Der Traum

"His idea," she would later repeat to herself. His idea. "He’d said, if you want to, we could try one of those clubs sometime, those weird ones, where you can put on a blindfold and become a glory hole or get up on a stage to be pelted with eggs and orange soda. I don’t know, I’ve never been to one, y’know. But, maybe we should try it. Maybe that would help. Know what I mean?" Like he had to convince her of something morally unsound.

He didn’t do any of the research, though—it wasn’t his browser cache to clear. She hunted, she gathered. She even did drive-bys, casing the joints, trying to determine seediness levels from black-painted exteriors and obtuse, one-word names: Velvet. Endure. Heartthrob. Eventually, she settled on Der Traum. They had sleeping beauty rooms.

"What’s that?" he asked, over breakfast.

"One person pretends to be asleep, the other person comes in and..." She twirled an et cetera in the air with her index finger.

He swallowed some eggs. "Anything?"

"I think so." She got up for more coffee. "Anything’s okay with me, if it’s you who comes in the room."

"Is that something you’d want to try?" She shrugged carefully. "If it sounds good to you."

"I guess it does," he said. "But, we could just do that here, in our own bed. You said this place is $150 an hour."

"There’s a special atmosphere there," she said. She added skim milk and barely a pinch of sugar. "They described the rooms, like the wedding scene in Phantom of the Opera."

"There was a wedding scene in that?"

Still facing the cabinet, she rolled her eyes. "When he takes her down into his lair? All those candles?"

"There’s no wedding then."

"He puts her in a wedding dress."

His knife screeched on the ceramic plate.

"But, there’s no actual wedding."

"For fuck’s sake, Chad."

"So, the rooms are, like, Gothic? With candles and red satin?"

"Yes. That is the point." She sipped the coffee and tilted her head back. The hem of her hair brushed the valley of her back.

"Cool," he said. "When?" She looked over her shoulder, her nerves electric. "What? Just like that?"

"You want to argue about it some more?" He rolled one shoulder blade up, over and

down. "Yeah, it might be fun. Shake things up."

"Well, if you think so," she said.

Inside the nondescript black street front of Der Traum, they descended velveteen stairs—the color of the plastic jewels in her earrings. Bass beat all around and under them—slow, like the opening of Dark Side of the Moon. A window, like a box office, faced them at the end of a short hallway. Tiny LED lights offered the feel of insignificant spotlights, one hollow of light after another.

"Wilkommen in der Traum," said the man behind the glass. He sported tribal neck-stretching bands and a naked shaved head. "Ihr Name?"

"Chad and Andie," she said.

The man offered a narrow, stingy smile. "Danke." He did not consult anything or even seem to move behind the pane of glass, but a door to the right opened out of a matte black wall. The hallway on the other side of the door was red, like the stairs.

"Sich amüsieren," said the shaved man, and grinned.

At the end of the red hallway was a close, low-ceiling rectangle, fogged with dry-ice smoke and the accompanying ozone stench. The room contained a dozen high-legged tables and a back bar. People in complicated garments milled about. The lighting imposed a simian brow on all occupants. Behind a tiny, dark podium stood a tiny, dark woman with a pierced septum. "Wilkommen," she said, although her accent was nothing to the shaved man’s. "Bar or room?"

"What?" he said.

"Here for a room or just to mingle?"

"A room," she said. "Chad and Andie."

"Gut," said the tiny woman and produced a skeleton key attached to a garish orange rabbit’s foot. "13F. Upstairs to the left. Don’t open any of the other doors."

"No," he said.

They went to the bar for gin and tonics. They settled at a table near a party of three—two men and a woman. The woman, her head bowed, wore a green studded collar and leash. Before her was a glass of water, no ice.

"How do we do this?" he said.

"I’ll go to the room," she said, over the knocking of her heart. "You come in ten minutes later, or so. I’ll pretend to be asleep, and then you, you know, do what you want."

The sharp-suited man holding the leash tugged briskly and the woman’s head snapped up. Andie’s lower belly clenched.

"How will I get in?"

"What?"

"If you use the key, then lie there ‘asleep’," he said with air quotes, "how will I get in?"

"It’s not a self-locking door," she said and held up the skeleton key. "I’ll just leave it open."

"What if someone else comes in?"

"They won’t."

He took a long draught of gin, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

"Are you alright?"

"Yeah, sure," he said.

"This was your idea." True, but she shouldn’t have said it. It dangled in the air.

He brushed his mouth with his fingers. "I thought it would help."

"It might," she said.

"Go on up, then," he said. "If it’s what you want."

Sweat had beaded around her temples. Her eyes kept straying to the woman in the collar. She had pearly black skin and wore no shoes. Andie wondered if she was working out some psychological-historical issue, or if this was just what she liked. She wanted to touch the woman’s face and bathe her feet.

"Alright," she said. Chad moved her drink closer to his own as she headed for the staircase next to the bar. She passed the woman in the collar, who did not look up. She smelled like hair products Andie had never used, creams and unguents with powers beyond her ken.

