She knows he’s ready because she can hear the clatter of his all his belts – four, possibly five – as they hit the floor, buckle against boards.

He’s not so much in the bedroom as standing silhouetted behind the painted sheet that separates where he’s placed his bed from the rest of his studio. And it’s not so much a bed as it is a box spring and a mattress on the floor. But it’s real, she thinks. You know? Real. Like Bjork.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m ready.”

She moves around the hanging sheet, and he stands there, all his bones surfacing against his pale skin, paler in the blue light from his iBook. He is skinny, skinnier than the boys she remembered in high school, but there is a dichotomy to the way his face is white and his hair is black, sweeping over one eye – the way his body his tense but his lips are soft with organic balm. She knows he will taste like ginger, and she knows she will taste like coffee and Parliament Lights.

Pulp is playing – softly – and is it appropriate that it’s the Hardcore album, the one with the picture of the porn starlet on the front, right before they do the inevitable and fuck? Fuck hardcore?

Her clothes are wet from riding back to his studio in the rain, clinging to him on the back of his moped, and the buttons on her denim jacket stick. The light glints off all her one-inch pins (Cursive, The Paper Chase, Nine Inch Nails (just to be kitsch) and a plea to put an end to sweatshops), and off her black fingernails and all the piercings in her ears and the one in her lower lip.

The tension in the room is palpable, though the air is cool. She slips out of her tunic dress, peels away her lace, footless tights and slips out of her ballet flats. She unhooks her bra and throws it aside and as she rolls down her panties, he can see she hasn’t shaved in at least a week.

But it’s okay with him. He hasn’t shaved in four days.

She steps closer to him; he is trembling. As she presses her body against his own, he whispers into her ear,

“Don’t you think it’s strange we’ve been going to the same coffeehouse for three months and still haven’t fucked?”

“No,” she says. “I knew it would happen when you wrote that thing on the bathroom wall with a Sharpie.”

“You knew that was me?”

His hand reaches down to feel between her thighs, to softly thumb her clitoris like he would the E string on his acoustic guitar.

“Who else would write, ‘Wait, they don’t like you like I love you, Amelia?,” she asks.

He pulls her down to his mattresses, and it’s a long way, and an entanglement of their tiny limbs, but once they are there, he is on top of her, kissing her madly.

As he slips his knee between her thighs, spreading her legs with the same joy as when his favourite band puts out a new album and he’s yet to see the liner, he feels his cock grow hard and his heart start to pound to the bass line that backs the voice of Jarvis Cocker.

“I knew when I saw you reading that dog-eared copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being that I would make love to you,” he says.

She takes his cock in her hands, stroking and then surprises him:

“Roll over.”
“What for?”
“Just do it.”

He is confused, but he climbs off of her and settles down on his stomach. She sits and reaches for her messenger bag.

“What are you getting?”

“Relax, Winston.”

He thinks of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and tries. He can’t see her behind him, but he can hear the clicking of something metal, like a belt. Like his belts that clattered to the floor.

He can see her shadow falling over him as he stares at his hands splayed out before him, the Ms indicating he is only 19 still visible from the show the night before.

And then he feels it, a cold, wetness at his anus.

“What are you doing?”

“Shhh,” she says.

“I’m going to use my strap-on.”

He tries to roll over but she pushes him back down.

“This is progressive, Winston,” she says. “Don’t you want to be progressive?”

And Winston does very much want to be progressive. He closes his eyes and he lays there, and he keeps thinking about that Frankie Goes to Hollywood song, and keeps trying to relax as she begins to ease the plastic through the threshold. His cock is still hard, and his mind racing from the Aderall he snorted off the back of the coffeehouse toilet six hours ago.

She softly sings My Body is a Cage from Arcade Fire’s last album to him.

“My minds holds the key,” he mutters to himself as he resists tensing. “My mind holds the key.”