Chapter Five • Hyperfixation • Lillith #2
“Oh, I like him, Lil,” Naomi says. I try to snatch the card out of her hand and she lifts it way above my head. “Nuh-uh. I’m not letting you sabotage king behavior. I’ll be right back.” She says the last bit to Damien.
Damien grasps my thighs from where he’s sat behind me and pulls me down onto his lap. Binx stares at us. After squinting one more time, he says. “Wait, you said you’re a musician?”
Oh. No. No, no, no. Binx has been subjected to so many of my late night hyperfixations, particularly the ones where I swoon over the vascularity of Damien’s hands.
The ones with visual aids. The ones where I scroll through Damien’s feed and zoom in on his perfect hands, or pine over the Pinterest boards devoted to them.
“Yeah,” Damien says. “My band’s on tour. Portent.”
“Oh, you’re the one Lillith is totally in love with, then,” Binx says as if he’s realizing Damien and I are wearing the same colors and not spilling that I absolutely gush about this man to randos in public. “Lillith watched me draw your hands a whole bunch a couple months ago.”
I’m absolutely frozen in horror. Time slows.
Damien leans over me, waiting for me to look at him. When I do, his lips are curled in the most self-satisfied, smug, shit-eating grin that has ever been seen on this plane of existence. “Did she?” he asks.
Binx is so focused on flipping back through his sketchbook that he doesn’t notice the horror on my face or the glee in Damien’s. “Uh-huh,” he says as he goes almost all the way to the front of his sketchbook and lets out a pleased sound. “Here it is,” he says.
“Binx—N—”
“Oh yeah! Let me see,” Damien says eagerly.
Binx hands him the open sketchbook where about ten copies of Damien’s hands in various positions stretch before us like a fucking scarlet letter.
There are some where he’s holding a drumstick, one where he’s mid-spin.
A pair of sketches of his fingers latticed together, like in that photos where he’s got his hands hanging between his bent knees.
One picture focuses on the vascular lines of his blacked-out hand.
“It was really cute,” Binx says. “She begged me to give her the pages, but I told her she’d have to wait ‘til I finished this one. When you rip two pages out, it ruins the signatures and makes the binding loose. Makes it a nightmare to draw in.”
I hide my face in my hands, groaning. It keeps getting worse.
“You’re really talented, man,” Damien says. “Do you do this professionally?”
“No,” Binx says. “I make really good money as a researcher.”
“You could make good money doing this too,” Damien says. “Tattoos or prints or something. How can I get in touch with you about making this a print for our band?”
“Oh, Lil has my email,” Binx says. “That would be really cool. I can do the hands of all the bandmates if you want.”
“Sick, I’ll be in touch, man,” he says, handing the book back to him.
I look at Binx as he retreats with a pleased little smile on his face.
I’ve been telling him to pursue art forever and of course he only listens to Damien when he says it.
I glare at Binx’s back as he settles into his hyperfocus again.
I feel Damien twist a lock of hair around his two forefingers as he whisper into my ear.
“Someone has had a little crush for long, long while,” he husks against the shell of my ear.
A little chill rolls through me, and I can feel how red my face is as I meet his gold-green gaze. He still looks so self-satisfied. It makes me want to throw one of the books he just bought me right at his head.
“I-is that a problem?” I stammer out with all of the false bravado I can muster.
“Only if it’s a problem that I’m already just as obsessed with you as you seem to be with me,” he says, brushing some of my hair behind my ear. “Is that fine by you?”
All of my fight drains out of my body. “If you keep saying stuff like that, I’m going to think you mean it,” I whisper.
“Do you think I’d be sitting with you at one in the morning in a bookshop, perfectly content to watch you read those door stoppers while I massage your feet if I wasn’t head-over-heels in like with you?” he asks.
“You don’t have to massage my feet.”
“Are you yucking my yum, Lillith?” he asks. “Shying away from my foot fetish when I didn’t even bat an eye at your blood kink? That’s rude.”
“Oh my god. I don’t. Have. A blood kink.”
He manhandles me a bit until my legs are draped over his lap. He starts untying my knee-high boots. “Stop changing the subject, beautiful,” he says. “Those books aren’t going to read themselves.”
I balk at him. “Damien—you don’t have to—”
“If you finish that sentence, I’m going to massage your back, too,” he says, quite literally threatening me with a good time.
Naomi returns with Damien’s card, which he pauses his unlacing to accept. “Thanks,” he says as he slips it back into his wallet and continues his work of freeing my feet from the boots.
My feet... are a little sore, I guess. And if he really does have a foot kink, I guess it’s only fair that I let him indulge in it after lusting over his perfect hands for so long.
I nibble on the inside of my lower lip for a moment or two, but finally give in.
Settling back onto a pile of cushions against the armrest picking up one of the books Naomi set aside for me.
It’s an analysis of the Corpus Hermeticum by a celebrated scholar of the occult.
I’ve been really into reading about the Hermeticists lately.
They get a lot of magic stuff wrong, but they have some really interesting approaches to ceremonial magic that I think I can make good use of if I tweak a few things here and there. “Should I read it out loud?” I ask him.
“Nah,” he says. “I probably won’t understand a text that dense, anyway. Just keep me in the loop for the interesting stuff, yeah?”
I smile at him as he pulls out my left foot. I forgot I was wearing my neon pink Kuromi socks, but he looks absolutely charmed by them as he digs his capable hands into the tender arch of my foot.
“Kuromi is the baddest bitch of all, you know?” he says, totally disarming my self-loathing before it can start.
It’s just what I need to settle into the comfort he’s offering me. I open the book and start reading.