VELVET GOLDMINE : Take Two People Romantic // R

Take Two People Romantic
Brian Slade/Curt Wild
rated R
2,362 words
disclaimer--> never happened, characters ain't mine.

notes: Brian's POV; story title shamelessly lifted from lyrics to "2HB" performed by the Venus in Furs off the original motion picture soundtrack

Feedback's nice.



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When I first saw you, you were half-naked at a backyard music festival, all white, glittering perfection in (and then out of) your second-skin leather trousers. I wonder if you knew then how entranced I was by your voice and your looks and your presence. Your spirit...

That same night I laid awake next to my sleeping wife and stared at the ceiling. All I could see was you, all I could hear were your untamed, animalistic screams across the lawn, bouncing off the tree trunks. You had them all captive in the palm of your hand, you could either smash them in your fist like so many dead leaves or love them as they loved you. Jealousy, envy, that's what I felt. Jealousy, envy and want.

Then imagine my utter shock and amazement when I was told I would be going to America, and then asked who I wanted to be introduced to.

"Curt Wild. I want to meet Curt Wild."

I remember the words tumbling off of my tongue and then how my cheeks warmed out of how embarrassing my eagerness seemed. Mandy noticed, she'd felt it since the first time we saw you. She saw right through my costume, that mask I'd painted on myself that was supposed to deflect all curious minds from peering inside my head and seeing all my of most private musings and yearnings with unforgiving clarity.

On the plane trip I kept to myself, mostly. I refused to have drinks with Jerry and Mandy because I needed to compose myself. In reality I was rehearsing what I would say to you in my head. I imagined in my mind's eye this sudden understanding between us when we first locked gazes, and you would take my hand and pull me into you, assimilating me with your sublimity. We would collide and intertwine. I would be yours, all yours, and we would live together in a fantastic, perfect universe, and never die.

The club was throbbing with the pulsating bassline of the music when we arrived. People turned and looked at me as if they recognized me, but nobody was bold enough to stop our entourage for a few words. Mandy was behind me and Jerry in front, advancing like foot soldiers through the crush of gaudy, feathered, sequined outfits and sweating bodies. Then we found you.

I got that butterflies sensation in my stomach, and I thought I was going to throw up. I hadn't eaten anything in recent memory but the inclination was still there, and difficult to ignore. There were girls flanking you but I felt no loathing for them for being so close to you. Tunnel vision, I only saw you, with your stringy brown hair and darkened junkie's eyes, and that cigarette hanging ridiculously from between your lips. You looked awful, but so beautiful. I wanted so desperately for that moment I imagined on the plane to happen but it didn't, but somehow, that was all right. At least you knew my name now, and my face, although in the back of my mind I assumed you would forget it the next time you opened up your veins and poured smack into them.

When we ate breakfast in that pompous hotel with Jerry I was more confident, not such a moony-eyed schoolboy with a crush. When you agreed to come back to England with us I knew it was the start of something much greater in the fantastic universal plan.

And so it began.

We were like giants. Everyone noticed us. Tabloids wrote about us, fabricating stories that we later wove into realities. Photographers snapped pictures and editors slapped scandalous captions underneath them. Each night after our plane first touched down we were together, right next to each other but still light years apart, despite what our stage antics suggested in no vague terms.

I didn't know how to get in past your enigmatic defenses. You were still a tantalizing secret that I was wont to discover. But I was too afraid, fearing rejection or embarrassment. It took about a year of accumulating tension, of coming so close to finding an in that I caught a glimmer of the beauty you kept inside before you snatched it away, either by choice or circumstance. In a way, I suspected you knew what you were doing to me, and it was a game. Little did I know I was playing the same tricks on you.

Then it all came to a head. We were, all of us, stuck together in a posh hotel suite among slick, naked bodies draped with limbs, lace and opium. We drank from an ocean of wine until our lips were the shade of crushed red grapes and our tongues wagged freely before being taken by another mouth in a passing kiss. The tangle of humans upon every surface looked like some grotesque modern painting. Three girls were each fawning over us, feeding each other acid-laced candies and wine-bittered tongues. I felt invisible, except to you.

You got to your feet with a half-empty bottle in your hand and a bulge in your trousers. You looked at me and saw right then into my core, past the smeared eyeshadow and rouge, into my very soul, shivering and pale, naked. I wanted to weep, but with joy.

I watched how you moved, just like a panther with how each one of your sinewy, ropey muscles in your torso stretched to coincide with your graceful steps. Your hair was a greasy brown mop, and fell across your forehead and cheeks just so. From behind the curtain of hair your eyes bore into me and as if you were the angler casting a lure, I felt myself being reeled in because right then, we both knew you'd caught me.

You went. I followed. Down the hall, into the vacant bedroom where the window was open and the curtains parted by an unseasonably warm breeze. Your skin was blue and pale and flawless in the moonlight, with glitter flecked on your skin and black eyeliner smudged beyond a care. I remained by the door because I was frightened, not by you, but by my own sense of self-conscious naivete.

"Don't be afraid anymore," you murmured. You edged closer, closer until our chests were almost touching. I could feel the heat radiating off of your body in strong waves, I thought I would drown. Your hands were then on my hips, fingers sliding underneath my silk shirt; you licked your lips, and then...

