom grew hard and splintery, and she smiled charmingly at the drunken bar-keep, who blinked owlishly, surprised as she faded in and out of his vision. She smiled at the young man in the striped shirt, now, and he blinked once or twice and smiled back. Yeah, she thought, she was ready.
Johnny slid onto the stool next to her, but she didn’t look up. It was imperative that she not look up.
“Hey, hon…” He said, pleasantly surprised, and then, she looked up.
“Johnny…” She smiled then, looking into his fathomless eyes, and the pleasure was genuine, if the surprise was not. Johnny Heartbreak, drinker, gambler, player… all around bad boy. And beautiful, of course. Handsome, blue eyes, dark blond hair—a lithe body that swayed in time to a distant sea. He’d been in the Marines before he went into advertising. He’d been working for her firm for ten years—was, in fact, twelve years older than she was, which was why, she was sure, he hadn’t hit on her yet. Hadn’t hit on her ever. She was attractive enough—sweet faced, all dark eyes and curly hair. Her body was the tight side of all right, and she was blessed with a fair amount of charm and wit—and he liked her. She knew he did—he sought her out at lunch, consulted her on his accounts, made it a point to see that she was invited to parties that, as the new kid, she would normally be left out of… dammit, he should have hit on her by now. He was protecting her. He was guarding her innocence. A chivalric act, a hint of the goodness beneath the debauchery. All that, and a cleft chin—it pretty much sealed his fate.
“What’s new, Pussycat?”2 He asked, semi-facetiously, and she leaned right into the segue with “whoa whoa whoa” And they both laughed a little. It was a game they played, both of them in the advertising game and all, wherein they channeled various poems, songs, and movies—playing tag with pop-culture allusions, daring the other to keep up. All the people in their group at the office did it—but Cherry and Johnny did it exceptionally well.
“I went out for a ride…”3 She said, which was partially the truth, but it fit into the game.
“Are you going back?” He asked, and she blessed their secret passion for Springsteen.
“Waiting to take that wrong turn.” She responded, and he widened his eyes a little as he frowned, and called the bartender for a Dewars and water.
“Now see,” he said, “I never got that. You know, you take a wrong turn, and you usually turn around and go back.”
She smiled briefly at him, over her frou-frou drink. “I used to think so.”4 She said it channeling Baby from Dirty Dancing, and he squinted at her for a moment… frizzy hair, peasant blouse… nose before the job…but he couldn’t place her, so he shook his head and shrugged.
“Lost me.” He said, looking at her pleasantly and waiting for her to tell him.
She shook her head. “Nope. You won’t get away that easy…”5
“You think that was easy?” He sprang back, then looked surprised, as though uncertain how Aladdin had slipped from his mouth.
She laughed in her throat, a low sound, designed to seduce, and then she began to sing, “You’ve gotta stay, one jump, ahead of the hit man…”
“One swing ahead of the sword…” “I steal anything I can’t afford…”
“That’s everything.” They said simultaneously, and she looked directly at him and giggled. He shook his head again, disoriented. For a moment, she knew, everything had been Disney-colored, and she’d been wearing a fez and an interesting vest thing that didn’t cover nearly enough. She smiled at him, all innocence, noting that his eyes dilated and his breathing quickened. She was reasonably sure that, should she check, she’d see a bulge in his groin as well. Perfect, she couldn’t have planned it better if she’d scripted it.
“Whoa…” Johnny said, blinking at his Dewars as he took a sip. “What’s in this stuff…”
“Chicken lips and lizard hips and alligator eyes…”6 She sang, then clapped her hand over her mouth. Oops…
“Eewww…” He spit out the scotch all over the bar, and she knew that for a moment it had looked just awful. Mentally she slapped her head—way to kill a mood. She was tempted to hum just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down 7…but the damage had been done and the bartender was on his way to see if everything was okay.
“Actually,” Cherry said, when Johnny looked like he was going to complain about chicken lips in his scotch, “I amhungry like a wolf…” 8 Johnny turned to her, surprised, and suddenly hungry in a way that had little to do with the buffalo wings and quesadilla she ordered for them both.
“A little young for Duran Duran, aren’t you?” He asked, sipping at the water she’d gotten from the bartender.
“Isn’t eighties music forever young?”9 Ah… that had been a good choice… she could take a guess from they way her was looking at her that suddenly it was not that she looked older, but that he felt younger. Good.
They continued talking, segueing from movie to song to poem in a, he believed, random way. At one point he looked at the neon clock over the bar and realized that it was past ten. “Damn,” He said, “I could do this with you all night, but I’ve got plans in the morning…”
“Plans?” She asked, coyly. She knew he’d planned to go shopping with his on-again/off-again. He’d made noise about it being required in order to fulfill the duties of a steady lay. “You’d leave me alone on a Friday night because ofplans…”
He smiled at her, and, as she had known, his courtliness took over. “Had we but worlds enough and time…”10 He sighed, taking her hand and covering it with his own before bringing it to his lips…
“This coyness, lady were no crime…” She finished off, smiling into his eyes as he did so. And Andrew Marvel was suddenly alive and well between them, urging lovers to action. Beautiful, she sighed happily, beautiful…
But he stopped, holding onto her hand, still, running it by his lips in a way that made her body tighten, her lingerie damp. “Cherry…” He said softly, seriously… “We can’t… I mean…it’s not that you’re not…” And he closed his eyes and sighed, turning her hand palm up. He kissed her palm, then, touched it delicately with his tongue, and then tried to pull away. She wouldn’t let him, cupped his cheek instead.
