Adult Diversion. 10 p.m.
--
That was the text Ian received sometime close to midafternoon, inviting him to Sera's next show. Adult Diversion is a dive bar on East Colfax, not far from the Ogden. The place is in a basement - this steep clatter of concrete stairs and iron railings leading to a narrow concrete apron of a courtyard where folks can loiter and smoke in fine whether or shiver and smoke in cold weather. Bouncer standing at the door with a cauliflower ear and a gold tooth where his canine should be and a black-painted door that opens into an impressive little space, vaulted like a wine cellar or a speakeasy, bookshelves on the wall where the hightops are scattered, a big, impressive bar dominating a somewhat small space that opens into a slightly bigger performance space in the back. This pair of pool tables and a small, open dance floor that isn't quite big enough to get a true mosh pit going but on Punk Rock Tuesdays (hand-written in chalk on the UPCOMING SHOWS board) someone always tries to throw arms and elbows and maybe even stage dive.
The crowd is exactly what you expect in a place like this. Eclectic, varied. Bright and lively at nine or nine-thirty, when the kitchen closes, turning somehow both bright and darker as the alcohol really starts to flow.
They take the stage at 10:15 or so. Play a forty-five minute set - reeling, varied, covers to originals and originals that everyone in the crowd thinks are covers because the people to whom they've sold songs - well. Dan knows what the fuck he's doing when he writes a song, and sometimes even Serafíne does too. They have such a chemistry, the tight little foursome. Dan's a killer guitarist and Dee kinda hangs back on the bass and lays it down and there's nothing flashy about Rick on the drums but sometimes you wonder what it is that keeps them going, why they are so fucking good on stage even as the lead singer herself is keeping lost and finding threads and stopping and starting and clearly not-sober and, if the bottle in her hand is any indication, rapidly becoming even more not-sober. There's a fifteen minute set break in the middle when they come back and play for another forty-five minutes or so, which is a helluva lot more material than most unsigned, unknown, unheralded bands can throw on stage.
Something about their presence: something about the night or the room or the way they work. The way they know each other, swing it and swing out and swing it, they way they know her says that maybe being: unsigned, unknown, unheralded is a goddamned choice.
But god, she's scintillating. The light loves her sharp features, her spare frame, her long limbs. Catching bright and hard against the fine bones and delicate arches, the dark dark eyes. Sera does have a guitar and she plays it sometimes and sometimes she slings it around to her back and holds onto the mic with one hand and the neck of her bottle with the other and croons, so softly you can hear every rasping breath.
The two songs are both covers: Lily and Parrots and then Tonight the Sky, both by Mark Kozelak. They play up that big-ass riff and make it louder and louder and even Sera needs her goddamned guitar to carry the line so that Dan layer in the scintillating runs over it, but then the vibe changes, rotates, slows and Sera gets rid of the guitar once and for all. Picks up the bottle. Grabs the mic, just sings. Tonight the sky will open for you / Mountains and big clouds divide us in two.
Then it is over, over for good and Sera waits for just a few seconds of the applause that comes before she turns to slide the strap for her guitar over her head and hands it off to Dee or Dan then jumps off the stage as if she handn't just spent hours on her feet in five inch heels. Walks in those things as if they didn't do a goddamned thing to hobble or shorten her gate. Slips through the crowd like water, headed toward the bar and probably Ian. She needs another drink.
IanWhen Ian arrived at the bar, he was alone. There'd been a moment, maybe, when he'd considered bringing someone else. But Emma didn't like dive bars and Jae-shin didn't like bars in general and Elijah was already going to be spending the weekend with him as it was. More to the point, Ian was the sort of person who could get away with going to a concert alone. So he did.
He didn't try to grab Sera's attention while they played. Perhaps she noticed him, standing back by the bar with his mouth close to the ear of some girl he'd just met. Or later, dancing in the crowd with said same girl. Perhaps he was just another beating heart in the room. Another force of life and will and vitality. People tended to blend together when you were on stage, becoming this interconnected, singular being. Ian was familiar enough with the interplay between performer and audience. The mutual exchange of energy.
