( fic: grass-like )

[poetryslamming]

Title: Grass-like
Length: 2100 words
Rating: Explicit, lots of cursing, sexual situations
Summary: The days of man are like grass.
__________

Rosebud smells like menthol cigarettes, every-fucking-where and all the way out into the pretty, single-sex bathroom stalls. A clingy, fakely fresh stench that reminds Alexa of the clientele itself.

Clingy and fakely fresh, sounds about right.

The procedure is always the same, she arrives before midnight, while Shiori is still crooning velvet and silk into the air, to go with the mint they’re all smoking. Alexa doesn’t smoke menthols, she fishes out her own completely ordinary cigarettes, full of tobacco and other similar sins, as she sits down at the bar. Furthest away from the stage. As far away from the jazzy atmosphere as possible.

Until the clock strikes twelve, they ignore each other, Alexa and pretty much everyone else present at the club. She drowns a shot of whisky to take the edge off, chatting with the bartender over the rim of her glass and waiting for reality - the real nightclub scenery - to descend upon them.

They’re all waiting, she knows, the Rosebud Brigade just won’t admit to it. Bunch of fucking hypocrites.

*

They always meet in places where they won’t run into any of Irene’s friends, the straight and narrow ones as well as the brigadiers, God fucking forbid that they see them together and get ideas, yeah?

Alexa leans in and lights Irene’s cigarette for her. Slow, deliberate movements that she knows the other woman’s a sucker for, because in reality she wants someone to take care of her, heed her every whim, fulfill her every need. No, she doesn’t need no man, she needs Alexa and she is well aware, they both are, but Irene yearns to fit into the lipstick crowd at Rosebud - while Alexa fits in exactly nowhere.

Hashtag: Shit don’t mesh.

*

The Pigsty isn’t quiet at the best of times. It sure isn’t quiet on Saturday mornings when you most of all just want to wake up to sweet hummingbirds and honey-dozed bees buzzing in your ear. Instead Alexa is woken up by repetitive hammering on the wall by her downstairs neighbour, like, who the fuck redecorates at seven (she checks her phone, okay, fine)... twelve-thirty in the morning? She’s going to kick his fucking nuts in, shit.

Rolling out of bed, she stumbles over a box of caramelized chocolates that she has no idea how got there, because she doesn’t eat chocolate, doesn’t touch the stuff. Did she take home company last night? A look around the room offers no clues, reveals no left-behind articles of clothing, no makeup and she sure as hell doesn’t expect any notes with names or phone numbers. Talk about miracles, the day she finds one of those.

So she ignores the chocolate, leaves it to melt in the stark midday light and heads for the kitchen where there’ll be coffee, because coffee cures all ailments.

Except headaches.

*

For the fun of it, she’s begun dividing the audiences she attracts at her presentations into four subgroups. The hardcore dykes, the fourth-wave feminists (most of them teenagers), the teachers and the men - the latter group showing up only to put a face to the words that wound their precious egoes oh so fucking much.

Today she’s doing her presentation at the Pigsty’s tiny local library and not completely unexpectedly, there’s a vast majority of subdivision four present, sour male faces staring up at her from at least five of the twelve rows. The rest looks to be teacher-types.

Yeah, this is the part of her “job” that sucks.

*

Once the clock strikes midnight, Rosebud transforms. Jazz bleeds into the heavy, intoxicating beat of a true as fuck nightclub and all the brigadiers momentarily forget themselves in the pulse of their own rushing blood. They forget themselves so much that they even take note of Alexa again, always in the same way, always with the same aim. Where she looked foreign in comparison to Shiori - and how sweet is irony, how fucking cute - she is now the sole missing piece to complete their nights, these sweet lipstick lesbians with their unvoiced lust for what lies beyond the scope of their makeup mirrors.

Irene’s eyes seek her out across the room as Véronique approaches first. Alexa doesn’t break it, their eye contact, she lets her favourite girl look, lets her stare to her heart’s content while Véronique and she take to the dance floor, leaving an untouched Tequila Sunrise and an emptied tumbler with ice bits behind on the counter.

There are fingers curling into the fabric of her tank top, in time with Véronique grinding against her thigh, writhing and whirling and she could be a mouthful of smoke going up in thin air, except Alexa has it on good authority, talking from experience even, that the woman tastes a heck of a lot better than a fag.

And all the while, Irene’s eyes cling to their shadows melting into one another on the floor beneath their feet.

*

The waiter delivers two searing hot cups of coffee to their table, the liquid steaming, mirroring the smoke from Irene’s cigarette nicely. They’re a picture, the girl and her coffee. Alexa fishes her phone out of her pocket and snaps a real one with her camera without asking first, Irene catching her eyes through the lense and forming a small smile to go with the rest.

She’s so fucking beautiful.

“Make me laugh,” she orders, rather than asks. As if to top Alexa’s consent-less act from just moments before. Alexa puts her phone down next to her coffee, reaches for the cup and lifts it to her lips without any little fingers sticking out anywhere. No princess-like sipping here, okay.

“Not your fucking funny man,” she replies, shrugging.

Irene sighs and reaches for her own cup, drinks from it without saying anything else. Her smile doesn’t grow wider, there’s no show of teeth. It remains an indication of something that could be, but isn’t, never is.

