Smoking

  A thirty-something friend of mine still plays in a band, and he invited me to a show of theirs. When I arrived at the address he’d given me, I found not an auditorium or bar but rather a narrow turn-of-the-century row-house on a residential block. As the front door opened and closed, bass kick tumbled down the steps to meet the people going inside. I followed them in. A guy with a man-bun, thirty-something, directed me to the basement door and the gaining surge, not before asking for five dollars – presumably an admission fee – and slashing an X on my hand with a felt-tip marker.

  Taking the steps down into the basement was like descending into a different era. The era wasn’t entirely clear. The basement was dungeon dank, the walls jagged stone and almost medieval. Everyone was dressed like the 1990s: the girls wore floral chokers and dark eyeliner, the guys had plaid shirts tied around their waists. Everyone was in their thirties. They were nodding asynchronously to a drum-machine beat and electric guitar riffs produced by a screamo duo kneeling around an amp the far corner. The performers and most everyone else were smoking cigarettes, and very purposefully at that. A thick, bluish miasma permeated the basement space.

  My friend came by to say hello and offered me a cigarette. I lied and said I was trying to quit. Mercifully, the screamo duo finished their set, and my friend went over to the stage to set up.

  Over the twangs and scrapes of audio feedback, I let my gaze meander through the blue-grey haze, trying to look as purposeful as all the people with cigarettes. I wasn’t the only non-smoker. Against the far wall on the left leaned a woman in a sundress sans cigarette. She wasn’t wearing a choker either. She was standing in between female friends, each of whom weren't non-smoking, and were yelling conversationally back and forth across her, gesticulating with their cancer sticks. She had dark skin and a tight chignon. Her eyes were a deep brown but sparkled with a faint optimism even in the dank and smog. Her smile, as prim and dignified as her figure, seemed to strain against the palpable despair as my friend’s band of thirty-somethings started into their workmanlike punk rock. Her bust, meanwhile, strained against her blouse.

  She noticed me noticing. Upon seeing those buoyant brown eyes trying to find something salvageable in my fairly shameless male gazing, I deigned to look at the band. I narrowed my eyes and started pecking forth my head and face to the beat like “yeah, in no way is this depressing.” In front of me, all the thirty-something white people were doing variations of the foot-shifting dance that white people do at rock shows.

  As I pecked to the punk rock, I became vaguely aware in peripheral vision that there was a rupture moving through the smoky murk. I turned to my left to see the woman with the chignon pulling up beside me like she knew me.

  “So,” she said. Her voice was barely a whisper, but I could make it out over the three-chord cacophony, soft and measured, loud and clear.

  “So?”

  “You’re really feeling the groove, huh?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I stammered.

  “Darn,” she said. “I thought we had more in common.”

  “We have something in common?”

  “We do,” she said, looking at the band pensively. “We’re the only people in here not smoking.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Can’t you just feel yourself dying?”

  I looked at the guy foot-shifting arhythmically in front of me. He was probably thirty-five, with glasses, and the hair he had left was dyed purple. I looked back at the woman with the chignon. Her lips were pursed, eyes pinwheeling with mirth. She saw it too.

  “I’d nod vigorously,” I said, “but I’m afraid I’d look like I liked this music.”

  She let out a peal of laughter. She proffered her hand and I took it.

  “Janice,” she said.

  “Demetrius,” said I.

  She kept my hand in hers and pulled me towards the stairs. “Come on,” she said. “It’s way too smoky down here.”

  The guy with the man-bun gave us a brief nod goodnight. The midnight air had a cool, fresh sop in it, and as we started up the street, I said so.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “But it really juxtaposes with the smoke on our clothes. Can’t you smell that?”

   “I can,” I said. “It’s gag-inducing.”

  “Not as gag-inducing as all those people in their thirties acting like seventh graders. I wonder how many of them are actually addicted? That’s the only excuse for that kind of ignominy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Totally ignominious otherwise. Where are we going, by the way.”

   “Oh, my house is just up the block,” she said. She had yet to relinquish my hand.

   Her place was on the ground floor of a split-level on the other side of the street. In the door way she pulled me close, kissed around my collar, wrinkled her nose.

  “Ugh,” she said. “Fucking smoke. These clothes are saturated in it. If you’re going to come in, they've got to come off.”

   I fumbled with the bottom button of my shirt, as she had already started at the top. Our hands met in the middle and she pulled my shirt off, throwing it into the kitchen where it slid along the shiny parquet floor. She followed in its path, peeling her sundress up and off of her body as she went. Her dark skin gleamed with muscled contour. That rich brown was interrupted only by a white bra and a matching tanga, pulled up taut. The smooth play of the lithe tendons in her calves and thighs gave me pause.   

   “You just won’t stop staring, will you?”

