everybody dance

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁.

.✦ ݁˖ idk maybe he would have snuck into the back of the theatrical release of this movie with his kids in tandem, ready to see Peter and Wendy fight off pirates and fly with the help of pixie dust.

.✦ ݁˖ he would have also probably learned the score on the piano and loved it dearly for how whimsical it was

.✦ ݁˖ i think he would have left the cinema feeling like he'd also been dusted with tink's pixie dust, and the movie would have made him feel so good that he could fly too.

You walked through the hallways, that were startlingly still.

The air itself seemed to hold its breath, a thick, dusty silence that swallowed the sound of your own footsteps on the worn parquet. Your flashlight beam cut a wavering path through the gloom, illuminating motes of dust that danced like agitated spirits. The dictaphone in your other hand felt both absurd and necessary, a tiny, plastic tether to the rational world you’d left beyond the iron gates.

“Log entry… seven,” you whispered, your voice hushed not just for recording but out of a deep, instinctive reverence. The house demanded quiet. “Time, approximately 10:47 PM. I’ve entered the main hall of the property known colloquially as the abandoned L’Estaque Manor. Initial impressions… the decay is theatrical. 

Deliberate. 

It feels less like neglect and more like a stage set waiting for its principal actor.”

You panned the light upwards. A grand staircase swept into darkness, its banister adorned with intricate, cobwebbed carvings. The wallpaper, once a rich burgundy damask, peeled in long, languid strips, revealing the skeletal lath beneath. It was cold, a damp chill that seeped through your jacket and settled in your bones. Yet, there was no malevolence in it. Not yet. It was the cold of emptiness, of a vast space long devoid of warmth.

“No standard paranormal signatures yet,” you continued, moving slowly toward a pair of towering oak doors. “No EMF spikes, no temperature fluctuations beyond the ambient chill. But the atmosphere… it’s heavy. It isn’t threat, maybe expectation?.”

You pushed open the doors to what must have been a music room. A sheet-draped grand piano dominated the space, a hulking white ghost in the center. Tarnished candelabras sat on the mantle. 

Your light glinted off the glass of a large, gold-framed portrait above the fireplace, but the face within was too shadowed to make out. You stepped inside, your boots whispering on the Persian rug, its patterns faded into vague, blood-like smudges.

“This room,” you murmured into the recorder. “There’s a… resonance here. Auditory? Maybe. A memory of sound. If I listen…”

You stopped. You closed your eyes, letting the silence press in. And then, beneath the sound of your own nervous system, you heard it. 

Or felt it. It wasn’t quite a melody, but the echo of one. The faint, phantom vibration of a piano chord—a minor, unresolved, hanging in the air like a question. Your eyes snapped open. The sheet over the piano was perfectly still. No dust had been disturbed.

“Did you hear that?” you asked the empty room, the dictaphone catching your quickened breath. “A chord. C minor, perhaps moving to… no. It’s gone.”

But it wasn’t. 

As you moved back into the hall, it followed you. It wasn’t only just a sound, but a presence. The back of your neck prickled. The air, once uniformly cold, now seemed to stir with a faint, impossible current. 

You entered a long gallery, portraits lining the walls, their subjects’ eyes seeming to track your progress from faces blurred by time and shadow.

Then you felt it. A breath. Not on your neck, but inside your ear. A cool, gentle exhalation that carried with it the faintest sound—a wordless, melancholic fragment of tune, the same one that had haunted the piano chord. It was intimate, paralyzing. You froze, your blood turning to ice water.

“Who’s there?” you breathed, not daring to turn. The dictaphone, still recording, captured the tremor in your voice.

There was no answer. Only the returning, absolute silence, now feeling like a held secret. 

You forced your legs to move, driven by a compulsion that was equal parts terror and desperate curiosity. 

The master bedroom was your goal. In these old houses, it was often the epicenter of residual energy.

You found the door ajar. Pushing it open, you were met with a spectacle that stole what little breath you had left.

The room was vast, dominated by a canopy bed whose curtains hung in tattered shreds. But it was the far wall that commanded attention. 

The enormous windows were naked, their curtains ripped away or decayed. 

They were thrown wide open to the night, and the wind poured through in a silent, powerful river. 

The moon, nearly full, cast a slab of pewter light across the floorboards, illuminating the dust swirling in the turbulent air. The curtains that remained on the sides billowed and snapped like the sails of a ghost ship, soundless in the vacuum of the room. 

The night itself seemed to be invading, a cool, black ink flooding into the tomb of the house.

You stepped into the lunar wash, drawn to the windows, to the view of the overgrown gardens and the skeletal trees. The wind played with your hair, kissed your feverish skin. This was it. The heart of the strange stillness. You raised your dictaphone.

“The master bedroom. The windows are open. There’s a… a violent peace here. The wind, but no sound. The moon, is so creepy. I feel…”

You felt watched.

The sensation was so intense it was a physical weight between your shoulder blades. You slowly, so slowly, turned from the mesmerizing night.

He stood in the doorway.

You hadn’t heard a thing; footfall or rustle of cloth. He was simply there, having coalesced from the very shadows of the hall. Your mind, trained to document and analyze, short-circuited, overwhelmed by sheer aesthetic shock.

He was beautiful. It wasn’t in a modern way, but like a painting by a Romantic master who believed in the tragic allure of the sublime. Tall and imperially slender, he was dressed in an anachronism of elegant decay: a white poet’s shirt of fine linen, its ruffles at the chest and cuffs pristine, the top buttons carelessly open to reveal a expanse of pale, smooth skin that gleamed like marble in the low light. 

It was tucked into tailored black trousers that emphasized his long legs, and over it all, a sweeping black velvet cloak rested on his shoulders, not quite touching the floor. His hair was a cascade of raven-black waves, stirred by a wind that didn’t touch you, framing a face of heartbreaking symmetry—high cheekbones, a strong jaw, lips that seemed carved from something both soft and cruel. 

His eyes were the most alive thing about him, a burning, intelligent dark brown, with a glimmer of mischief in them.

And he was opaque, but only just. You could see, faintly, the outline of the doorframe behind him, the subtle suggestion of moonlight passing through the solidity of his wrist where he held the doorjamb. A ghost. A spectacular, gorgeous ghost.

Your legs gave out. The dictaphone clattered to the floor, but you didn’t hear it. The world tunneled into those dark benevolent eyes, and then into black velvet nothingness.

Consciousness returned without a jolt, but as a slow, cold seep. You were on the floor, but not on the hard wood. 

You were cradled in an impossible chill, a sensation like being held by a statue carved from winter moonlight. Your head rested against the crisp linen of his ruffled shirt, and through the thin fabric, you registered a profound, deep cold, the utter absence of living heat.

“Open your eyes.” The voice was a melody all its own, low, cultured, vibrating with an old-world accent and a current of simmering anger. “I did not grant you the courtesy of my solitude only for you to escape into unconsciousness.”

Your eyelids fluttered open. His face was above yours, inches away. Up close, his beauty was even more devastating, and more unnerving. His skin had a faint, pearlescent sheen, and the cool air around him smelled of old books, dried lavender, and something metallic, like distant ozone.

“You…” you croaked.

“I,” he agreed, his tone icy. With a grace that was both effortless and unsettling, he shifted you, helping you to sit up. His hands on your shoulders were like brands of ice, a shock that cleared the last cobwebs from your mind. He didn’t release you. He knelt before you, his stormy eyes pinning you in place. 

“Now. You will explain. Why do you trespass in my home? Why do you shuffle through my halls with your little machine, speaking to the silence as if it owes you answers?”

He was furious. It was not the rage of a monster, but a deep, personal offense of a scholar whose library has been invaded and ripped up by a vandal.

“I… I’m a paranormal investigator,” you stammered, your professional pride flickering weakly. 

“This house… it’s famous. I thought it was empty.”

“Thought it was empty?” He released you as if burned, rising to his full height in a fluid motion. The white ruffled shirt he wore, flapped in the wind.

“You thought. Or you assumed? And on that assumption, you violate my peace? For twenty years I have curated this silence. Twenty years of moonlit rooms and echoing chords, and you believe you can simply… walk in?” He turned his back to you, a gesture of supreme disdain, looking out at his billowing curtains.

“Your world is so loud. So bright. It forgets what lurks beyond it. It bulldozes. And now it sends its curious little children to poke at what it has forgotten.”

You scrambled to your feet, your legs still unsteady. The dictaphone lay at your feet, its red recording light a tiny, accusing eye. “I meant no disrespect. I’m just… trying to understand.”

He turned his head, his profile a sharp cut against the moonlit window. “Understanding is not yours to take. It is mine to bestow. And I am not inclined to be generous.” He faced you fully again, his anger seeming to settle into a colder, more calculating resolve. 

“However. You are here. You have seen me. That… complicates things.”

A new kind of chill, one of primal fear, trickled down your spine. “What are you going to do to me?”

A ghost of a smile, bitter and beautiful, touched his lips. “The traditional tropes? Frighten you to death? Haunt your dreams? How pedestrian.” He drifted closer, his movement so smooth on the rotten floorboards. The cold around him intensified. 