Sera, and her band, were a revelation. Hardly a surprise, given what Ian had seen of them before, but that made it no less of an experience. As the hours passed, Ian drifted back and forth between the bar and the stage. He had a drink when he came in, but after that he stuck to water (partly because he was dancing, and because the room was hot with the press of bodies, but also because he had to be up at 5am the next day.) The girl he ended up gravitating toward was a few years younger than him - a college student from UCB who'd driven in for the weekend with her friends. They talked a bit, but mostly they just enjoyed the performance. Before she left, she gave him her number.
By the time Sera concluded her final song, Ian was back at the bar, leaning against the counter without bothering to inhabit a seat. He was dressed pretty casually, by his standards. Skinny jeans in raw denim and a black t-shirt. The boots he had on were one of his older pairs. A bit scuffed in places. Possibly splashed with spilled beer at some point in the night. There were leather bracelets on his left wrist. Wherever his coat was, it wasn't with him.
He met Sera's eyes as she approached the bar, smiling in this way that seemed lit with coiled energy. His shirt smelled like beer and pot, neither of which had come from him. The rest of him smelled like expensive hair and skin products and some kind of subtle cologne with woody and citrus notes.
"Are you always that fucking amazing?"
Serafíne"Flatterer," Sera riposts, meeting Ian's eyes and she can meet his eyes because they are nearly of a height with her five inch heels on. They're black, nearly but not quite stilettoed, covered in a bristle of studs and spikes enough that they could double as a medieval torture device. The bottle she has in hand is whiskey, maybe a quarter of it remains, and it sloshes around as she approaches the bar, too close because she likes to be close.
Inhales, there, the musk of marijuana, the spilled drinks. Inhales again the scents beneath it, and does it in a way that would tell Ian she is - naturally - fucked up even if he hadn't just watched her drain that bottle over the course of the night.
"Course we are," she murmurs, leaning in to brush her mouth over the apex of his cheekbone. She was wearing a short pink dress covered in a fine print of cartoonish little bumblebees with garters and fishnets but midway through the performance she got too hot and peeled down the bodice of the dress to let it hang at her waist. Beneath: this sweet little black bra with these scalloped cups like shells or Frence madeleines, and of course her tattoos. The ink on her bicep and forearm, the ink crawling beneath her right breast and drifting over her right shoulder blade, tight against her ribs, and on and on. All blackwork.
"Thank you for coming," she continues, murmurs when they're close, and she smells like sweat and whiskey and her eyes are little bit unfocused so maybe there's something else in her blood, too. Smiles around the thought and lolls back a bit and pushes the bottle aside to make room for her ass because, "I wanna sit on the bar. Will you pick me up? And, fuck. Tell me how you know Justin."
IanIan probably (no, more than certainly) wasn't the strongest person in the room. For all that his physique spoke of wired and elegant athleticism, he wasn't muscular in the way of, say, a football player. But Sera, despite her heels, was a fairly petite creature. And Ian had... rather a lot of experience with lifting people. Knew how to do it so he put the tension in the right muscles. Knew how to make it look graceful, even. So when she asked him to lift her up, he set his hands firmly on either side of her waist and hefted her onto the counter in a smooth motion that made it look as though he was expending less energy than he actually was.
(Thank you for coming.)
"Of course." He let the rest of his reply hang a moment, setting his hands on the bar on either side of Sera's legs. Leaning there, slightly in her space but still perched far enough away that he could pull back and give her room if she wished it.
"I met him while I was performing in Madison over Christmas."
SerafíneOh, Sera is a spare thing. Sinew and sharp, fine little bones. Sometimes she spends her days drinking and drinking and forgets to do anything so prosaic as eating. Sometimes she fasts, perhaps even purges, because it feels like ritual.
Someone once told her about ritual, so.
Tonight, though, Ian lifts her up and can feel her inhale, can feel her laughter - incipient, lateral - through her body, the promise of it in the tension of the muscles flanking her waist. Her skin is warm, even hot, and damp with sweat that darkens the snaking tendrils of her dyed curls.
She smells like sweat. Sweat and whiskey and Chanel No. 5. Sweat, whiskey, Chanel No. 5 and a fast-beating heart.
This release of tension in her toes and both shoes drop to the floor of the bar. Ian's in her space, but she doesn't seem to object. Not now, not yet.