“You’re honorable, I know.” She murmured, her eyes sure and confident, but her head tilted at a demure angle. “But I could not love thee dear so much, loved I not honor more…” 11 She smiled, stroking his cheek with her thumb. Ah, the cavalier poets, still urging, still urgent… and she began to plan what she would say next if he tried to extricate himself from her now.
“You’re very young…” He said, “And I’m not… I mean, I don’t want to take advantage…”
“but born are the maids to flower an hour in all…”12 she murmured, and he looked at her, surprised again. “e.e. cummings—a lover’s secret weapon.”
“We’re not…” his voice cracked, he tried again, “We’re not lovers…”
“your slightest look easily will unclose me…”13 and it was e.e. cummings again… ah, erotica at its most sublime. She could almost hear the blood thundering in his ears, his breath catch became hers, and she ached, oh, goddess how she ached in the hollow, empty place between her thighs. She knew that with her words she’d given him her ache. She saw his face color, his eyes dilate, and knew that with a push, a nudge, a few more syllables, she could push him over the edge, and he’d embarrass himself, spill himself there, in front of her, standing on the wooden rise of the bar. She eyed him earnestly, entreatingly, only the faint lick of her lips giving lie to the predator she’d worked so hard to be.
“I have a…” he breathed, but she knew the nature of that relationship, and how to disintegrate it with his own pet phrase.
“A steady lay?” she asked. “Is that what you want? I could be a steady lay.” She’d conjured an image, she knew it, but it was one he flinched from, visibly, almost but not quite relinquishing her hand. “No?” She asked, all innocence. “That isn’t what you want?”
His breathing was thick in her ears, the heat welling off his body was syrupy and thick, sweet and intoxicating, deadly and wonderful, like her little frou-frou drink but far more high. When he spoke his voice was scratchy, and he stuck to the game rules because he had no other words. “I want your kiss.” 14 He muttered.
She brushed her hand across his lips and brought his ear down so she could whisper in it. “I want your sex.”15 George Michael this time, and she felt him shudder under the touch of her hand on the back of his head. Without a word he grabbed her other hand and hauled her out the door, giving her just time enough to grab her purse and drop a tip on the bar.
In the darkened parking lot his hands fumbled for the door of his car, and he dropped his keys twice before she took them from him and opened the door. She scooted into the driver’s seat, sending him around the car in a dazed mix of lust and childish trust. She drove smoothly and quickly, knew where his apartment was, had been there for parties. They didn’t speak during the few blocks, but when the car was stopped he got out first, came around and opened her door for her. She was glad he had recovered some of his self-possession—this was, after all, her first seduction and she would need his help eventually.
At his doorway he took the keys from her hands, the contact feeling heated, hurried. She let him open the doors, humming I will be the one to hold you down… underneath her breath. 16 It worked, because he hardly slammed the door closed behind them before he fell upon her, in a kiss that shuddered and quaked with the effort of the two of them to crawl inside the other’s skin.
Their clothes were shed in trembling moments of shaking fingers, and they slowed down for a moment after that, while they marked each other with teeth and kisses and tongue. She rubbed the side of her face against him, like a cat, down his chest and abdomen, over to his sex which was softer in texture and harder in fact than she had ever dreamed. In her head she heard the words of a thousand romance writers, all clamoring with descriptions of desire on the edge, and she felt those words pushing against him, making him throb and pulse, just like it said in the books.17 He was close, so close, and when she moved up to bite his neck (now channeling Laurell K. Hamilton and Anne Rice)18, he took over from her, turning her on her back and crashing against her body bluntly and painfully, so that she lost all her words.
It was better that way, she realized with a gasp, when he had kissed her startled tears and begun to move again. Because this wasn’t her magic, the word magic that she could summon alone. This was their magic, the body magic, that took consensual humans and made them shiver with light and desire. As he took her higher, to orgasm, to freedom, her words left her completely for a time.
When she came back to her body, on her back on the scratchy floor, dealing with both his aftermath and his embarrassment at taking her virginity so roughly, with so little finesse, so little discussion, her words came back. She took his face in her hands and kissed him, sealing the bargain their body had made.
“you are Mine said she,”19 said she. And he was too thoroughly ensorcelled to argue.
Bibliography
- Witchy Woman--by Don Henley and Glen Frye
- What’s New Pussycat--Tom Jones
- Hungry Heart--Bruce Springsteen
- Dirty Dancing--starring Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze, written by Eleanor Bergstein, 1988
- Aladdin--song by Alan Menken and Tim Rice--1992
- Chicken Lips and Lizard Hips--by Bruce Springsteen
- Mary Poppins--1968 (Music by Richard and Robert Sherman)
- Hungry Like the Wolf--song by Duran Duran
- Forever Young--song by Rod Stewart
- To His Coy Mistress--Andrew Marvell
- To Lucasta, Going to the Wars—Richard Lovelace
- #59
- # 35
- Kiss by Prince
- I want your sex by George Michael
- Possession by Sarah MacLaughlin
- This is a general reference to all romance fiction—there are certain rules to the sex words in romance book--throbbingand pulsing to describe an erection are two of the most clichéd.
- Laurell K. Hamilton and Anne Rice both write vampire fiction
- # 38