“I am a man of intellect. Of passion. Trapped. For two decades, I have been a curator of memories, a prisoner of sensation I can only recall. The taste of wine. The warmth of a fire.” His eyes raked over you, not with lust, but with a desperate, hungry curiosity. 

“The touch of a living hand.”

He stopped an arm’s length away. You were captivated, utterly. The fear was still there, deep in your veins, but it was subsumed by a terrifying fascination. He was a masterpiece of sorrow and anger.

“I will let you go,” he said, his voice dropping to a intimate murmur that seemed to reverberate in your very bones. 

“I will unlock the doors and watch you flee back to your noisy, bright world, and I will return to my melodic silence. But you will have given me something in return. A… experiment.”

“An experiment?” you whispered.

“A confirmation,” he corrected, his gaze holding yours. 

“A sensory recollection,” he added, with a whimsical tone.

“I have wondered, in my long solitude, if the memory of pleasure is a lie the mind tells the soul. If the mechanics of passion are lost to a form such as mine.” He lifted a hand, and his fingers, pale and slightly translucent, hovered just beside your cheek. 

You felt the chill, a thrilling ache. 

“I wish to know if, after twenty years, I can still… feel. In the most primal sense. I wish to know if I can still make a living woman sigh, and in doing so, remember what it was to be a mere mortal man.”

The meaning crashed over you, not in a wave of horror, but in a surge of electric, reckless understanding. He wasn’t asking for your life. He was asking for your body. As a test. As a sacrament. Your mouth was dry. Your heart hammered against your ribs. You should run. You should scream.

You looked into his eyes, saw the centuries of loneliness, the artistic fury, the haunting, fragile hope. 

You saw the pale column of his throat above the open ruffles, the elegant line of his shoulders under the worn white shirt. His hair fell shoulder length, and was beautiful - an almost blue hue shone off of it in the moonlight. 

He was the most beautiful, terrible thing you had ever seen.

“Yes,” you heard yourself say, the word leaving your lips on a cloud of breath in the cold air.

His eyes widened, a flicker of surprise, then a dark, triumphant fire. “Yes?”

“Yes.”

The word hung between you, a pact sealed. The anger in him seemed to transmute, melting into a fierce, focused intensity. 

He closed the distance. Where his body met yours, there was no solid impact, but a gradual, chilling immersion, as if you were stepping into the shadow of a glacier. 

His hands came up to frame your face, and the cold was piercing, exquisite. He leaned in, and his lips met yours.

They were soft, and colder than anything you could imagine, but not inert. They moved with a practiced, desperate skill, and a strange thing began to happen. 

As the kiss deepened, a sensation bloomed within the cold—a memory of warmth, a phantom heat that seemed to generate from the very friction of your living spirit against his spectral one. 

A low, shuddering sigh escaped him, a sound that was half moan, half sob, and it vibrated into your mouth.

The dictaphone was forgotten. The investigation was forgotten. There was only the Maestro and his experiment.

He pushed you backwards, his mouth never leaving yours, until suddenly he was gone. All that was left was a whisper of the feeling of him on your lips. You brought your fingers up to your lips immediately, missing the touch there. 

All of a sudden he appeared behind you, as if by magic and grabbed your other hand and pulled you onto the bed. 

With unseen force, the tattered remnants of the bed curtains fell away completely. He laid you down on the cold, silken coverlet, following you down, his form settling over yours with a weight that was more pressure than mass. His cloak enveloped you both, a dark tent against the moonlit room.

“Tell me you can feel that,” he murmured against your throat, his lips trailing icy fire down your pulse point. His fingers, deft and chilling, worked at the buttons of your jacket, then your shirt. “Tell me I am not just a dream touching you.”

“I feel it,” you gasped, arching into the shocking cold of his hands on your bare skin. It was a paradoxical feeling—the cold was so intense it burned, and within that burn, pleasure sparked, sharp and shocking. 

“You’re real.”

You nearly yelped at the force in which he pulled off your jeans.

He made a sound, a raw, hungry thing, and his own clothing seemed to dissolve into mist and shadow at his will; revealing the pale, sculpted plane of his chest, the elegant taper of his waist. He was slender, graceful, beautifully made, and glowing with that faint inner luminescence. 

His skin, when it met yours fully, was a shock—a deep, penetrating cold that made every nerve ending sing a desperate, alert song.

He explored you, focused, like a connoisseur rediscovering a lost art. His mouth, a brand of ice, traced the lines of your collarbones, the curve of your breast, his tongue swirling in a pattern that left behind a trail of goosebumps and fire. 

Your voice gave out, the sound swallowed by the billowing curtains and the silent night. Your hands clutched at his back, feeling the powerful muscles shift under skin that was smooth and cold as polished alabaster. 

You could fully feel him now, the reality of his form, even as your fingers sometimes seemed to sink into him a fraction too deeply, meeting a core of thrilling, empty cold.

“I crave the warmth between those legs,” he breathed, his voice ragged with wonder. He was between your legs now, his storm-cloud eyes holding yours, his dark hair cascading around his face, stirred by his own spectral energy. 

“You are... A delicious, living thing. Something I have not been close to as of late. Let me… let me remember this.”

He prepared himself by using his index finger to rub the precum on his cock, and then entered you in one slow, relentless glide.

The sensation was beyond anything you could have conceived. It wasnt the friction of flesh, but something stranger, more profound. It was a bone chilling cold, a possession that reached into the very marrow of your bones and clawed up to your heart from below.

It was like being touched from the inside out by a icy winter river, shocking and pure and terrifyingly intimate. 

Another choked and wordless sound of shock and overwhelming pleasure came from you; your back bowing off the bed, crazily, as if you were possessed. Maybe you were.

He stilled, his face a mask of agonized ecstasy. “Ah… it is… better than I remember….the memory is true. It is… worth the waiting.” 

He began to move, and each movement was a study in contradiction—the solid, rhythmic pressure of him, coupled with the eerie, chilling diffusion of his essence spreading through you. 

The feel of him became a drug, a stimulant. It sharpened every sensation, made every nerve raw, every pleasure point on the edge of falling apart.

You felt everything with a hyper-clarity: the silken slide of the coverlet beneath you, the rush of the moonlit wind over your heated skin, the exact, perfect angle of his hips as he drove into you, seeking his own forgotten culmination. His rhythm was diabolically good, you did not know that these feelings could overcome your body.

He was not silent within this endeavour. He whispered in a mix of broken words and song, fragments of poetry, curses, prayers. You couldn’t tell what was which - your brain unable to concentrate for the unbelievable pleasure coursing through your veins.

“Warm — you are so extraordinarily warm — I had forgotten — god, the scent of your skin alone is enough to have me—" He stopped. The sentence didn't finish. For the first time since you had met him, the Maestro had run out of words.

His hands were everywhere, icy points of contact that ignited wildfires under your skin. The juxtaposition of this feeling in your brain was hard to comprehend. 

One hand tangled in your hair, tilting your head back to expose your throat to his marauding, freezing kisses. 

The other gripped your hip, his fingers pressing in with a desperate strength that should have bruised, but only left a thrilling ache. You were unraveling, your own moans and pleas becoming a constant, ragged soundtrack to the act unfolding in this old gothic home. 

The pleasure built not in a warm wave, but in a cryptic crescendo, a pinnacle of sensation so sharp and cold and brilliant it felt like nothing you’d experienced before..

“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice guttural, his form seeming to flicker with a stronger inner light. “Look at me when you fall from the precipice.”

You forced your eyes open, meeting his. They were no longer just stormy, but lit from within by lightning, wide with a shock of feeling so long denied. 

The sight of his beautiful, haunted face, hovering over you in the throes of a passion both otherworldly and devastatingly real, was the final trigger. 

The world dissolved into a ridiculous gothic black and white film. You felt like you’d fallen through the bed and into a whole other dimension - your body experiencing such extreme sensation it had never felt before. 

Your climax was not a release of heat, but a vacuum of sensation, a pulling inward of all the cold and the pleasure into a single, singular point of absolute zero ecstasy. You convulsed around him, a wordless scream trapped in your throat.

It triggered his own orgasm. He threw his head back, the veins of his pale neck standing out in stark relief.

His climax was silent, a seismic event contained within the shimmering outline of his form. He grunted mercilessly at first.

A visible shudder wracked through him, a wave of distortion that made the moonlight behind him bend and warp. 

His head still thrown back, his mouth opened in a soundless cry of pure, unadulterated release, and for a moment, he became almost fully transparent, a mere sketch of a man lost in feeling.

Then he solidified again, collapsing forward, his weightless form half-covering you, his face buried in the tattered pillow beside your head.

You both lay there, entangled in the wreckage of pure sensation.

You could feel the echo of him inside you, a fading, delicious chill. His skin, where it touched yours, was no longer just cold; it was thrumming with a low, resonant vibration, like a plucked cello string.

He was the first to stir. He pushed himself up on his elbows, looking down at you. The storm in his eyes had calmed to a dazed wonder. He looked… younger. The lines of ancient despair had softened.