"How is he?" she asks, leaning forward like she wants to bump foreheads. Like she needs a fulcrum against which she might sway. "Did you guys fuck?"
IanHow is he?
Ian grew quiet at the question. Sera leaned forward until their foreheads nearly touched, letting her shoes drop to the floor. Like she was uncoiling, unwinding. Ian met her eyes for a few seconds, and there was something unfathomable in the velvet darkness of his gaze.
Then she asked if they'd fucked, and he laughed. It was, perhaps, the obvious question, given who she was talking to.
"A few times." He leaned down to collect her shoes, setting them neatly on the empty barstool to his left. "And he seems to be doing fine. As far as I can tell. He's saving up to buy some property outside of town. Said he wants to get into organic farming." Ian said this like it was just about the least exciting thing he could think of to do with one's life. "I think maybe he's a little lonely. But... who isn't."
Serafíne"I miss Justin. I miss a fucking lot of people."
This ghost of a half-smile chases quicksilver across her mouth. Yeah she started the night with dark dark eyes and crimson lipstick but the lipstick is long since gone, left behind is just a faint berry-colored stain more evident when she seams her mouth than when she smiles. And she watches Ian lean down for her shoes and swings her legs a bit as he rises and her half-smile deepens or sharpens into something like real pleasure when Ian tells her that he and Justin had sex.
But her gaze dampens, banks a bit when Ian goes on, says something about organic farming and tells Sera that maybe Justin's a bit lonely and who isn't?
Her gaze hooks and her gaze hoods and something -
"You aren't lonely, are you?"
IanThe thing about sensation is that, when it's constant, you stop noticing it. Like a teenage boy who can't smell the potent stench of hormones in his bedroom, or an older woman whose joint pain is so omnipresent that she stops realizing it's the reason she's always in a bad mood. The thing is still there. You still experience it. But you don't think about it anymore. It becomes the baseline.
Ian glanced at Sera's eyes. Her lips. Watching the way her expression fell. There was something a little sharp and a little too sleek about Ian's expression. The way he slid past the question. The way he didn't really answer it.
"I think that, compared to most people, I'm pretty fucking privileged in that regard." There was literally an entire library of numbers in his phone that he could dial if he wanted to get laid. Not that he needed to ask, really. Things like that usually just happened to him. "And anyway, I don't mind being alone."
That much, at least, was genuine.
"Are you?"
SerafínePerception plus awareness-as-empathy: oh are you avoiding the question?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9) ( success x 4 )
Ian[What, me? Not give a straight answer? Surely not.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 7, 7, 8, 8, 9, 10) ( success x 6 )
SerafíneSera watches Ian's sharpened gaze so closely and so carefully and she watches him with a regard that could perhaps verge on the tender, and this time that tenderness belongs entirely to him, and no on. Searches the nuance of expression in his face, chasing the bits that seem -
oh, elusive.
Her eyes drop from his face. She glances away, her profile stark against the soft, warm impression of the bar. The bustle of humanity, the haze of the soundsystem, the bartender behind her who tests the bottle she pushed aside before Ian lifted her up to the bar and decides that: yes, there is still drinkable alcohol left. A shot or two or three.
And she asks if he is lonely and he deflects and his deflection is so practiced and so polished and so - something, that it makes her feel a little bit more lonely so she cuts her eyes away and he has a brief impression of her delicate profile, the vulnerable column of her throat.
"Yeah." She says, then, with a tight little cut of her shoulders in a shrug. "'Course. Maybe not so often as you'd think, and more regularly than I'd like." This impression of tears ghosting over the surface of her eyes. I miss Hawksley. I miss alot of people."
A beat. Then: "What'll you do if I kiss you, now."
IanIan had to know, at least a little, that keeping someone like Sera at a distance could be harmful. Almost even a little cruel. Or maybe he didn't know. Maybe for him, distance meant safety. (And not only for himself.) But he'd been more honest with other people before. Kalen. Elijah. Kiara, even. (And what did they have in common? Was sex really the only way to get him to act like a fucking person? Perhaps it was just the easiest way to start.)
But then, Sera had to know, at least a little, that trying to force someone like Ian to be vulnerable could also be harmful. Maybe even a little cruel.
Or maybe she didn't know.