Between them.

*

Alexa sits down at her minuscule kitchen table where there’s room for her elbow and her cup, that’s it. From there, she’s got a plain view of a couple of high-rise blocks and behind those, the main road through the Pigsty. It’s not a beautiful view by any stretch, but it feels like home, far removed from her parents’ suburbian lifestyle and the house she left behind so explosively at eighteen.

Sitting by herself like this, Alexa drinks her coffee in silence, checking her phone - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all her social media, pictures from Rosebud have gone up on their website and she locates herself in a fair few of them, dancing with some redhead newcomer. Well, chocolate mystery solved. She did have company last night, a short-lived affair, obviously. The girl must have slipped out before Alexa woke up. Big fucking surprise.

But hey, briefly she wasn’t alone. Who the fuck is she to complain?

Although there are only dregs left at the bottom, she takes another drink of her coffee cup.

*

He’s easy to pick out of the crowd, even if half her audience today consists of men not unlike him. Alexa knows from the first time their eyes meet that he’s the one who’ll stir trouble. Probably not the only one, but he’s gonna be the most insistent, the most obnoxious, the one that should earn her a fucking medal if she doesn’t punch him in the face. The Pigsty’s library isn’t big and her event takes up most of the western corner, so they’re all on generous display to the public who didn’t choose to show.

Meaning that she really should behave, right? Well, fuck that.

The guy in question is sitting on the second row, square-middle. Probably named something starting with Jean (because everyone with a dick is around here) and clad in a sleek work suit that doesn’t really fit into the Pigsty demographic, but she imagines he lives on the outskirts of the area where the relatively big houses are relatively cheap. In his right hand, he’s holding her poetry collection like it was some kind of shield. Alexa feels fucking sorry for the poor book, having to uphold such a douche’s sense of security.

They both get through her recital and her brief introduction without crossing blades, but when the Q&A starts, Alexa can tell it’s crunch time. He raises his hand, the one with her book in it. Yeah, he raises his hand and he smiles in the most sickeningly polite way.

“Why waste your time hating on men, when you could do something constructive for women instead?”

Oh, he went for the Nice Guy angle. Ain’t that fucking sweet.

It comes to her in the form of a poem and she wonders briefly if she’ll really have to remember the shit she’s about to dump on him or if the librarians are filming this, in any case she runs with it, she beats every word as she speaks them as if it were some poetry slam night. She replies:

I hate on men
because there’s so much to hate
about them

I hate the way they raise their fists
to strike us
down

I hate the way they hold on
to their privileges
and in the process
keep us
down

I hate on men because
they really do think
no means yes
and yes means anal

I hate on men because they
take and take and take
without asking
our permission

I hate on men because it’s
necessary to climb
the walls they’ve built
to improve the conditions
of women

I hate on men
as we know them
because they are an obstruction
and they need to be surgically removed

before the fight can ever be over

Silence follows.

Monsieur Smart Suit’s hand slowly sinks, her book landing gently, softly in his lap where it doesn’t even want to be, because his dick is somewhere nearby and Alexa is breathing hard through her mouth, putting her microphone down. They look at each other. Neither of them avert their gazes.

He scoffs, then. And she smiles.

K.O.

*

In the end, it’s just the two of them. Véronique and Alexa. Stumbling up against the tiled end wall of the bathroom, currently deserted, Véronique utters something in French under a heavy intake of breath, distorting the words until they’re unrecognisable to Alexa’s ear. Not that she cares. She’s busy fucking the other girl with two fingers buried in her to the knuckles and Véronique keeps flexing her hips so fucking nicely to meet her thrusts. Even now, she smells like menthols. Well, menthols and pussy, the latter drowning out the first just enough, just enough.

In her pocket, her phone vibrates and she’s pretty damn sure it’s Irene trying to get her attention, but Alexa always gets a certain degree of tunnel vision when she’s having sex. At this very moment, Irene doesn’t exist, for all Alexa cares, she can go fuck herself, because Alexa is busy fucking Véronique, isn’t she? And Véronique is starting to clench up, her final exhalation sounding more like a sob.

“Yeah,” Alexa moans against the side of her face. “It’s okay, come on...”

Shaking and stuttering and sighing, Véronique climaxes around her fingers and it’s the same feeling every time. A momentary sense of inner peace, of love, of belonging. Complete and utter zen. Alexa is panting hard, her breath leaving traces of wetness against Véronique’s cheek and Véronique eventually does get to her knees to reciprocate, but the feeling doesn’t return, it escapes her and when Alexa comes, it’s to the knowledge that this moment in time is over, it’s done.

Véronique gets to her feet. Dries off her mouth with a napkin she fishes out of her pocket, careful not to ruin her makeup further. They don’t say anything else to each other. They fix their own clothes, they check their reflections in the mirror and then, they return to the main room. On the way, Alexa pulls out her phone.

You always make the worst choices, Irene writes.

Watching Véronique’s back as it once more disappears in the crowd on the dancefloor, like nothing of essence has taken place in between then and now, Alexa is partial to agreeing.

At Rosebud, the night fades into a trivial familiarity that carries on until dawn.