“The hypothesis,” he whispered, his voice scraped raw, “was correct. I’m still able to make a woman come undone.”

A breathless, hysterical laugh bubbled in your chest. “Glad I could be of service… for your research.”

The ghost of a real smile, less bitter now, touched his lips. He traced one icy finger from your sternum down to your navel, making you shiver. 

“Service implies a transaction completed. I find myself slightly… unsatisfied. The experiment had a singular parameter. Intercourse. It was a blunt instrument.” 

His gaze drifted lower, down the trembling plane of your stomach. “I wish to get closer.”

The air, still crackling with the aftermath, grew thick with a new, focused tension. “Closer?” You asked.

“I want to taste you,” he murmured, his voice dropping to that intimate, bone-resonating register. “I felt your heat before. A glorious, enveloping feeling. But I was a clumsy guest, storming the gates.” He began to move, sliding down your body with a serpentine grace that left a trail of gooseflesh. 

The silken coverlet whispered beneath you. “I wish to map the source. To taste the joys of your pleasure. To see if I can elicit the same symphony with my tongue as I did with… other means.”

He settled between your thighs, at the edge of the bed, his broad shoulders pushing your legs further apart. The moon cast him in stark relief—the fall of his dark hair, the elegant line of his back, the pale curve of his buttocks. 

“I wish to break you open, in your pleasure. Make you question everything you have ever known about your sensory receptors in your body. It needs to be precise”

He was kneeling on the floor, and as he did, you saw his hand move. He took himself in hand, his length already stirring again, impossibly, from the aftermath. 

It was graceful like the rest of him, and he gave himself a slow, thoughtful stroke, his eyes fixed on the apex of your thighs with the concentration of an artist contemplating a fresh canvas.

“You are watching me?” he said, without looking up. His thumb swept over the head of his cock, a slow, circular motion. 

He sniggered at your lack of response. 

“Good, I suppose. This is part of the process. The anticipation. The visual study.” He stroked himself again, a long, languid pull, his breath hitching with a soft, frosty sigh. 

“I am reminded that women of this day like to watch solo performances…. However, you’ll be so overcome you won’t even remember I am touching myself too.”

The sight was mesmerizingly obscene. This beautiful, beyond the living man, kneeling in worship between your legs, casually pleasuring himself as he prepared to devour you. It shattered any last pretense of a normal encounter. This was a ritual. Unlike any intimate moment you had shared with a partner before - it was as if they never even existed outwith this moment.

He leaned forward then, and his breath washed over you first—a cold, damp gust that made you jolt and gasp. He didn’t touch you with his mouth yet. He nuzzled, his cheek and the bridge of his nose sliding through your curls, inhaling deeply.

“Extraordinary,” he breathed, the words a vibration against your wet cunt. 

“The scent… alive. Musk, salt, sunlight trapped in flesh. I have missed this more than wine, more than music.” He finally looked up, his black thunder-cloud eyes glinting in the dark. 

“Tell me to stop if you are frightened?”

You couldn’t. Your voice was gone, stolen by the spectacle of him. You could only manage a frantic shake of your head.

A dark, pleased hum escaped him. “Then we continue.”

His tongue was not like a living man’s. It was cooler, smoother, and yet impossibly deft. He didn’t attack; he was calm and slow when he devoured you. 

A long, slow, flattened stroke from bottom to top of your centre, soaking in the feel and taste of you. You cried out, your hands flying to your mouth to cover the obscene sounds coming from you.

“Such a pretty and shy girl,” he murmured against you, the words almost indistinct, felt more than heard. 

“Let me hear you,”

He continued to just marvel at your sex; you looked down at him, bewildered that this could even be really happening.

“The texture… the give… the heat is not a wall, it is a tide. And it welcomes me.”

He began to work in earnest, and it was clear he was, as he said, a maestro. His tongue was a precision instrument, tracing lazy circles around your clit before focusing on it with a pinpoint, icy pressure that made you see what felt like the expansion of the universe. 

He alternated—broad, lapping strokes that cooled your entire core, then sharp, flickering assaults on that one hypersensitive node. His pace was deliberate, experimental, listening to every hitch of your breath, every twitch of your thighs.

And all the while, his right hand moved on himself. You could hear the soft, slick sound of it, a counter-rhythm to the wet, hungry sounds his mouth was making. He stroked himself in time with the flicks of his tongue, a slow, consistent pumping motion, his own pleasure feeding back into the attention he lavished on you. 

It was a feedback loop of sensation, a closed circuit where his cold arousal and your burning need amplified each other.

“You taste of the world,” he groaned, lifting his head for a moment. His lips glistened. His eyes were heavy-lidded, his face flushed with a phantom of color. His hand never stopped moving on his cock. 

“You taste of summer grass and night rain and… and life. It is an addiction.” He dove back in, his hunger less controlled now, more ravenous. He added his fingers, one, then two, sliding into you with that same shocking, perfect cold, curling upwards as his tongue lashed at your clit.

You felt obsencely overestimulated, the deep, filling chill of his fingers, the maddening, icy pinpoint of his tongue, and the visual, audible proof of his own mounting pleasure as he stroked himself faster, his breath coming in short, frosty pants against your skin. 

You were babbling, pleading, pulling his hair, your hips rolling uncontrollably against his face. 

The cold was no longer just a sensation; it was the fuel, the catalyst that made every nerve scream twice as loud.

“Is this the way?” he asked, his voice muffled, desperate for confirmation. “Tell me, my living beauty… does this path lead to the same peak?”

“Yes—God—yes, please, don’t stop doing whatever you’re doing, please—” you sobbed. “I am so close”

He redoubled his efforts. His tongue became a blur of cold, relentless motion. His fingers pumped, crooking just so, and his thumb pressed hard, circling your clit. His other hand was a piston on his own length, the rhythm frantic now, the soft slapping sounds filling the air. He was chasing it, chasing your climax with desperation; starving for proof of his own existence.

The build was different this time. Not a shatter or a falling apart that you’d have been used to, but a slow, inexorable melt. The cold he was pumping into you seemed to meet the core of your heat and create a thermal reaction, a swirling vortex of sensation that pulled everything you were into its center. 

Your muscles locked. Your breath stopped. The world narrowed to the freezing, brilliant point between your legs and the sight of his beautiful, obsessed face buried there, pleasuring himself as he drove you mad.

It broke silently, a vast, wave-like submersion. Your climax washed over you profoundly, a drowning release, a slow-motion unfurling of every tense wire in your body. 

You pulsed around his fingers, a long, shuddering series of contractions, a silent scream locked in your throat.

He felt it. He let out a choked, triumphant cry against you and his own rhythm stuttered, then broke. His back arched, a perfect, taut bow, and he spilled over his own fist with a ragged, gasping groan, his release pearlescent and faintly glowing in the moonlight, striping his own pale stomach and the dark coverlet beneath him. 

He trembled violently through it, his mouth still pressed against you, drinking in the final aftershocks of your pleasure as his own wracked him.

Slowly, he pulled away. He looked wrecked, glorious. His hair was wild, his lips swollen and slick. His eyes, when they met yours, held a look of stunned, satiated reverence. 

He looked down at the evidence of his own pleasure on his hand and stomach, then back at you, as if he couldn't quite believe either.

"The data," he whispered, his voice utterly spent. "Is... overwhelming. The hypothesis is not only confirmed... it is expanded upon. The variables are infinite."

He moved then, fluid and weary, coming to lie beside you. He didn't pull you into the full, chilling embrace of before, but he slid an arm beneath your neck, his body a line of cool pressure against your side. He was still stroking your hair with his other hand, his touch now almost gentle.

"You have," he said to the canopy above, "given a ghost a memory that does not hurt to hold. That is a rare gift, little trespasser."

You turned your head on his arm. The dictaphone was still on the floor, its red light a steady, distant pulse. The investigation was over. Something else had begun.

"What now?" you asked, your voice hoarse.

He was silent for a moment, watching the curtains dance with the night. "Now," he said finally, a new, contemplative note in his voice, "we discuss the parameters of further... experimentation. And you tell me your name. One should know the name of a beautiful, living creation, should one not?"

fin

The air in his Encino bedroom was thick with the scent of orange blossoms from the garden, trapped by the drawn velvet curtains. 

It was past midnight, a rare pocket of stillness in Michael’s cacophonous life. It was almost pitch black in the room, except from one of his old multicolour light up disco toys shining on the opposite side of the bedroom.

The house, a sprawling monument to success, slept around him. Only the faint, persistent squeak of the pool filter from outside breached the silence.

He lay on his back atop the oversized bed, its pale sky blue comforter cool against his skin. 

He wore silk pajamas, a gift from Latoya when he had turned 19.  

His mind, a relentless projector, had been replaying the day’s studio session—the synth beat on “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” the way his own voice had soared on the playback, a sound of pure, unleashed joy that felt separate from the boy laying in bed.

That feeling, that electric surge up his spine when the music finally clicked and finally made sense, it was still there, buzzing under his skin like a trapped bug.

