Page 45 of Dirty Chorus

I’m singing, but the words are blurring and I’m losing them and I think I’m losing myself.

My mouth drifts to her neck. Her skin smells faintly of vanilla and nerves. When I press my lips to the crease of her throat, she trembles. When I bite, she whimpers. My hands are steady, but my body isn’t. Blood rushes south, and my chest tightens, and my dick is granite with the kind of hunger I can’t let her see. I should pull away. I should remember the cameras, the crew, the reason we’re here.

But all I can think about is how her body feels against mine, how close we are, how easy it would be to lose every bit of self-control I have left.

When my hands slide up and curve gently around the base of her neck, she gasps. It’s barely audible over the music, but I feel it, the vibration of it under my palms, the shiver that runs down her spine. She’s shaking. And I’m falling apart.

As I sing into the hollow of her throat, every note tastes like sin. I can already imagine how she’d sound, and what she’d look like under me on a bed of cotton. The devil’s louder in my head than God right now. If Charlie asked me to sleep with her, if she even whispered the word please... I know I’d give in.

We end up running through the song three times before Tony signals for the mud.

We do small increments at a time, and it’s freezing to the touch as if pounds of ice cubes are pouring over me. Charlie shivers, her teeth chattering. I have to do the same thing, lightly choking her as I sing into her ears, my hands running down the center of her sternum between her breasts. Her chest heaves in and out, and I think it’s gotten to her, as she loses her posture and grabs a chunk of my hair, yanking until my hair follicles are on fire.

Our last shots were all of us drenched in mud, playing the song on repeat. I’m exhausted from hearing my own voice. I’m a bit irked with all of our equipment lathered in creamy grey mud.

“I think we got it.” Tony throws his hand in the air, signaling he’s got all the footage he wants, and he turns off the music. “This is going to be interesting, putting it all together.” He throws a towel onto my chest. “You two have some intense chemistry.”

“Yeah, you were basically fucking her on set. Damn,” Vince adds in.

“Thanks for filling in,” Omen says dryly to Charlie with his jaw twitching.

“No problem.” She briefly smiles at them.

The guys clean up the mud, pulling apart the backdrop. Charlie and I sit in old lawn chairs on the backside of the record store in the darkness of night. She’s got the hose, rinsing off her toes and legs. Clumps of mud are in my eyebrows and hair. It stings as globs get in my eyes. The towel isn’t much help as all it does is smear it around.

“That was fun,” I say.

She struggles like me trying to get the mud off her face. It’s clumped in her hair, and completely ruined her spiral curls. “Yeah, you were great...” She smiles with dried tan smudges around her dimples. When I inhale, I breathe nothing but Charlie, and the lingering aroma of strawberries and vanilla.

“So... umm...” She curls her fingers around the fibers of the towel. “My mom is going to kill me if I get mud all over the car seat, and I’m not sure how she’ll react to how I look. There will be questions.”

“You want to shower?”

She nods. I signal her to follow me up to the apartment. The guys have the store mostly cleaned up, and I’m sure they won’t mind me disappearing for five minutes. I lead her up the stairs, and mud drops off us like autumn leaves, leaving a trail the entire way up. When we walk in, mud litters the floor.

Gramps lies in his recliner, mouth wide open as he snores and Law and Order plays on full blast, resounding off the wall. The bird clock on the wall says it’s past ten, and it’s around that time he passes out for good.

I find a clean towel in the closet, leading Charlie to the bathroom. The door clicks and the shower kicks on.

I head to my bedroom and get out of my clothes, saturated in mud, and throw them into my hamper. I already dread what it will do to the washer. I pace around my room, wearing only my boxers and chewing on my thumb, with gritty dirt lingering on my tongue.

The door creaks open, and Charlie comes into my bedroom fresh and clean, smelling spicy and sweet as if she used half of the bottle of soap I have. “I’m going to rinse off,” I tell her as I rush out of my room before I get caught staring, closing the door behind me.

I shower off, finding mud in weird places. In my ears, and in my ass. There are even clumps in my armpits. It was gallons of mud. Once I think I got all the spots, I find another cluster. It’s worse than beach sand.

I dry off, beating myself up for taking longer than I expected. I won’t be surprised if she has changed and left already. I head back into my room with a towel wrapped around my waist. Lucky me, Charlie is crisscrossed on my bed, her hair tangled and wet, dripping onto my sheets. With the towel still wrapped around her chest, but it’s starting to come undone since it was tucked in so loosely.

“Hey Noah...” she says, and the sound of my name on her lips stirs something inside my chest. The lip biting is really making me trip over my own feet.

“Yeah?” I ask and she pushes herself up, her steps slow across the floorboards.

“I left my clothes downstairs. Can I borrow another shirt?”

“You never gave me the other one back, huh?” I ask.

“Do you mind?”

“No...”