When we got back to the apartment, Juniper stole another one of Jordaan's cigarettes. We could hear him inside, singing and playing, his wail of a tenor like a fire alarm in a cornfield.

Juniper shook her head and twisted one of her dreads. "You guys act like you're so sad, but you get what you want."

"What's that?"

"I mean," she said, grinning, "if you want something, you get it."

"Let's not go inside," I said. "Let's go get my lamp."

And that's how we ended up back in the empty living room, just the two of us, with the lamp off this time. Right when I pulled out the cord, Juniper pushed me against the wall, and pretty soon we were explicitly disobeying my landlord's order not to spill things. Shirts first. Then Juniper unhooked my belt, pulled my jeans off, my boxers. I undid her bra. We made good sounds. I stroked her nipples with my thumb. She tugged on my cock. I slid her jeans down and ran my tongue up her thigh. We kissed and bit. I didn't really like her dreadlocks (they itched; I was afraid I'd sneeze), so I didn't touch them, but they looked exciting, spread vine-like around her head.

As we kept on, I felt an odd rush of performance anxiety, different than the normal am-I-bucking-at-the-right-speed? kind of thing. Suddenly my tongue in her ear had to impart epic melancholy, every touch had to spring from some kickass urgency. The whole thing started to feel like a guitar solo.

Which signified some awful remove from the act, a lack of respect, a sheen of pure schtick on top of the regular sweat. The sex wasn't me, but a product of "work," and I felt devoted but outside of it, watching Juniper's eyes not for the cues of a lover but the cues of someone being entertained.

Hey, maybe she thought the same thing. Because she definitely wanted the ticket's worth. First, she started to twist my hair, clumps of it, jostling my head a little. I made a sound against this and she let go, but she wasn't done. She pulled me tighter on top. Then her nails latched onto my shoulder blades, and she began to scratch. Just a little at first — okay, whatever. But then more and more, until she was making big digs, purposefully, up and down my back.

"Jesus," I whispered. Unfortunately, because of the whole epic kickass urgency melancholy etc. shit, it sounded like the oh-my-god-keep-going type of "Jesus," and not what I'd intended, which was more like congratulations-you've-hit-bone.

Then she started to sing. Or whisper sing, like the sound of a flute played wrong. She sang "knife knife my life knife dance knife life" perfectly in time with what we were doing.

And of course! It's what we wanted, right? The image I'd cast: half swagger, half rain dog. Even the knife line (wherever I'd stolen it from) seemed to endorse all this. We'd broadcast such wants from the get-go, endorsed all the relevant clichés, and I had no right in this massive whammy bar of a world to feel that most pedestrian of things: uncomfortable.

"What's wrong?" she whispered.

Quickly, I decided not to admit anything. Instead, I stared at Juniper and put my finger on her lip. "What about James?" I said.

She shook her head away from me. "He's a nice guy."

"Right."

"Well." Her body stiffened, she hugged her arms over her breasts. "I didn't think you'd care about that stuff."

"He's my friend," I said, going for earnest.

"You're still hard," she said, parrying for true.

So we ended up compromising and got each other off with our hands. It was awkward and anticlimactic. I didn't know whether Juniper felt shortchanged, embarrassed, or what. All I knew is that the mythology of the encounter had been irrevocably shot. If this were the new pornography, I'd be fired after the first money shot.

When we finished, she pulled her jeans on and stood up. "Did we take any more cigarettes?" she asked.

I shook my head, sprawled naked on the carpet and looking up at her. "I don't actually smoke."

Juniper closed her eyes and smiled thinly. "You don't actually smoke," she said. "Oh, yeah."

She walked into the kitchen and stood there, hand on the screen door. That's when I saw her tattoo. I hadn't noticed it during the Great Carpet Scrape. It covered almost her entire back; black ravens ran from below her right shoulder up to the small of her neck. An unkindness of ravens, taking off, lit under the fluorescence of the kitchen and silhouetted against the night beyond the screen door. They made her the mysterious one, the desired. All those ravens reminded me why I'd fingerpicked my emotional bullshit in the first place. There I was, already flunked off a ride I hadn't honestly felt much about, and these ravens suddenly made me want her, for real, maybe for the first time all night.

But nothing happened. She walked back to the living room, we got dressed and returned to my apartment in silence. Jordaan was asleep on the couch. Juniper tied her dreadlocks in a tall bushel and took one of my windbreakers to walk home in. The next morning, I took Jordaan to the bus depot, and he asked me how it went. Great, I told him. A satisfied customer. Before he got on the bus, he gave me a strong hug. He knew I was lying. We play the same kind of music. Rock stars we ain't.

Yet, don't all kinds of music come back to desire? You see and want, carve the urges of your body into tune, trying to call someone in. Once upon a time, all the Killers and Tommy Lees of the world were kids staring at the backs of beautiful girls. Really, the trick isn't making them turn around. It's doing what you promise without feeling cheesy. Accepting what you've already done: beckoned a stranger out of the intimacy of a dark audience into an even more confident darkness. The songs — they do the work. Your job is just to live up to them. Your job is to prove they're true.  n°

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Mike Young co-edits NOÖ Journal. His short fiction and poetry appears in Coconut, Pindeldyboz, Juked, elimae, Hobart, Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years and more. He blogs at https://noojournal.com/blog and lives in Massachusetts.