But now, alone, the energy had nowhere to go. It pooled low in his stomach, a warm, restless ache. He shifted, and the friction of the silk against his thigh sent a small, shocking jolt through him. He went very still.

It’s just tiredness, he thought, the words forming in the cadence of his mother’s voice. You need to pray and go to sleep.

He tried. 

He folded his hands over his chest, staring at the ceiling above. 

“Oh Jehovah, thank you for this day. Please help me to be a better person tomorrow and watch over my family. I ask this in Jesus' name, amen.” he whispered, quietly.

But the warmth didn’t subside. It pulsed, softly, insistently, in time with his heartbeat. 

He groaned and rubbed his hands over his face, exacerbated.

A memory, unbidden, flashed: a dancer from the last tour with his brothers, a girl with a laugh like wind chimes, the way her sequinned hip had brushed against his as they passed in a crowded hallway. 

The memory was hazy, but the phantom sensation was sharp, a brand on his side.

A small, frustrated sound escaped his lips—a quiet “Mmh!” 

He turned onto his stomach, burying his face in the pillow. The new position pressed him into the mattress, and the ache intensified, transformed from a whisper to a clear, demanding shout. 

His breath hitched. This was the feeling. The one the elders warned about. The “sin that dwells within.” He was supposed to flee from it.

But his body felt heavy, magnetized to the bed. He gave a tentative, almost imperceptible roll of his hips. The pressure was a lightning strike of sensation, so intense it blurred his vision for a second. A gasp was torn from him, sharp and ragged in the quiet room. “Ah—!”

Guilt thundered in immediately, hot and sour. No. No, this is wrong. He was a good son. A Jehovah’s Witness. He sang about love, pure love. This was… this was base. Animal.

Yet, his hips moved again of their own volition, a slow, searching grind into the yielding satin of his pyjama pants. 

The friction was better this way, more complete. A low, shuddering moan vibrated in his throat, “Nnnggh…” He muffled it in the pillow, his fingers clawing at the fabric. He couldn’t let his brothers down the hall hear him, nor his parents.

The conflict was a physical pain in his chest, a vice tightening around his ribs. Every sinful surge of pleasure was answered by a psalm of condemnation in his head.

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit…

He rocked harder, his legs tightening. The silk of his pajama bottoms was a maddening barrier. 

The pleasure was building now, like a copper wire, pulling tighter and tighter in his core, a sensation so profound it felt like fear.

Like standing at the edge of the stage before the lights hit, that terrifying, exhilarating void.

…and the Spirit against the flesh…

With a sudden, frantic movement, he shoved a hand down, fumbling with the drawstring. 

His breath came in short, wet pants now, “Hah… hah…” The knot gave way. 

He pushed the fabric down just enough, the cool air a shock against his heated skin. The direct contact with the soft material of the comforter made him cry out, a short, sharp “Ungh!” that was too loud. 

He froze, listening for any sign of movement in the hall; a creak, a footstep. Nothing but the annoying pool filter and one of his light up gadgets in his room occasionally creaking from its twisting mechanism.

The pause broke the dam of his hesitation. The need was too urgent, too all-consuming. He surrendered to the rhythm, his hips developing a frantic, jerking cadence against the bed. He wasn’t thinking of the dancer anymore, or of anything concrete. 

The frantic, muffled humping against the satin comforter wasn't enough. The friction was diffuse, maddeningly indirect, building the pressure but refusing to focus it. A sob of pure frustration caught in his throat, a heavy, choked sound.

His left hand, still tangled in the pillowcase, released its clawing grip. It drifted down, trembling violently, as if moving through water against a powerful current. 

His mind was a shattered mirror: one fragment showed the earnest, wide-eyed boy on the Andy Williams Show, another the gangly, hormonal teenager he’d turned into – touch starved and relentless in his want.

His mind was trying to grapple with the young, innocent he used to be and now the sought after heartthrob he had become. Girls throwing themselves to be used at his feet. 

He loathed the thought of them thinking he’d merely have his way with them. He’d be gentle if he could, sensual, ensuring their beautiful bodies get the attention they so deserved – his hands ghosting over their perky breasts and their gorgeous curves. 

The thought of his hand sliding under a tight waistband, of sly little lace panties, soaked through; wanting him. Needing him.

The thoughts were driving him wild now; crazy with desire.

His fingers brushed his own heated skin. The touch was so electric, so alien and yet intimately familiar, that he convulsed, a full-body shudder wracking his frame. A high, thin whine escaped his pressed lips. 

This is the line, a voice, clear and cold, stated in his head. You cross this, you can't go back. He flipped his body over, now on his back.

His body was a runaway train, every nerve screaming for the destination. His fingers, slick with a nervous sweat, curled. The first tentative stroke, from root to tip, was a revelation so profound it bordered on terror. 

His back arched clear off the bed, a silent scream stretching his mouth wide. He was so concentrated and overstimulated, that his throat was dry – his lips cracked.

The sensation was nothing like the grinding. It was tactile, exquisite, a direct and fused line to the storm gathering in his belly. His hand was soft and warm – just like he’d imagined the inside of a woman he had taken to bed.

He began to move his hand, the motion clumsy at first, all jerking wrist and frantic pressure. It was too much, too intense. 

He slowed, experimenting. A softer, slower glide. A twist at the top. A thumb brushing over the slick, weeping crown. Each variation sent new shockwaves through him.

The sounds he made were no longer attempts at words or even moans. They were raw, phonetic expulsions of feeling, lost in the fortress of his pillow.

His right hand fisted in his own hair, pulling sharply at the roots of his afro, the sting a bright counterpoint to the drowning pleasure below. His hips stuttered, still pushing up into his own grip, a desperate, seeking rhythm. 

The sheet beneath him was soaked, a cool patch against the small of his back when it made contact. 

The world telescoped down to this: the slick, rhythmic sound of his hand, the hammering of his heart against his ribs, the sweat pooling in the hollow of his throat.

He thought of the recording booth, the absolute silence before he opened his mouth to sing. 

That moment of poised potential. This feeling was its dark twin; a silence filled with the roar of his own blood, a potential about to violently, messily become.

His pace became punishing, relentless. He was chasing it now, chasing the echo of that studio high, the feeling of being perfectly, utterly free. His breath came in ragged, hiccuping gasps. 

He’d wound himself to breaking point. Pleasure and terror were fused, indistinguishable. 

The religious imagery crashed over him not as condemnation, but as sensation: it was a falling, a drowning, a being consumed by a holy fire that felt anything but holy.

"I’m— I’m gonna—" The words were a pathetic, broken whisper, lost.

His whole body locked. For a second, he was suspended in a silent, breathless void. Then it detonated.

It wasn't a single wave, but a series of brutal, wracking pulses that tore through him like internal lightning. A guttural, punched-out cry was ripped from his very core, a raw, open-throated yelp that the pillow could not hope to contain. 

His vision whited out, speckled with violent colors, a kaleidoscope of pleasure. His hips jerked erratically, helplessly, as his hand kept working, milking every last, shuddering drop of sensation until it tipped over into a sharp, almost painful sensitivity.

He collapsed.

The stillness that followed was absolute, profound. The only sound was the ragged, torn-up sawing of his breath and the distant, indifferent hum of the filter. The warmth spread across his stomach, a sticky, shameful reality.

The guilt didn't wait. It descended instantly, a heavy, smothering blanket. 

The verses from Galatians completed themselves in his head with cruel clarity: "…so that ye cannot do the things that ye would."

Tears, hot and sudden, welled in his eyes. He didn't move. He lay there, a spent, trembling wreck on the stained, wet sheet, feeling the pleasure evaporate and leave behind the cold, hollow shell of transgression. He had reached for a moment of the divine and clutched only his own weakness.

Slowly, mechanically, he pulled up his silk pajamas. The fabric felt disgusting against his soiled skin. He rolled onto his side, curling into a tight ball, facing the grand, empty expanse of his bedroom. The afterglow was just a physiological ghost; the real residue was a deep, aching loneliness.

He would pray tomorrow. He would pray harder. He would throw himself into the music, into the work, until he was too tired to feel anything at all.

But for now, in the deep California night, Michael lay very still, the ghost of his own ecstasy a sharp, sour taste in his mouth, and the only rhythm left was the slow, beat of his own heart.

fin.

tag list;

The air conditioning died at twelve past two and took the lights with it.

You laid still for a moment in the sudden dark, waiting to see if it would come back. It did not come back. The room, which had been a manageable kind of hot with the unit running, began almost immediately to shift into something evil – the Georgia July pressing in through the walls and the windows and the blackout curtains like it had been waiting for exactly this opportunity, to smother you entirely.

Within ten minutes the sheet under you was warm. Within fifteen you had kicked it off entirely and were lying on top of the mattress in your shorts and your oldest t-shirt with the back of your neck against the pillow and the sweat already starting at your hairline.

You were not going to sleep anyway.

The rumination of your mistakes has begun as soon as you checked into the hotel the crew were crashing at for the night. Just re-running the show, the spots you missed, over and over. You were glad the talent – The Jackson brothers had not noticed anything different, but unfortunately, Greg, the Head of Sound and Lighting on tour did. 