The hallway was full of 13s&mash;13A, 13B, 13C. A tall person in black fiddled with something on a table between doors some yards away, the lighting too murky to see what or who. The wallpaper was shiny red satin, with jacquard black velvet patterns.

13F had a big, black bed, muted red carpet and preposterous candelabra. The windows were painted over and curtained with heavy fabrics. Andie couldn’t stop noticing things. She heard only the clock-like basso pulse— no neighbors. Her palms began to sweat. ,0,,

She undressed quickly, draping her dress over a Savonarola chair. A black polyester curtain was bunched above the huge mirror over the bureau and she unfurled it for Chad’s sake—he did not think he looked dignified whilst fucking and angled their own dresser mirror away from the bed. From time to time, she bumped her toes on the odd edges.

Under the silken sheet, feather-light, she tried without success to quiet her heartbeat. The sheet maddened her nerve endings. She reached between her legs (God, she was sopping), but it seemed beside the point, somehow, or she was too keyed up to cum. So she counted her breaths and looked at the red/black jacquard ceiling. Where would you even get such wallpaper, let alone in such quantities?

The door. She lay still. Still. The lock tongue clicked in its chamber.

Footsteps...fabric rustling...him breathing.

Shoes shucked off. Her eyes shut. Casual, not squinched. Still. Still. Her cunt flamed. Quieter footsteps. The bed shifting. She loosened her neck, let her head roll a little. The sheet removed. Warm hands on her body. She stifled a shiver. Exploring, up and down and around and over and down. And down. And between. She tried not to rise to him. He moved like a masseur, his hands cupping her skin, even as they passed over it. He lifted her knees up and over, shifting her to her side to caress her back—a thick, hot bolt shot down her spine. The way he handled her. Her body a doll’s.

He came to the other side of the bed, stroked her face and plucked a strand of hair away from her mouth. He rubbed her lips with a thumb—gentle at first, and then pressing—the movement of wiping lipstick off. Her lips parted her teeth, and his thumb invaded her mouth. His other hand moved star-like up her outer thigh, the way she liked. The muscles in her vagina ached.

He shifted closer to her on the bed and drew her knees apart. She lolled onto her back, lazily. Her every cell buzzed. His thumb still occupied her mouth, but the angle changed—the bed’s center of gravity telling her that he was before her now, not to the side. His hairy legs brushed her inner thighs. Here it was. Here it was.

Just as he plunged inside, his scent caught and held in her nostrils and the red tangle of her thoughts calcified. Both his aroma and the fine pressure of his cock informed Andie all at once that it was not Chad on the bed with her. His girth and shape were different and he smelled earthier—less like Nordstrom’s cologne and more like something you couldn’t get from a bottle.

God. God. He pulled out and thrust in again, harder, in no hurry—she bit down on her scream. A protest bubbled up, told her to open her eyes and stop this stranger from fucking her, but her lax and fiery body did not listen.

His next thrust shoved her, lifted her chin and hips. She came, fiercely. He lifted her arm and arranged it across her face. Beneath it, she breathed as quietly as she could. Kept her face still. Still. Still.

It went on, for how much longer, she could not say. His pace remained excruciatingly powerful, until finally he came, with a near-imperceptible grunt, and withdrew. He closed her legs for her and placed her hands together on the flare of her ribs. Through the spin and tumble of her sensations arose the urge to open her eyes and see this man as he dressed. What his hands looked like. His face. She denied herself. The door. The lock tongue clicked in its chamber.

She lay still for several more minutes. Her sweaty palms made the skin of her abdomen itch. Her pussy leaked indiscriminately. She tried to worry about STDs, but couldn’t find it in her. She felt emptied out, clean, peaceful. She wanted chocolate cake.

Andie wiped herself with a standard white hotel towel she found in the side table and dressed. The mirror had been uncovered. She gazed into her eyes, unblinking.

Chad stood at the same table, a third drained gin and tonic, keeping the other two company. The tiny dark hostess stepped away, just as Andie walked up, and Chad made a check-you-later-babe gesture with three fingers and put that hand in his pocket. For a moment, Andie wondered if the last half-hour had been a figment of her imagination and she’d only been gone for a few minutes, while Chad ordered another drink.

"Hey," she said. He jumped—a jolt of marionette strings.

"Hey! What happened?"

"I don’t know," she said. "What happened?"

"I went up to 13F, but it was empty," he said. "I sat on the bed and waited a while, but you didn’t come."

"Huh," she said. "Me too. I went to 13F and got undressed and waited for you."

"How can that be?"

"Did you go up the wrong stairs?"

He gestured. "There’s only one set."

"That’s really weird," she said. "Maybe there are two 13Fs? And, the other one was unlocked for some reason?"

"Maybe," he said vaguely and drank. His eyes skated around the room, settling on her only once in a while. "It’s weird. And it’s too bad, we spent all this money, for both of us to sit in a room and wait."

"Yeah," she said. "It’s a shame." The collared woman had moved to another table. She glanced at them, once, and to Andie, her eyes were a mirror.

They went home and fucked, vehemently, insatiably, staying up too late. They ate Ho- Hos, drank decaf coffee in bed and fucked some more. They could barely look at each other and made no conversation. There was nothing to say.