But, give her credit. Sera answered the question. Maybe she was the stronger of the two, for all that she always seemed so perilously close to breaking apart. Ian didn't react to the admission as coldly as one might expect. Nor did he attempt to question her further. There was just this lingering look. Softer than it had been a moment ago - sharpness melting into something reserved and gentle.
What'll you do if I kiss you?
"You're drunk," he said quietly. "So... not much." It wasn't a statement of judgment, but of caution. She was not sober. He was. That was an imbalance. "But you won't know unless you try."
Serafíne"I spent Christmas day alone," and her voice is low and her voice is raw and her voice is rich and she does always seem to be falling apart. She is is a permanent state of falling apart and somehow both her body and her soul retain the strangest sort of integrity. This hint of deflection because she isn't precisely looking at him so much as some piece of the bar, some passing hint of skin. A stranger's curving shoulder, a stranger's vulnerable through. Her own, swallowing. The sheen of her sweat starting to dry makes her shiver and the floor seems to very fucking far away.
"Flew back from London a few days before and went to Kiara's party and Dan didn't know I'd be home 'til I was and he'd already made plans to see his folks and I was like fuck it you have to go. Home, you know?
"And I went to mass the night before but not all of it because sometimes that shit pisses me off, and that night I went out and I picked up this guy and brought him home. He didn't stay. Wanted to be there for presents in the morning, had a kid brother who still believed in Santa and everyone else was gone and the house was empty and I woke up in the predawn and it was just my breath and it was just my heartbeat and it made me - "
A brief, quick breath.
"I went and slept in Dan's bed. Then I had a party starting that night, and the first person who came over was Emily and she was done with everything Christmas except cocktails and sugar-rims and more people and more people, and I fucked loved it, but I still missed the people who were gone."
Sera's half-closed eyes open again here. She hums, beneath her skin, opens her eyes and opens her legs and leans forward - sharply, swaying in a way that seems dangerous, and yes, she's drunk. she's probably something else as well and she kinda starts to laugh when she feels the world upend itself and she leans forward one more time until their brows touch.
And she kisses him: gently. Tenderly.
Open-mouthed.
Tastes like whiskey and smoke and magick, does our Sera.
IanAnd just like that, it all spilled out. The story of what Sera did for Christmas. And Ian always had been better at listening than he was at speaking. He didn't know the details of her life - not really. But he remembered these things that she told him. Used them to piece together bare sketches in his mind.
She didn't say anything about her own family.
And then she kissed him. She was sitting on the bar and Ian was standing with his hands still planted on the edge of the counter by her knees. When she opened her legs, he let his hands fall back to his sides and stepped closer. The act was instinctive, moving into her space as she invited him into it. Letting her gravity draw him there. Their foreheads met. His breath was warm against her mouth. Both of them smelled like whiskey tonight, but his was muted. Mostly washed away. His hair smelled like a high-end salon. His clothes smelled like the bar. Two pieces of his life, slotted together - not quite in sync. But... human.
He kissed her back. Open and slow, controlled and surrendered at the same time. His eyes slid shut when their lips met. When he tasted the whiskey on her tongue. A beat later, his hand found its way into her hair, threading into the longer strands to feel the slope of her scalp beneath his fingers. There was a subtle press to keep her close (even if only for a moment,) and his other hand came to rest on her hip. Pressed his thumb just slightly into the soft tissue of her abdomen.
When he pulled away, he ran his tongue over the swell of her lower lip, as though to reclaim some of the taste he'd left there.
"I usually spend Christmas alone. This year, I spent it with a guy who was too nice to be with someone like me. He made me stuffed french toast and egg nog and I let him fuck me. Then we walked in the woods for like two hours and I tried not to think about the fact that I had my first real kiss in those same fucking woods."
SerafíneThe bar is a great blur around them, all that noise. The cacophony of conversations distant and near have a watercolor uncertainty, but create a kind of music that fuses somehow both within and beneath the beat of music pulses through the soundsystem. Right now a cheery Saint Pepsi dance number which is a strange little counterpoint to what passes between them. No one in the bar who knows her will be surprised to see Sera perched on the bar proper kissing a near-stranger. Hell, strangers aren't surprised, either. She just feels like that kind of girl. That's how the world bends itself around her. How she wraps herself up in it. How she sinks her teeth into its skin.