You had been running this desk for four months without incident and then tonight of all nights you had missed three cues that could have been catastrophic in nature – leaving an instrument without sound would have messed up the brothers' musical cues. Greg wasn’t even mad at you, it was just the disappointment after he had to click his fingers in your face and wave at you expectantly to get your attention. It felt ridiculous that he even had to, but your brain was just a million miles away, recently. Home sick.

Marlon, whom you’d grown really close to out of the talent you worked with had become really busy on this leg of the tour – constant interviews, TV specials and charity performances outwith the tour. It felt like these days you saw him at sound check and stage strike, to get the mics back and that was it. You missed drunk Rummy games at the back of their touring bus and being silly, playing pranks. Skating out in the truck parking lot with Randy was a nice memory; it just all seemed so far away.

It had finally started to feel like a job, and you hated that. You couldn’t have a normal life, not the type you wanted. A partner, a steady income, and a nice house. For now, you’d have to just suck it up and be happy you were seeing the country.

You sniggered at yourself – thinking about how hard the boys in the band had it. Especially Michael, his privacy was never his own. None of them had that luxury. They had real reason to complain, their lives would never be the same after this.

You finally decided to get up.

The ice bucket was on the bathroom shelf. You found it by feel, pulled your hoodie on out of habit and let yourself out into the hall.

The corridor was completely dark. The emergency strips above the doors were out, which meant either the backup had not kicked in or this hotel's idea of emergency lighting was the faint orange bleed of the Atlanta streetscape coming through the window at the far end of the hall. 

You moved toward the ice machine with one hand on the wallpaper, which was slightly damp already from the humidity creeping into the building now that the climate control had gone.

The ice machine was off and the ice had already started to melt considerably. You stood there with your empty bucket contemplating your next move.

The exit sign at the far end of the corridor glowed red on its battery. You started walking toward it slowly, your bare feet making very little noise on the carpet. It was deathly quiet at this hour.

Below it, the stairwell door sat slightly ajar, and through the gap came the dry cool of a concrete space that the heat and sunlight had not reached yet, and you pushed through it without thinking too hard about whether it was a good idea. The door clearly was kept ajar for situations like these – you made sure to keep it like that so you could get back out to your room that you left open; totally unsure if the locking mechanism would work under the circumstances.

It was cooler by maybe five degrees. Enough for you to stop the rumination and the overreaction going on in your head.

The stairwell had one emergency light in a cage on the ceiling casting amber down the steps. You sat on the second last step from the bottom and pressed the back of your neck against the cinderblock wall and closed your eyes.

You heard the door above open, the sound echoing in the empty space you occupied.

Footsteps on the landing.

You opened your mouth and turned toward the door at the same second the draft from above caught it, and you watched it swing shut with the slow realisation that what was done, was already done and there would have been no way to reach the door in time from where you sat.

The latch clicked and the mechanism locked up.

The footsteps came around the turn of the stairs.

You looked up.

The figure had stopped on the second to last step.

The amber ceiling light fell across him — white t-shirt, dark sweatpants, curls loose at his collar, a small notebook in one hand. He was looking at you very curiously

"The door, it’s— ugh, it’s locked us in here" you said awkwardly, flailing your arms frustratedly.

"I heard it close. M’sorry."

You clambered to your feet and ran up the steps to meet him. You tried the handle. It gave nothing. You tried it again with your shoulder and it gave nothing; a heavy, impossible to open fire door. Great.

You let go of the handle and wiped the sweat forming on your forehead.

You turned around to face the culprit. Someone you rarely had the pleasure of interacting with.

He slumped down on the step and leaned his back against the wall. He carefully balanced his notebook on his knee and then suddenly he was looking at you with a slightly unreadable expression. Michael was the second youngest in the band you worked for; and the most mysterious. You had rarely crossed paths with him other than a quick hi on the bus playing card games, or helping the guys get their mics sorted at the start of the show. 

He was mysterious to you just like he was to the rest of the world; but you had an inkling of what he was really like, a small insight. How kind he was to his brothers – what he looked like first thing in the morning when he was tired, the way his eyes would stare out at an empty stadium during soundcheck, still performing as if there were a hundred thousand fans sat in front of him.

He was delicate and soft spoken, and had a femininity that you had never quite seen in a man – certainly not his older brothers. They were boisterous and loud; making passes at you, and being inappropriate at times. You always played along as you seen yourself as one of the boys anyway, you enjoyed their company as there were never many women around to chat to. 

You sat back down on your step.

You set the empty ice bucket beside you and put your head in your hands. It had gone from a bad situation to even worse – stuck in this stairwell with a man who rarely broke breath to you. You didn’t even think he liked you.

"I guess the ice machine is off," he said.

"I am aware of that, Mr Jackson."

A beat of silence.

Outside the concrete walls the city of Atlanta still carried on; trucks hurrying past on the highway, the occasional sound of a horn, and somewhere on property a generator had kicked in and was doing its best.

You pulled your knees up. The cinderblock wall was still cool through your t-shirt if you pressed back against it. 

"Just Michael," he said. The same way he always said it when people did that — immediate, slightly tired of it — and then he caught himself and looked at you properly. "You don't have to make it formal."

"I know I don't have to." You hugged your knees closer to your chest and looked up through your eyelashes at him. "I just wasn't sure we were there yet."

He absorbed this without defending himself, which you had not expected.

"I suppose. I am sorry I have never really interacted with you," he said.

"Sorry?"

"You seem upset so I am merely apologising. I am just a bit … socially challenged at times. Especially when I am performing a lot. It takes a lot from me."

The corner of his mouth was quirking up ever so slightly; he genuinely was trying to be apologetic.

"Its fine," you said. "I get that."

The stairwell was quiet again. The heat was coming slowly up from the floors below and the five degree advantage of the landing was beginning to lose the argument with the Georgia July pressing in from everywhere else.

You nodded at the notebook on his knee.

"Are you up drawing or something?"

"Writing," he said. "Lyrics."

"For a song with your brothers?"

"For —" he paused. He looked a bit sullen in the dark.  "No. Something else."

"Do you always carry it on you?"

"Everywhere." He turned it over in his hand to admire the hardback. 

"I lose the thing if I don't write it down the second it comes. It doesn't come back the same way."

You understood that. You had lost enough things that way.

"Do you draw?" he asked. He said it like a natural follow-on, curious rather than pointed.

"Sometimes. When I can't sleep mostly. Whatever's around; call sheets, the back of a tech rider."

"What do you like to draw?"

"Depends. Whatever I'm looking at." You picked at the old label on the ice bucket to give your hands something to do. You were really nervous around him.

He had a really intense energy, one that meant when he was around you; his full attention was yours - totally undivided. Almost like you can’t escape it.

"I spend a lot of time at the back of venues staring at the rigging so it ends up being a lot of scenic outdoor subjects; horizons, sunsets or whatever. Sometimes you guys on the stage; watercolours and oils.. The crew. Whatever feels fun."

He was listening with that scarily undivided attention you had clocked a hundred times from the desk - you’d never been on the receiving end of it til now.

It really was a different thing, being on the receiving end of it. He never had the excuse of having to talk to you at work; if Michael had something specific he wanted done, he’d talk to Greg. And Michael always wanted something specific and usually difficult for us to pull off. He was a perfectionist that way.

"I did a big portrait of Marlon once," you offered to fill the silence again. 

"Last winter. We had three days off in Memphis and I had nothing to do and he sat for me for about two hours working his way through an entire room service menu. It turned out well, I think. He got a little emotional when he saw it, which he will absolutely deny." You laughed.

You smiled inwardly at the memory. Marlon in a janky hotel chair with a club sandwich and his convincing argument that he was the most interesting subject you had ever drawn, talking the full two hours about his brothers, the first time he played a sold-out show, what it felt like to watch his little brother become the most famous person on earth.

Michael was looking at you intensely again.

"Are you and Marlon —" he stopped. He looked back at the notebook in his hands, losing his conviction. "Sorry. That's not —"

"No," you said.

He looked up.

"He's my friend," you said. "One of the best ones I've got on the road. But no, we aren’t together if that’s what you were wondering."

He nodded.

He looked back down at the notebook and turned it over once in his hand and did not say anything for a moment, and you watched the slight tension in his jaw release.

The silence that followed was a different one; he seemed like he was really deep in thought about something. So you let it be; there were likely not many times in his day that he could just sit without someone bothering him.

Something had certainly shifted atmosphere wise, it felt like maybe he was becoming more comfortable with conversing with you.

You were both sweating properly now. The cool of the landing had been entirely absorbed by the Georgia heat crawling up the stairs, and the back of your t-shirt was sticking to your spine and his white shirt was entirely see through; the amber emergency light was putting out its own small warmth from the cage on the ceiling and illuminating Michael in a really cinematic way.

You swallowed and tried to move your thoughts away from how nice his chest looked in the wet shirt. 

"Tell me about the song," you said, quickly. Trying to distract yourself.

He looked up, surprised.

"You don't have to sing it or anything. Just — tell me what it's about?"

