|
Echo Echo
by Nicola
Rating: R
2006
He sees a girl with long, blonde hair leaning against a wall in a club and his heart slams in his chest—all the way back to 1987.
He knows who she is immediately, even though there must be a million similarly beautiful (and similarly drunk) girls in Manhattan. She has her mother's eyes, her mother's bright pulse of energy… her mother's inability to hold her liquor. He watches as her friend holds a drink out to her. When she reaches to take it, stepping away from the wall, she loses her balance. It's simple instinct for him to step forward and catch her before she falls. It's simple instinct, but the wrong choice entirely. Because now she's in his arms, her body soft and warm, melting effortlessly (drunkenly) at his fingertips. Now she's staring up at him, with Lily's eyes, looking at him like he's her Prince Charming (until someone better comes along, at least).
Besides, Rufus knows that the truth is, just like her mother, Serena does not want to be caught. She wants to fall—crash downward at speed and land hard wherever the bottom might be.
"Hello," she says.
He doesn't say anything. If he says something, he'll call her Lily by mistake.
"You saved me," she says.
He nods, the barest jerk of his head. Thinks: I didn't. I never could.
"It's loud. You wanna get out of here?" she says.
It's the loudness that he came for. The band playing at the club are friends of his. Maybe 'friends' is overstating it. They're a bunch of snotty-nosed upstarts who like to talk in interviews about how much Lincoln Hawk influenced them. The whole thing depresses Rufus. As soon as you're an influence, you're not current anymore. He's become a ghost, an echo. And somehow here, in purgatory—or wherever he has landed—his echo has found Lily's echo.
He nods again, this time indicating toward the bathroom. She gets it immediately. He realizes queasily that this is not the first time she has hooked up with an older man at a club. It should be a reassuring thought, but it's not.
They weave toward the bathroom, through the crowd. He still goes to shows regularly, even though he is (Dan's words) too old. He still craves the suffocating sensations of heat and noise; they are inexorably tied to memories of his early career. He also craves this: hands pulling him inside a bathroom stall, breathless giggling and the snap of the lock on the door.
She's wearing an electric blue skirt (so '80s) and he watches as she hikes it up, revealing—inch-by-inch—silky, smooth thighs. She leans back against the stall door, thrusting her hips forward. She's not wearing any underwear. He's almost disappointed at how easy it is.
Slowly, he runs a hand up the inside of her thigh. He delays a moment before his thumb ventures to her clit. The delay is enough to make her wriggle impatiently, emitting a slight grunt. Lily was always the same: supremely irritated by slow lovemaking. It took him a while to figure out that her irritation belied the fact that she liked it too much—stuttering stops and starts and her orgasm pulled out of easy reach came to characterize their best ever fucking.
Twenty years ago, he would have been all over her, hands pawing at her breasts, with his dick slamming inside her; fast and dirty and so easy. Now he has learned to wait. He fingers her slowly, sliding first one, then two, then a third inside of her. He rubs her clit only intermittently, teasing it gently to life.
"Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me," she says.
It's only when he hears the way her voice catches—that peak of irritation—that he obliges. The condom rolls on and her body opens. She sighs as he makes his first thrust inside of her. He realizes he can still hear the music. The band are playing a Lincoln Hawk cover. He's glad that he can't make out the vocals. All he can hear is the melody. As Serena pants and moans, striving for her orgasm, the bridge of Rosewood crashes over them.
A few weeks later, at breakfast Casa del Humphrey, Jenny will talk a mile a minute about Gossip Girl. She will mention the fact that Serena van der Woodsen is so out of control that her mom has packed her off to boarding school. Rufus will pretend not to listen.
January 2008
Note: Title from 'Kiss and Swallow' by IAMX.
|
|