We were kissing. I was frozen, at first, but your taste was so sweet and I wanted more of it, so I kissed you back with my mouth open and my tongue laving. My arms wrapped around you just below your arm pits and once I felt our bodies touch a feeling that I can only describe as warm honey trickling down my body, dousing me with heavenly sweetness to the point of being smothered, overtook me. Our tongues danced and slid over and under and around each others'; it seemed like we were fighting to dive into one another through our mouths and thereby consume ourselves, bottling our bodies and souls up in a single gold locket that no one could open.

The bed pulled me into it and wrapped me in crushed velvet blankets the color of the blackest midnight, and you were there to keep me from falling into oblivion.

We melded together and sang in chorus to the ceiling, over and over again until our hearts felt like they were going to burst and splatter inside our ribcages, and we at last toppled apart like a card castle. Yet in our parting there was somber resplendence keeping us suspended together, and as the first rosy flames of the dawn tinted the sky and kissed us good night, we were sealed: fused into one by this forge of a sumptuous bed.

You fell asleep with your hands on me, one threaded through my bleached hair and the other splayed on my back. You positioned one of your legs between mine and just as I waltzed with you on the fringes of slumber, your words came soft like cherubim breath fanning the back of my neck.

"I love you, Brian."

In a lot of ways, I think of that night we surrendered to destiny was the beginning of the end. For awhile we had it like lovers ought to, waking up every morning to bleary-eyed kisses and slow, decadent lovemaking beneath golden splashes of light flooding through the drapes.

We had it all in ways like never before. Now there was no shame in being caught down on my knees in front of you before a show, or kissing with sloppy tongues for the press and their flashbulb smiles and ink-stained hands.

It didn't matter that my marriage had dissolved like snow in a heat wave because you were the most exquisite distraction on two legs. And we really were in love then, we had a love so potent and pervasive that we were blind. Nothing else was relevant, nothing else even existed.

But as time passed, we got sick of each other; disease ate away starting in our chest cavities and spread outward until we decayed, crumbled and destroyed from the inside out by too much beauty. It was the glamorous thing to do, to be killed by what we adored.

You no longer were there in the morning for me to awaken with a kiss and a warm body. You were off God knows where, unconscious with fresh track marks on your arm and someone else draped half-naked across your body carved of ivory. You were the reason I lost myself. I gave my entire essence to you and you took it away greedily, stuffed it in the back pocket of those same leather trousers and put out of sight, out of mind.

I loathed you because I still loved you. I waited for you to come back every night, but you rarely did. I watched the minutes tick past on the face of the grandfather clock in the sitting room and once the hands reached a certain point, I got up and did what you would have done. I prepared the syringe and, sitting upon the lidded toilet in that gilded bathroom, tied off the circulation with one of your scarves and punctured my pretty little veins. In the haze of the euphoria I didn't need you, and by the time I would come to you would be back, wanting me as if I was a hit of the drug still coursing through your bloodstream.

The vicious cycle, how many casualties it has counted. I hated myself for letting it go on for so long, but that's what love will do to a man. Enough to build you up or break you down.

I was tired. So were you, I could see it in the dead glare in your eyes. The morning I left I tried to kill myself in the taxi, but my constitution was too weak. Instead I went running to Mandy because I knew she'd take me, slit wrists and fierce tears that ruined makeup and all. For awhile, I didn't need you. You certainly didn't need me.

I got clean. Then I went to the concert, the one paying reverent homage to our dying era. I do not know if you saw me, but I was there like a phantom in the rafters, watching and remembering. Oddly enough, I left the hall feeling some semblance of closure.

I did it all for you, you know. The whole shebang. When we fell apart I was left incomplete, and I knew that if I were to move on with my life I had only two options: go back and get you and myself back, or perish. Death appealed to me, and that's what set my master plan into formulation.

The phony predictions, the media skepticism, all that tawdry publicity and then finally the stunning denouement of my scheme, all a sham garbed in silver spandex and white feathers, strutting to the tinkling melody of a piano's upper register before expiring, smattered with plumage and stage blood.

You were the one I went to when it was all over. You cursed me for coming back, more than for me pulling off the grand fiasco I orchestrated. With my death you would have been free, I thought, and felt truly dead once I realized this. But then... you stopped. It was quiet. We looked at each other for a long moment. It felt like years. It could have been seconds. But I saw all the pain and suffering, all the confusion and hatred beautifully reflected in your eyes as clear as a film reel spinning away.

I kissed you, just like we kissed the first time. The first real time, when the end began. It felt like a renewal, a rebirth even. Coming out of the womb again, but blessed with the knowledge of experience in the realms of love and loss, of mistakes made. When I stood back, your eyes were full of tears threatening to spill over and streak down your face. It was like a knife to the heart until you pulled it out with your smile.

Your hands cupped my face and you pulled me in close, kissing my lips, forehead, eyes, chin. It was as if you were confirming that it was really me, truly me who had come back for you because I still cared about you.

We escaped that night. Hand in hand we flew across the globe to some exotic port of call. We disappeared, just two feckless renegades on the run from the world, only wanting to claim our own corner in which to hide from it all.

You were the best and worst thing to ever befall me. Strange how love deals in such polarized variables.

Now we have the rest of time and space to live anew, and procure from each other the spidery lodes that complete our separate puzzles from our love's velvet goldmine.

END