He considered this for a long second. You got the impression he was deciding not whether to tell you the real meaning behind it, or a media trained version of it.

"Wanting something you can't figure out how to have," he said eventually. "Not in a sad way. Just. The feeling of being right on the edge of something and not knowing how to step into it."

You looked at him.

He was looking at the notebook cover.

"That's an interesting take," you said.

"Yeah, it really boils down to me having feelings about certain people and not being able to help it. Loving so deeply, I mean."

"That's actually quite specific."

"It doesn't feel specific enough yet. That's the problem. It still sounds like it could mean anything." He opened the notebook, not offering it to you this time, just looking at the page himself. "I want it to sound like the feelings I am living through right now."

"Have you fallen in love with someone you can’t have, Michael?"

He closed the notebook.

He looked at you for a moment in the amber light, and the look was long enough and level enough that you felt the back of your neck go warm in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature.

"I'm still working out if it is something I can have," he said. “This business is tricky for loving relationships. I am sure you have seen the absolute zoo my brothers hoard around with them. Girls just chomping at the bit to be with them.”

You held his gaze for a second and then laughed softly; he was right. You’d never really seen Michael partake in the groupie scene. 

You turned the empty ice bucket over in your hands, running your thumbs along the rim. The plastic was slightly tacky from the heat.

"How long have you been writing music," you asked. "Your own stuff. Not for the band."

"Since I was about fourteen." He leaned his head back against the wall. "I used to do it in the back of the bus on the way to shows. I had a little tape recorder. I'd hum into it and write the words down and then hide the tape in my suitcase lining so nobody found it."

"Why hide it?"

"Because it wasn't ready for people to listen to yet." He said it simply. "And because when you're one of 9, everything is everyone's. Your ideas, your time, your voice. The tapes were the only thing that were just mine."

You thought about that, not having privacy even at that age. Every moment of your life expertly controlled. You had a normal childhood; one where you could go to the park with your friends and play tag, and make up crazy make-believe stories.

"And now?"

"Now I have a room to myself and I still find I hide them - even from my brothers." He laughed quietly at himself. "Force of habit."

The generator sound from somewhere below had settled into a steadier rhythm, and through the concrete walls you thought you could hear the very distant sound of the hotel coming back to life — an elevator somewhere, a door, the muffled television voices of someone who had left their set on.

"What was it like," you said. "Starting out. Being a child doing it?"

He was quiet for a moment.

"I don't really remember not doing it," he said. "Which sounds like a good thing. I think most people would hear that and think — lucky. To have found the thing you want to do for the rest of your life that young." He was looking at you intently now as he spoke; he had really gained some confidence, and you wondered if it was because you were both plunged into almost darkness. That you weren’t making him feel vulnerable, or preyed upon.

"But you don't get to find it. It just is. You don't choose it, it doesn't feel like a gift, it's just the situation you find yourself in. And around it everything else is just happening to you after that; you can’t control it. The schedule and the shows and the travelling. You don't know another way of living so you don't miss it. You just sometimes wonder what it would be like had it not all happened so fast."

"To choose it? You mean?"

"To choose it, on my own. Yeah." He said, with a small smile on his face; glad that you understood his sentiment. “I would have made my way back to music somehow. Maybe a little later, and with a normal childhood under my belt”

You set the ice bucket down after that. It felt rude to fidget when he was bearing himself to you.

Outside the stairwell the hotel was definitely waking up — you could hear it more clearly now, the building reorganising itself back into function.

Your knee was touching his knee, where you both sat on the stairs.

You had not noticed that you had both become so close in the dim light. You did not move from where you sat; you just allowed the close proximity. Small butterflies fluttering in your stomach.

He was so real like this. When you lit him on the stage and heard him in the cans each night, he still felt like this out of your touch character. So talented that it might not even be grounded in reality.

"Can I ask you something?" you said, impatiently

"You've been asking me things for an hour" He sounded like he was smiling.

"A different kind of thing, I guess"

He looked at you.

"All the girls," you said. "Tonight on stage? Why do you let them almost maul you like that?."

He didn’t really respond, so you push again, trying to make a point 

"Does it scare you? I mean – we are always on the edge of our seats wondering if they finally pulled you off the stage this time"

He considered the question without performing the consideration.

"No," he said, honestly. "That's probably the problem."

"Why doesn't it?"

He was quiet for a beat.

"Because when I'm out there nothing seems scary, or frightening to me,” you could just about make out his animated hand movements whilst he talked.

"The show is real. The people at the rail are very real to me. They are a indicator of how well I am performing. They keep me in line.” The amber light was catching the beads of sweat on his forehead, where some of his dark hair was sticking to his face.

“Everything behind me goes away. And the girls at the rail are reaching for an interaction, to check if it’s real life and that the energy I am giving them is real. It most certainly is. I can give that to them, the rush, the elation." He paused. "I know what it looks like from the outside, but I see what it does for the fans."

"It looks like you have a death wish, Michael"

"I don't have a death wish." He chuckled, breathily.

"I know you don't." You said it before you had actually decided to, leaving a bit of an awkward lul after it. It was as if he was computing the fact you weren’t arguing with him.

"I've watched you for 9 months now. You don't have a death wish. You have a — well, you can't bear for anyone to leave without getting what they came for." You smiled, not knowing if he could even really see it or you.

You continued your rambling;

“Which is a very beautiful thing that is also going to get you seriously hurt one day."

He did not say anything for a moment.

"That’s it, really. I want to give them everything; just like I do for my family, my work outside of performing, so why not them too in the moment?" he said quietly. "Usually everyone else doesn’t get it when its brought up; it's just stop doing it. You're being stupid. You're being selfish."

"It's not selfish. It's the opposite of selfish. That's what worries me about it."

He was looking at you with an open unguarded expression, that made him look a lot younger than his age. Doe eyes, almost like they were entranced by headlights.

"I've thought about leaving," he said, feeling more confident to share with you now. 

"The band. Not in an angry way. Just." He looked up, at the ceiling.

 "There's a version of this where I do the thing I actually want to do."

You did not say anything.

"Quincy has said things to me that I haven't told anyone. About what he thinks is possible. To achieve with my voice, and my vision." He looked at the wall, in a dazed way, recalling the moment. 

"I think about it on the bus at night when everyone else is asleep. What it would sound like. What I'd do differently if I didn't have to run it past four other people first. Or my father."

"What would you do differently?"

He laughed softly and looked at you passionately.

"Everything," he said.

The word landed like a dead weight; you could now see why he was so dejected and reserved around the other boys. He was trying to push away and leave them, without hurting them or himself in the process.

You looked at him, thoughtfully. Your whole opinion of him had been rewired in this weird by chance moment

The air between you was warm and close and had been this way for a while now

"Why did you come out here? Its so late and I am imagining  you have everything you could ever need in the room they put you in" you said.

"It was colder out here." He looked faintly wistful.

"It was the coolest place I could find… and well, it’s suffocating being in those rooms by yourself, your veins coursing with adrenaline. I come find spots where I can write and will maybe bump in to a stranger."

"A stranger? You mean to talk to?"

"Yes. I love hearing other perspectives of life, it is fascinating to me. It is quite lonely, this life."

"I would never have thought it like that. But i suppose you are right – I couldn’t sleep because i was homesick for something i dont have."

"We're having similar evenings then."

"It appears so."

You both laughed heartily, albeit a little awkward – the confessional nature of the conversation was making it so.

The laughter went up the stairs and disappeared, echoing, and when it was gone you were both slightly closer together than you had been and neither of you were doing anything about that.

All at once — the fluorescents blinking twice and holding, the amber emergency light clicking off, the whole stairwell suddenly ordinary and bright and concrete and completely visible.

You both blinked, adjusting to the assault on your eyes.

When you finally got a look at him, he had the kind of face that always seemed touched by softer light than everyone else's. Even sweaty and disheveled, barefoot just like you, he looked unfairly beautiful, his expression hazy and distant, as though he'd only just surfaced from a dream.

You could see the recognition in his dark eyes, as he looked you up and down, finally understanding more fully now, who he had been having this… deep conversation with. You couldn’t tell if he was feeling odd at the thought or completely delighted.

He stood up, abruptly and then reached down and offered you his hand. you took it and he pulled you to your feet and there was a beat where you were standing close together in the bright stairwell and neither of you stepped back.

He looked at you again, more than before, obviously noting how disheveled and tired you looked from the ordeal, but also a long day at work.

"The suite has a really good shower, with jets and all" he said. He said it nervously. 

"If you wanted to cool down, you can use it. I can wait in the other room."

You looked at him incredulously, but at the secondary thought of a cold shower in a fancy bathroom, you could not pass it up.

His face was very still, but his eyes weren't. The offer was there, threaded through the silence, through the way he was looking at you. Neither of you said anything. The stairwell felt suddenly too small, the air too warm. Above you, the fluorescent light buzzed softly while the space between you seemed to shrink of its own accord.

"Okay," you said.

Something shifted in his expression. His gaze dropped to the step between you, as though he needed a second to collect himself. When he looked back up, the beginning of a real smile tugged at the corner of his mouth—small, private, and somehow worse than if he'd smiled outright.