The kiss ends and Sera breathes out half-a-laugh and gasps in another breath. She's smiling. The world is spinning, and she likes the way it runs around the axis of her body. Likes the way it sets her loose. Likes this too: her shadow over Ian's face, the twist of his fingers through her damp curls, the warmth of his hand on her hip. She stays close, brow to brow if he allows it, because moving now might break whatever spell has been worked around them and one of her hands comes up to his face, fingers stippled on his jaw, thumb against his cheekbone. Wrinkles her nose like she might just give him Eskimo kisses.
But no, "What the fuck - " she's laughing, all on an exhale, whiskey on her breath, " - gets stuffed into toast. Turkey? French toast. Snails and brie?" Then a moment where she's inhaling, slantwise, reflective.
Inhale, inhale. Consider: and realize that - no - she's not going to puke. That makes her smile, too.
"Why didn't you wanna think about your first real kiss?" Kisses him then, again. Nothing close to chaste, but not so lingering. "I like to think about mine."
IanThis is the trouble with memories. Seemingly innocuous details get all twisted up with the things that break your heart. Sera laughed at the notion of stuffed french toast, which made Ian grin because he'd been skeptical of it too at the time. Their foreheads were close, touching so that she could splay her hand along his jaw. He left his own hand on her hip, but released the hold he had on her hair so that he could run the tips of his fingers down past the curve of her throat - this light, exploring gesture that traced the pattern of her pulse.
"Strawberries, actually."
Sera wrinkled her nose, which was... fucking adorable.
Then she asked him why he didn't want to think about his first real kiss. Ian seemed perfectly content to let their lips meet again - to fall into that second kiss rather than contemplate an answer. But Sera didn't linger.
Ian pulled back slightly. Let his hands come to rest on the bar again. He lifted his eyes to meet hers. To actually look at her. To take in the way the light in the bar made her eyes shine.
"Sometimes good memories hurt more than the bad ones." He breathed out softly; let some of the heaviness settle in his shoulders. "What was yours like?"
SerafíneSera's eyes are a dark, dark blue, framed by these rather straight brows and dark make-up. The pupils are ever-so-slightly engorged. Light-hungry in the dark bar, perhaps, or maybe she's on something more than just the whiskey he watched her down tonight.
Maybe she's always on something.
And there's this shutter-stop moment when Ian pulls back, settles his hands on the bar and looks at her - really looks at her - and her focus is interval, not quite caught up with his outward shift and she both looks and feels like she's floating, as if there were nothing beneath her ass or her hands and she was going to either fall or take flight.
"Katie O'Connor. She had freckles everywhere." Still smiling, Sera, and shining with it, though it is a very different sort of smile than one might expect - internal, integral and yeah - okay - maybe a little bit sad. Doesn't alcohol make everyone maudlin, though? "Everywhere I got to see, anyway. Nighttime, and we snuck off to the chapel. In the sacristy - these big leaded glass windows. Almost all the other ones were stained glass, but these were clear and the full moon shining through the dark woods outside cast these shadows that were long and strange and made it feel kinda like we were submerged, you know? Underwater.
"What about you?"
IanThe ghost of a smile traced its way over Ian's features while he listened to Sera talk about her first kiss. (About Katie O'Connor and her freckles.) That smile melted away when she rebounded the question back to him, and for a long moment it seemed as though he might not answer.
"Naomi Alvarado. She was on the track team, but I didn't know that so I let her goad me into a race. She won. Barely." There was a flicker of something in his voice there. And edge of some old, forgotten warmth. "Anyway, we'd been hanging out a lot since both of us were in this play together, and things were getting... you know. How it is when you're fifteen and you meet someone you really like. So we were lying in the grass just trying to breath and she looked... perfect."
That small admission made his voice go still for a moment, and he glanced over Sera's shoulder. Behind her, rows of glass bottles decorated the wall, reflecting a slippery sheen of muted ambient light.
"I should have kissed her then. But I was being a stupid kid about it, so I didn't. I kissed her later when we were walking through the woods and ended up by this little creek. After she told me she wanted to be a musician and I found out we had the same favorite song. It wasn't actually my first kiss. But... it was the first one that scared me, and the first one that turned me on. So... it's the first one that mattered."
