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Contrary to spring break promotionals, there aren’t many blondes in the Li’l Latin America known as Miami. Or at least not ones with natural lips and hips, ones with accents from Pittsburgh instead of Portugal or Peru.

Ironically and traditionally exotic as an online dancer, Cherry is the fair-hair beauty I follow out of The Vinyl. Staring straight ahead, she sings to the air, “That was amazing.”

I’m not sure if she means the synth-wave show or the shards we snorted. Yet I agree. What could be more transformative than K-holing to goth pop with my porn crush I happened to stumble into? I must be higher than Pluto to hallucinate such a thing. Here’s holding out hope that I’m only half-wrong.

“Hey, wait!” Cherry’s eyes light like slot symbols. “I’ve seen you before. You’re always reading on the café deck outside the Cliff, aren’t you? Got those big textbooks I’d hate to lug around. No wonder I seen you fall asleep out there in one of ’em. Haha!”

My blush feels displaced, crooked, like it should burn a centimeter or two further down my face. I rub my eyelids. They feel chalk-dusted like the stalks of tulips. “Ehm, yeah. Hopefully, I wasn’t drooling then.” Or now.

As we walk to the bar, I excuse my “being popular at the club” as a second job selling drink tickets and glow sticks by the entrance. Which isn’t false; it’s just not what gets the buyers or me coming back to The Vinyl. So maybe the exorbitant price comes with a party favor tucked inside or beneath the legitimate purchase. Surprise! A story to tell long past the first date.

Is that what this is? A date or just a day of intrigue?

If I think about it too hard, well, I’ll get hard. And probably asphyxiate over too much anxiety. So, I bask in the glimmer of mild to moderate intoxication in Cherry’s incandescence.

I hope I come off coherent. Not just because I’m walking through white webs of psychedelia, but because she looks succubus-beautiful walking into the all-enveloping red lights of Bar Kaiju.

Over cocktails, she says, vaguely, that she works in online marketing, something to do with risqué fashion. Again, not a lie, and it makes me smile that we tread the same line. Want to thread in as much truth as possible before a full feel-out.

Despite candid streams where she mutters about her “loser” boyfriend doing rails in the background, I see she’s a more careful, thoughtful girl than those slices-of-life show.

If her white lies can be endearing, why not mine?

And what’s so bad about meeting a secret fan anyway? Or finding out he has way more of the drugs he shared for free?

Her drink is empty now. “You know, it amazes me. I put my whole self on the internet, for pennies on the dollar, and it’s like nobody cares… Not to sound conceited, but I should be getting more clicks.” After a beat, she corrects, “For the bikini lines, I mean.”

“Yes, of course.” For the very tasteful, very tame fashion spreads… that end in pulled-aside panties and spread-apart pussy.

Not fussing. Just the facts.

So maybe Cherry wants to be found? Not to be put out of her misery in a punishing sense, but to see that not everybody is a malevolent fink and can make a connection?

I sniffed out her breadcrumbs in perfect synchronicity, so why am I assailed with a wave of sadness? At the start of the night, we snorted anti-depressants—I thought.

The silence lingers. For some reason, I think of death. The dirt on my mother’s casket—had we the money to bury her. The cousins I never hear from anymore. How I probably owe Cherry more than these couple of drinks for years-long distraction.

As a saving grace, the waiter comes by to deposit a saucer between us. Pickled vegetables and citrus wedges.

Cherry rolls out an olive, seesawing it between her index and middle finger. “It matches your eyes,” she says with half a laugh. “You know, it’s funny. That’s what I’ve been calling you in my head when I see you outside our motel, lolling around with a book.”

“Oh?”

“Olive Eyes.” She holds it up to my temple, like trying to compare a paint swatch. “Such an unusual shade of green. Bright but pale or dark at the same time, you know what I mean?”

A nervy but thrilling flutter starts from my stomach, swims around my chest. It sparks up my body, my brain stem and into my memory bank. I can already feel the moniker infiltrating my inner monologue in ironic third-person diatribes: Well, Cherry wouldn’t want Olive Eyes to do this… Olive Eyes would never betray Cherry like that absentee boyfriend…

If Olive Eyes is not my next darknet username, a passcode nickname I’ll try too keenly to pass off in the streets as someone who faraway buyers should ask for, I’m deceased.

“Olive Eyes, is that right?” I sound like I’m confirming a winning lottery ticket.

She positions the stone fruit so she can play peekaboo with the opening, where a red pit should go. The start of a silly little love tunnel. “Olive Eyes, yup. It’s your new name, the one and only.” Her tone signifies the stupidity she finds in the admission, but that’s sticking power.