He bent and picked up the empty ice bucket.

When he handed it to you, his fingers brushed yours for the briefest moment.

The feeling was electric.

–

The elevator was working, thankfully.

You rode it to the top floor in silence, the two of you standing side by side in the mirrored box with your empty ice bucket and his notebook and the faint hotel-elevator music hanging around you. 

You could see both of you in the mirror opposite. You looked exactly like what you were — two people who had been sitting in a concrete stairwell in a Georgia heatwave for an hour. He had his hands in his pockets. He was looking at the floor numbers.

The doors opened.

The top floor corridor was wider than yours and the carpet was thicker. The wallpaper was a different quality, the kind that had texture to it, and the lights up here had come back on fully and were the warm gold of sconces rather than the flat fluorescent of the lower floors. 

He stopped at the end of the corridor and slid his key into the door.

The suite opened up in front of you and you stood in the doorway for a moment because you could not help it.

It was enormous. Not enormous like the hotel rooms you had stayed in on this tour — the standard doubles with the single window and the unit on the wall and the carpet that had seen a lot of summers. 

This was a different category of space entirely. A proper living room with sofas and a coffee table and a grand piano in the corner that somebody had presumably put there because he was who he was. 

Floor to ceiling windows running the length of the far wall with the Atlanta skyline laid out beyond them, the city half-dark and half-lit in the aftermath of the power cut, the orange glow of the streetscape and the scattered squares of building light and above it all the flat black southern sky. 

A dining table. A separate bedroom through an open door. Flowers on the sideboard, the kind that came with a suite, white and slightly formal and already wilting in the heat.

You stood in the doorway with your ice bucket, bare feet and an old overly washed Toto hoodie. 

"Right," you said, sarcastically

He had gone slightly self-conscious. He was standing in the middle of the living room with his hands in his pockets clearly not knowing what to do; he seemed bashful that you were seeing this for what it was, clear unadulterated indulgence

"It's just a room," he said.

"Michael, there's a grand piano."

"I asked for that, I like to play to wind down at night"

"I have a bathroom the size of a cupboard and a AC unit that sounds like a dying animal and a view of the car park."

"Yeah..." He said it quietly. Not showing off. "I know it's a lot."

You walked further in.

The carpet under your bare feet was the kind of thick you only felt in places like this, the kind that gave slightly under your weight. The living room smelled of the flowers and the faint cool trace of the air conditioning that had just come back on and was beginning to move the warm air out of the room in slow, luxurious waves.

The air conditioning.

You stood under the nearest vent and tilted your head back and closed your eyes and felt the cool air move across your face and your damp hairline and the back of your neck.

"Oh," you said. "Oh that's good."

When you opened your eyes he was watching you from across the room with a nervous, toothy smile and his hands still in his pockets. He was enjoying this; you thought. Enjoying the fact that someone was here with him, to share the bizarreness.

You looked away first.

"Show me the shower," you said.

–

The bathroom was through the bedroom.

You noticed the bedroom briefly — king bed, turned down, the kind of white linen that looked like it had been ironed by a person rather than a machine, a stack of his things on the nightstand, the notebook's twin, a paperback with a cracked spine. 

The bathroom was marble.

Floor to ceiling. Cool white marble with grey veining that caught the light from the vanity above the double sinks, and in the corner — the shower. 

It was a steam shower, the kind you had only seen in magazines, with a wide rainfall head set into the ceiling and two body jets on the side wall and a bench along the back and a glass door that fogged from the outside in and a separate control panel beside the door like something from a spaceship.

You stared at it.

"The controls are —" he pointed at the panel. "You just — the top one is the temperature. The middle one is the steam. You don't have to use the steam."

"How do you use a shower with a control panel?"

"I'll show you." He stepped over to it, self-conscious now in a different way — a self-consciousness for having to explain something ordinary about his own extraordinary circumstances. He pointed at the top control. "Temperature here. This one turns the rainfall on. This one —"

"Michael."

"Yes."

"I can figure out a shower. It was most certainly a rhetorical question" you laughed

"Right." He stepped back. "Right. I'll be in the —" he gestured vaguely toward the living room. "Take your time."

He left. He pulled the bathroom door mostly closed behind him. You heard him cross the bedroom, heard the soft click of the bedroom door.

You stood in the marble bathroom and looked at the shower for a second.

You peeled your damp t-shirt over your head and dropped your shorts and your socks and you opened the glass door and stepped in and pressed the top control and the water came down from the ceiling like rain, cool first, then finding its temperature, and you stood under it with your hands at your sides and your eyes closed and let it run over your hair and down your face and the back of your neck and the length of your spine.

Cold.

Genuinely, properly cold after the hours of heat, cold enough that you made a small involuntary sound the first second it hit you and stood there breathing through it until your body adjusted and the cold became something else. Something necessary. The sweat and the heat and the concrete stairwell running off you in streams and spiralling down the marble drain.

You stood there for a long time.

You had not realised how much of the night was in your body until it started to leave.

Then – sudden darkness again.

Not gradually. All at once — the vanity above the sinks, the small recessed spots in the ceiling, the strip of light under the bathroom door from the bedroom beyond. Everything, including the panel on the shower, which went dark with a small electronic sound, and the water, which kept running for about four seconds on whatever pressure remained before it faltered and died.

You stood in the dark in the marble shower in the silence.

"Y/N."

His voice, through the door. Careful. Close.

"I'm fine," you shouted back.

"The power went out again."

"I noticed, Michael." you laughed again this time, at his matter of fact statements and his endearing awkwardness.

A pause.

"The floor is marble," he said. "It's slippery. I don't — I'm not trying to —" he stopped. Another pause. "I just don't want you to fall in there. I’ll come help."

You stood there in the dark with the last of the water dripping from the rainfall head onto your shoulders.

"Okay," you said.

The door opened.

The bedroom beyond was dark too — no light from the windows because the Atlanta skyline had gone dark again. The only light in the bathroom was the very faint ambient glow of the city finding its way through the bedroom windows and through the open door, a grey-blue suggestion of light that was barely enough to see shapes and nothing more.

He was in the doorway.

You could see the shape of him; the white t-shirt, the curls, the way he was holding himself at the threshold with one hand on the doorframe; clearly nervous about the deliberateness he had before. You were beginning to notice Michael’s boldness in the darkness.

You reached for the glass door and pushed it open and stepped out onto the marble floor.

You had a towel from the rack by your elbow — you had clocked it before the lights went out, the thick white hotel towel on the heated rail, and you pulled it around yourself now, wrapping it across your chest, the fabric warm and soft in a way that felt, after the wet cold of the shower and the hours of Georgia heat, almost obscene.

He had not moved from the doorway.

His eyes had adjusted to the dark, there was enough ambient light to work with, and you were aware, that he could see you — the shape of you in the plush towel, your wet hair down around your shoulders, the bare feet on the cool marble floor.

He was very still.

"I'm not going to fall," you said.

"I know."

His voice was lower than it had been in the stairwell.

"I just—"

The words trailed off.

He was looking at you the way he had looked at you downstairs, open, unguarded, but something had changed. 

In the amber light of the stairwell it had felt careful, held in check by distance and circumstance. 

Here, in the dark marble bathroom, with the city washed grey-blue beyond the small window and your damp hair clinging to your shoulders, there was less distance for it to hide behind.

His gaze dropped briefly to the towel gathered at your chest before returning to your face.

Whatever had been keeping the look careful was gone.

What remained was startling in its simplicity.

Desire, certain and true and a bit reckless.

He stopped in front of you, close enough that you could smell the clean scent of hotel soap on his skin and the warmer, familiar smell of a sultry, musky cologne.

For a second neither of you moved. There were sounds of heavy breathing and the morning coming alive outside the window.

Then his hand lifted.

His fingers brushed the side of your face as he tucked a strand of wet hair behind your ear. The touch was almost impossibly gentle, but it still sent a pulse of awareness through you. As though he was discovering, too late, how difficult it was to touch you and remain unchanged by it.

His eyes moved over your face in the near dark. 

"I'm glad," he said quietly, "that Marlon hasn't gotten to you."

You looked at him, nervously.

"It means I can do this," he said, "without feeling guilty."

He leaned in and kissed you.

The kiss was a spark in the dark, and then the whole suite went up in flame. 

His mouth was warm and insistent, a little clumsy at first, like he was relearning the shape of a kiss in the absence of light. 

Your hands came up to his chest, fingers curling into the soft cotton of his t-shirt, feeling the solid, frantic beat of his heart through the fabric. 

He made a low, desperate sound against your lips, his own hands finding your waist, pulling you flush against him.

The towel, your only shield, became a nuisance. He tugged at it, his movements suddenly purposeful, his earlier nervousness incinerated by the sheer, driving need in the dark. He leaned in and kissed you more.

His fingers found the edge of the towel and then he hesitated, pulling back slightly. 

"Can I —"

"Yes."

It fell.

The air on your bare skin was a shock, a second, smaller climax to the feeling of your first kiss.

His forehead dropped to yours, both of you breathing hard. “The bedroom,” he murmured, his voice thick. “Now.”