  In profile, her pert, nut-brown nipples peeked over the top of her white sports bra. I edged toward her and touched the smooth skin over her hips, sliding my palms upward until I reached those breasts, my hand sinking into them. I bunched up the sports bra, loosing those fleshy embonpoints. My hands searched them, and then I followed suit with my mouth. Her breast-flesh was faintly sweet, as if washed in honeyed bathwater. I inhaled her nipples, circumnavigated the aureoles over and over again until she pulled me downward.

  She laid me down with my back to the lacquered parquet and then, still on her knees, straddled my face. My field of vision was blotted blissfully by pristine white cotton. She let her tanga-clad sex hover over my face while my tongue sprang madly upward, seeking a taste of the heat beneath it. At long last, she lowered it down. Smothered in her hot aroma, my tongue grappled with her underwear, salivating madly against it. Finally, she slid a finger down under the tanga and into herself. She snaked that hand through the tanga and into my mouth. At last, she pushed that strip of cotton aside. I could taste her pussy now, that labia like honey, too. She shifted all her weight back, pressing her sex harder against my face. Then I felt my cock being loosed from my khakis and the heat of her mouth lowering towards my glans. Eventually, I was able to parse just what sort of a gymnastic feat she was pulling off. She’d twisted all the way back. All at once I was out of body, floating atop it, seeing her seated on my face but cranked back, sinuous hips twisted and her torso corkscrewed to return the pleasure vigorously. The image brought me to the brink. I had to fight the vision from my mind, I had to fight her off my face, pushing against her thighs, motor-boating maniacally into her to get her off. She tittered, and then we disentangled.

  “Stand up,” she was saying.

  I did as she said, but she didn’t follow suit. Instead, she stayed on her back and, keeping her eyes locked on mine, threw her coltish legs up and pedalled her feet in the air, opening up more and more with every kick. I stared at a proud, pillared midsection, and at its peak were two round brown glutes, grooved in-between with a gleaming, salmon-pink slit.

  “Fuck me like this,” she said.

 I lumbered down and forward into a squat and guided my member to the flayed pink portal beneath the pubic stubble. Slicked with her saliva, my cock slid effortlessly into her snugness. She brayed gracefully. As if initiating some sublime workout routine, I started into a steady program of squats. Her breasts bounded hyperactively, a brown blur beating back against her clavicle. I accelerated my pace, setting my calves and thighs aflame, watching her elegant black labia froth with sweet secretions. She hollered with approval. Legs numb, I halted my down-bursts, burying the length of my cock in her, holding it there, withdrawing.

  I extended an arm and helped Janice to her feet. She shook the lingering amatory cobwebs from her head.

   “Now I want to fuck you like this,” I said.

  I backed her up towards the kitchen wall. Once there, I slipped my cock up into her again, steadying my hands on her breasts. I squeezed her energetic little tits as my hips and dick picked up speed in and out of her. I let the nipples peek out between the curl of my thumb and forefinger. She let her hands climb up the wall behind her. She unspooled her chignon, letting a careless spill of jet black hair play over her naked shoulders. She kept her eyes stapled shut, murmuring to herself with each ingress from my erection. That lean little smile never left her lips, at least not until it gave way to another rapturous rasp as she came. As our thighs clapped together, I could feel her erogenous condensation against my skin, hot little rivulets running off her leg onto my knee. The sensation was too much. I delved deeper into her, eyes clamped on her tits that I could not hold still, the nut-brown flesh pressing out between my splayed fingers. Nothing could take my eyes off them, or so I thought. Panting out her orgasm, she opened her eyes. I tilted my head up to those bottomless brown eyes, the lids still fluttering from her apogee. That familiar spasm at the base of my balls took hold, and propelled my seed deep into her. My forehead collapsed into her chest. I warbled the rest of my rapture into the space between her breasts. She wrapped her arms around my head and held me close.
   We caught our breath and then pried our bodies apart, sticky with sweat and lover's sap. Janice strode over to the cupboard and opened the drawer. Perspiration dripping from my forehead, mouth helplessly agape, I watched absently as she rooted around for something. Finally, she found what she was looking for and took it out of the drawer: an unopened pack of Marlboros.
   With her nails, she picked at the packaging, and then tore off the plastic.

   I blinked rapidly, sweat in my eyes. “I thought you didn’t smoke.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, sticking the cigarette between her lips and flicking her lighter on. “Only when I’ve earned it.”

  She lit the cigarette, inhaled, and then opened her lips in a O, sending out ringlets of smoke. I watched as those rings of smoke slackened, wavered, and merged together in a haze.

  “And what about me?” I finally asked.

  She tossed the pack towards me and I caught it. “Go ahead,” she said. “Kill yourself.”