That wasn't true, precisely. But people place different kinds of emphasis on different kinds of milestones.
SerafíneHi Ian, what are your feels?
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 9, 9) ( success x 4 ) [WP]
Ian[Let's see, can we get, like, a middling amount of successes? Diff 8 because reasons.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN8 (1, 4, 5, 5, 8, 9, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 ) Re-rolls: 2
Ian[IAN WHY]
SerafíneEven with her drowning eyes, Sera is watching Ian so closely in those moments. Her breath is withheld and her body relaxed, spare shoulders rounded forward, goosebumps rising here and there as her sweat evaporates, chilling her bare skin. One of her bra straps has started to ride its way down the curve of her arm but the other remains solidly fixed, bisecting the bitewing of her left clavicle. Each breath she takes is a lesson in tension and movement - the concave hollow at the base of her throat, the flicker of her dark lashes against the curve of her flushed cheek. The way she closes her mouth, inhales, opens it, and breathes out again.
Somewhere in the middle of Ian's storytelling Sera has matched both arms around his neck. Her elbows or maybe her forearms rest on his shoulders, her fingers are laced behind, thumbs drifting vaguely through the dark fringe of his hair.
And Sera's smiling, and she makes this noise like yeah, she totally knows what it is like when you're fifteen and you meet someone you really like, and hell, she probably does know. Can absorb it through the pores of her skin if someone's giving her enough energy, though somehow - that isn't what is happening here.
That makes her mouth quirk. And it makes her ache and it makes her a little bit sad and it makes her a little bit something else, she doesn't quite know what, she doesn't always names things.
Doesn't feel the need to.
Maybe, she thinks, it changes them.
It doesn't matter. She's so drunk that her eyes are bleary and unfocused, and shining, shining. Brighter than before.
"Hey Ian?"
IanSometimes he wasn't even aware of it - the way he starved people out. Gave them truth without emotion. Or emotion without the truth to give it meaning. (He was like that with so many things - as though he could only bear to be so open. As though intimacy was a heavy thing that could only be carried in pieces.) Sera was smiling because she knew - of course she did - what it was like to be a teenager falling in love. But Ian's smile did not quite manage to take hold. They were in a bar and the music was... not right. Not what he would have chosen to underscore the story he was telling.
It came out too easily. Too ordinary. And somehow that felt like a betrayal. (Of Naomi, and of everything that had come after.) But if it hadn't - if he'd told it differently - it may not have come out at all.
He let the moment be what it was. Let Sera fold her arms around his shoulders. And inevitably she said his name and he met her eyes again.
"Yeah?"
Serafíne"You should kiss me again." Sera is leaning forward again and maybe she's swaying a bit. Maybe having her arms around his shoulders steadies her. This time they are not precisely brow to brow. The bridge of her nose against his cheekbone, her mouth edging toward his ear. Her voice is quiet and a little bit raw. She was singing - sometimes screaming - up on that stage for the better part of two hours, so if there is a sandpaper edge to her voice, well. There's a perfectly ordinary explanation written into the history of the night.
"Maybe a lot? I like to make out." A short breath out. It sounds like a laugh, and hell, maybe it is.
Or maybe she has her own mysteries, too.
"Then I think you should go."
IanHuman lives were messy things. Somehow they always seemed messier in bars.
But here - see? They were talking. And the space between them was so small. And whatever he felt, Ian's body was warm and alive and his heart was strong enough - vital enough - to keep him there. To keep him grounded in space. To keep him hungry for things like the taste of whiskey on Sera's lips. Sera's skin had the salt-tang scent of sweat and Ian leaned his face into it - brushed his nose up the side of her neck to nuzzle behind her ear and just fucking breath her in. The pheromones and body chemistry that made up her pattern.
You should kiss me again.
His answer was to do exactly that. And this time it was less an act of measured sensuality than it was an immediate drive to be closer to another human being. And he pressed himself into her space - between her legs until his hips bumped against the bar - when his mouth opened against hers.
He kept kissing her until either she wished to pull away or the passage of time drew to a point where he was forced to do so (lest poor Elijah be left stranded alone on a mountain the next day.) Then he settled his tab with the bartender and left to find his way back to his apartment.
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