It was a fumbling, beautiful mess. The suite, so vast and clear in the light, was now a labyrinth of shadows and unfamiliar shapes. You stumbled over the threshold into the living room, his hand a firm, guiding anchor on your lower back. The coffee table was a phantom obstacle; you both gasped as your shin connected with its edge. 

He swore softly, a creative, muttered curse, and swept you up into his arms instead, bridal style, his strength surprising you. 

You laughed, a breathless, giddy sound, your arms wrapping around his neck, your breasts pressing against his chest. 

He carried you through the cavernous space, his steps sure despite the dark, as if the layout of his own kingdom was etched into his bones.

The bedroom was a void of softer darkness, the city’s grey-blue light barely touching the edges. 

He lowered you onto the turned-down duvet, the crisp linen cool against your overheated skin. 

You were reaching for him when his hands were already on your thighs, spreading you open. 

His mouth found your hip, your stomach, a trail of searing kisses downward. You threaded your fingers into his curls, a soft tug of encouragement.

And then his tongue was on you, a slow, deliberate flat stroke of your clit. You cried out, your back arching off the bed, involuntarily. 

It wasn’t the practiced rhythm of someone who’d done this a hundred times; it was exploratory, reverent, each flick and swirl a question he was answering with his whole body. 

He was learning your map by taste and sound, his groans vibrating against your most sensitive flesh, his hands holding your thighs wide, keeping you utterly at his mercy. 

You were already teetering on the edge, the tension from the stairwell, the shower, the sheer surreal intimacy of this blackout pulling tight in your gut and heart.

“Michael—ah—wait, I’m going to— if you keep doing it like that”

He didn’t wait. He sucked you deep, his tongue working in a relentless, perfect rhythm, and you shattered, a silent, shuddering wave crashing over you, your cries muffled in the pillow. You were still pulsing when he lifted his head, his face glistening in the faint light. He looked wrecked, his own need a visible thing in the set of his jaw.

“My turn,” you whispered, your voice hoarse.

You pushed him gently to lie back. He went willingly, a long, grateful exhale as he sank into the pillows. 

You fumbled down the bed to settle in between his long legs and then took him into your mouth slowly, giving him time to feel every ridge of the roof of your mouth and the soft inside of your cheeks.

Your hand cupped his balls gently, your thumb stroking soft circles. 

He was big, honestly bigger than you expected, and you worked him with a tender, worshipful pace, your tongue swirling around the tip before taking him deeper. 

His hands found your hair, his fingers trembling against your scalp. His breathing was ragged, uneven staccato punctuated by soft, broken dirty words and your name, a prayer and a curse. You could feel the nervousness radiate off of him.

You felt him swell, his thrusts into your mouth becoming shorter, sharper. “I’m—I’m gonna—” he gasped, his hips lifting off the bed. You pulled back immediately, and with the minimal light in the room you could make out his face, contorted with the pain of being edged, but also pleasure.

He reached out for your hand, like a small plea; you obliged.

You looked down at your joined hands, then at his face, at the quiet desperation there. The power was still out. The suite could have been a ship adrift in a sea of black. 

And for the first time all night, you didn’t feel lost at all.

There was now a primal need in you, the electricity he’d sparked with his mouth and his confession, wasn’t sated. 

You lifted your head, your fingers tracing a path through sweat glistening  on his skin, down the taut line of his abdomen.

“Michael,” you said, your voice a low hum against the quiet. “I’m not finished.”

You felt him go still beneath you, then a slow, deep inhale. 

In the dim light, you saw his eyes, wide and dark, fixed on you. The shyness was there, but beneath it, something else had taken root—a determination, a focus that the anonymity of the dark seemed to magnify.

“Neither am I,” he breathed.

His hands came to your hips, his grip firm, turning you. Before you could process it, he had you on your back, his body settling over yours, his weight a delicious, anchoring pressure. He kissed you again, but it was different now. No tentative exploration. His tongue delved into your mouth, hot and searching, and you met him with equal fervor, your legs wrapping around his waist, pulling him closer until you could feel the hard, insistent length of him, still throbbing and firm, wanting from being brought to the edge before. He was pressing against your slick heat, but was certainly holding back.

He broke the kiss, his breath coming in ragged gusts against your neck. “I need—I need to be inside you. Please.” The ‘please’ was a ragged thing, torn from him.

“Yes,” was all you could manage.

He fumbled for a moment, his hand between you, and you heard the rustle of foil—he must have grabbed it from the nightstand in that first, purposeful trip to the bedroom. His movements in the dark were sure, economical. He sheathed himself, his eyes never leaving your face, and then he was there, at your entrance, the head of him nudging against you.

He pushed in slowly, a groan tearing from his throat, a sound of pure, unraveling relief. You cried out, arching to take him deeper. He was big, stretching you exquisitely, filling you in a way that went beyond the physical. He stilled once he was fully seated, buried to the hilt, his forehead pressed to yours, both of you trembling.

“Oh, god,” he whispered, his voice shaking. “You feel… it’s like you were made for this. For me. Worth the weight.”

He began to move. His rhythm was not the polished, practiced cadence of experience you’d had before. It was earnest, deeply felt, each thrust a question and an answer. He was learning you, listening to your gasps, the way your body clenched around him, and adjusting, his hips finding an angle that made you see stars.

 His confidence in the dark was palpable; he was wholly present, every ounce of his focus on the connection, on the feel of you wrapped around him.

“Look at me,” he murmured, his voice a rough scrape in the dark. You forced your eyes open. 

His face was a study of intense concentration, his lips parted, his gaze locked on yours as he moved. “I want to see you. Even in the dark, I want to see your pleasure. I want to hear you moan for me.”

He drove into you, deeper, and you moaned, your nails digging into the muscles of his back. 

He kissed you then, a messy, open-mouthed kiss that tasted of salt and shared breath. His hands slid under you, gripping your shoulders, holding you impossibly close as he pistoned his hips, the pace quickening, becoming more urgent.

“Turn over,” he gasped against your mouth.

You didn’t hesitate. You rolled onto your stomach, presenting yourself to him, and he was on you in an instant, his body covering yours, his chest hot against your back. He entered you from behind, one arm banded around your waist, holding you to him. This angle was deeper, more primal. 

He hooked his chin over your shoulder, his breath hot in your ear.

“Is this okay?” he panted, even as he thrust hard, making the headboard knock softly against the wall.

“Yes,” you choked out. “God, yes, Michael.”

He moaned, a long, low sound of pure satisfaction. His free hand slipped between your legs, his fingers finding your clit with an unerring accuracy that stole the air from your lungs. He rubbed tight, perfect circles there, in time with his deep, driving thrusts. The dual sensation was overwhelming—the fullness of him inside you, the clever friction on your most sensitive nerve. 

You were babbling, a stream of half-formed words and pleas, pushing back against him, meeting every stroke.

“I can feel you,” he groaned into your ear, his voice thick with awe. “I can feel you getting tighter. 

Come for me. Let me feel you come.”

It was the command in his gentle voice that did it. The coil snapped. Your orgasm ripped through you, a silent, seismic wave that clenched around him so tightly you saw white behind your eyelids. You cried out, a raw, broken sound muffled by the pillow as you shook apart in his arms.

Feeling you climax seemed to shatter the last of his control. His rhythm faltered, became frantic, his thrusts turning shallow and hard. “Fuck, I’m—I can’t—ah, god!”

With a final, deep drive, he buried himself to the hilt and came with a guttural shout, his whole body seizing, his release pulsing hot inside the condom. He collapsed over you, his weight a welcome heaviness, his face buried in the crook of your neck, his breaths coming in great, shuddering gulps.

For long minutes, there was only the sound of your slowing heartbeats and the distant, returning buzz of Atlanta. He softened inside you but made no move to pull away. Instead, his arm tightened around your waist, holding you locked together.

He finally shifted, rolling to the side and carefully removing the now used condom; you could sense the slight bit of nervousness and uncertainness come back to him. 

Once he discarded the used condom he clambered back onto the bed where you lay regaining your composure and your elevated heart rate. You had not even thought of the implications this had on your job before you allowed him to ravish you. 

You felt like you couldn’t even be bothered to care.

He shifted closer to you and nuzzled your hair, his lips brushing the shell of your ear.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, his voice drowsy and sated. “I… that was fast. At the end.”

“Don’t be sorry. It felt… really good. It’s been a while for me too” You said, voice soft. Your eyes still had not fully adjusted to how dark it was in the room. 

“You shouldn’t leave, if that is what you are thinking. What kind of gentleman would I be if I let you roam around the dark hotel all by yourself?”

You laughed heartily, understanding that he just wanted an excuse to hold you close for the night, now that he had you like this. You were wholeheartedly enjoying it though - totally unexpectedly. 

“You’re more unhinged in the dark, Michael” You finally said, humour in your tone. 

“That's because you can't see me getting embarrassed.”

“You? Embarrassed?”

“All the time.”

The confession came so easily that it almost startled you.

“In the dark, I can pretend I'm braver than I am.”

fin.