Chapter Eight #2
I’m completely exposed in this stark hallway with no instrument to guide me, and yet there’s a ridiculous pleasure in singing to him.
“ Her Hestia and my hearthside, a feast of sea and soil, kneeling before her boldly, I swear that I’m made whole.
” Too far gone to turn back, I let the chorus possess me.
“ I devour her, the taste so pure, she heats and quakes, she breaks and breaks, her desolate mess the only cure .”
“Jesus. Your voice.” He draws a hand over his jaw. “What a thing to behold.”
“Stop.”
“I won’t.” He shakes his head. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anyone make the music sound like you do.”
Those simple words do more for my soul than I can articulate. Halloran saves me a baffled, incomprehensible response when he says, “What did you hear, then? In the lyrics?”
Though I can feel the blood rush to my cheeks, I’m honest. “I thought you were describing one hell of an orgasm.”
Halloran’s mouth quirks, though his eyes don’t leave mine, and I’m both set alight and self-conscious.
“Okay, now please tell me. Put me out of my misery.”
He chuckles as he relents. “I’d written it about our lack of accountability to the earth.
We take what we please and are shocked when temperatures rise or a devastating earthquake hits.
Hestia’s the Greek goddess of the hearth…
I was really mixin’ metaphors back then—” He scratches the back of his head.
“The title’s from a William Butler Yeats poem about growin’ old and wishin’ to keep his mind, but be rid of his decaying body.
Felt apt.” He runs his fingers along his chin in thought. “I like your interpretation better.”
I’m dumb as a brick. All the mentions of wet heat and mindless pleasure with no consequence make so much more sense now. “You’re a genius.”
Halloran just laughs. “That’s high praise.”
“Now you have to tell me which ones are actually about sex.”
He scratches at his beard to hide his smile. “Ehm—”
“Or not,” I say to spare him. “No pressure.”
“No, I’m just thinking.” His eyes cast downward, and when they find mine again, the heat that simmers there nearly knocks me unconscious. “?‘Heart of Darkness’ is, actually.”
The slow-burning beat echoes in my mind as the lyrics dance across my vision. “Sure. Makes sense. It kind of sounds like sex.”
That’s a wild thing to say and I know it as soon as it leaves my mouth. His throat constricts a bit when he swallows.
“Oh, baby, please let me stay. In your darkness I can lay. Knowing how you plead, Jesus Christ, you can’t keep me away. I prowl through streets I thought I owned, and realize I’m just your prey.”
As if he can hear his own raw vocals growling in my mind, he runs his hand over his rough beard again. “Folks were debatin’ if ‘Consume My Heart Away’ was about pleasurin’ a woman. I wondered if I actually wrote a song about that if anyone would even notice.”
Something about my expression makes him follow that bombshell with, “Not to be crude. The song’s less about ridin’, and more about feeling as though you know someone by night—someone you’ve longed for and lusted after—but come daylight there’s a sort of baffling otherness to them.
You can’t connect unless you’re inside them.
It’s about acknowledging the limitations of that kind of relationship.
That discrepancy in knowin’ their body, how to speak to them in that language, but not really knowin’ them at all. ”
“I see” is all I can muster.
“It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, though, because the allegory is that of a sort of feral, dodgy cat. One who knows its township innately by night and is this fearsome thing, but in the stark morning light, finds the place a bit unsettling.”
Talking to Halloran about sex might be better than any sex I’ve had.
I stare at the curve of his goose-bumped biceps.
His eyes never abandon my own, except when they do and I watch his gaze dip to my lips and then my neck.
Nerves that have been on some kind of summer vacation finally kick back in and I clear my throat to fill the electric silence.
The noise seems to break Halloran out of our mutual stupor. “I’m startin’ to feel really odd about my lack of shirt.”
Oh, God, I’ve objectified him. “I’d all but forgotten,” I lie. At this point I could draw the contours of his subtle abs from memory with near precision. I’m sick.
“You’re a better man than I, then,” he jokes as he pushes off the wall. “It was nice chatting with you, though. Get yourself some sleep?”
I nod, my heart a little too fluttery to respond in time.
You’re a better man than I. Does that mean he was noticing me ?
“Clem?”
“Hm?”
He’s turned around, halfway down the hall. “Best of luck with your fella. Does anyone call you Clem?”
I shake my head. “No, actually.”
His brows raise slightly and he nods to himself. “Good.”
And then he dips around a corner, one hand loosely in his pocket, the other grasped around that journal.
I’m still waterless, sliding my hotel key through the door, when I realize Halloran never managed to track down his pen.