Something that instills a quiet but quintessential giddiness in me, like Rudolph when Clarice compliments him: She thinks I’m cute. She thinks I’m cuuute.

I am christened.

I am emboldened.

I know I am wholly idiotic and I don’t mind.

I didn’t take drugs and spend hundreds of hours with her online to feel indifferent, utterly plain and logical.

My hand brushes hers as I take the olive offering. Caressing her heart-inked wrist with my knuckles as the shiny little orb crowns my fingers, I say, “I’ll take it… Will you let me take you home?”

Normally, at this time of night, I’d be sweating, cramped up in my desk chair, longing for Cherry to shimmy through my screen. To at least pick me from the group chat so I can ask her to play long-distance girlfriend for the hundredth time. She’d let me pick out her toy and sheer teddy, tell me how much she missed me at work.

Relieve me with crass murmurs about how she’s been touching herself in every vape break, how she can’t wait to finally reunite in Key West. How she’ll never look at the neck of champagne bottles the same way again, how she wants me to pop over her chest with more fervor than the foamy cork. I’d pant, just fantasizing about gripping her sun-warm cheeks as they dip into shoreside sand and I slide into that first thrust.

Now, I’m bereft of breath, light-headed, as she nuzzles into the crook of my arm, hiding from the faintest drizzle that sparkles the road. My elation wants to manifest through physical means. I could twirl her if I didn’t think we’d spin out into separate garbage cans. High renewed, she’s dosed me with dopamine.

We stumble-sway like flamingos: wobbling but ever-upright. It’s a dance unto itself.

I dip and glide her into a cab, get the driver to play slinky dark wave to cut out his chatter.

I think about going in for a kiss so many times, squeezed together in such close quarters, as she fixes her hair to fall behind her ears. But I come up with as many excuses not to: a bump in the bridge, tequila breath, her meathead maybe-boyfriend.

Her slight yawning crumple against my side will have to suffice. It’s certainly more than I expected 24-hours ago. I scarcely get more than a hand squeeze and leg pet in before she’s falling asleep, breath light as lambskin. “What d’ya think I’ll dream about?” she asks between fadeouts. “D’ya think it’ll be normal an’ boring since K has been so fun ’n’ trippy?”

Her eyes closing make me worry mine will next, and I’ll wake up back in my futon alone, no blonde neighbor sneaking downstairs, not a soul who speaks English or knows I exist, let alone as Olive Eyes.

“I don’t know what’ll happen,” I answer nobody. “I don’t know if you can even get full REM sleep on ketamine.”

I never have and that’s why I wanted to pull her in with me tonight, out of the screen and into Wonderland or some Roger Rabbit scenario.

When the cab pulls up to the Cliff some 20 minutes later, I’m still flying, floating on sunset-color clouds, amazed I’ve gotten this close. Can memorize her infinitesimal facial freckles, the supple curvature of her upper arms, the perfume as spicy as sweat. Online, it’s easy to focus only on cleavage. But with the whole picture, well, that’s a centerfold I’ll never forget. An enhancement to self-pleasure Penthouse or VR will never rival.

Gently jostled by the brakes, Cherry awakes, not moving from my half-hug. “It was good,” she mumbles, slowly rising to grab her purse.

“Hm? What was?”

All at once as alert and graceful as a hummingbird, Cherry slips out of the cab before I can get the handle. She turns on her heel to face me, lowering her head into the chintzy doorframe. Her posture is actually very regal with both hands gripping the small satin bag. “My dream. It was good,” she clarifies, extending a hand like the gentleman I’m supposed to be. “You were there.”

“Ah, so it had to be a good one,” I say with fragile confidence, ducking her hand to pay the fare and exit in one fluid motion. I fluff my sports jacket straight and reach for her grip again as we near the steps.

Her headshake is but a sliver. “You had your chance,” she teases, eyeing the café deck. “Maybe I’ll find you out here another night, not refusing my kindness.” She giggles at my frown.

It takes me a couple seconds to realize I should be thankful for the warmth of the blush. Any novelty at all in such a lonely life. “I was just trying not to weigh you d—”

“Try again tomorrow, Olive Eyes.” Her smile never leaves, tone never hardens. But the glistening curve of her lips disquiets – arouses and disturbs – me. When she walks off on her own, my heart sinks.

It gurgles and glugs around my feet like a half-puddled fish.

She’s only a few steps up ahead when she turns around. “You quit too quickly, you know that?” She shoots back down to be street-level with me. “You didn’t respond, not even fake machismo like a second ago.”

“M-Maybe I’ll fare better sober. When I can think.” Or once I puke in the bushes. There’s still tomorrow, right? Honestly? This time, I take her hand and don’t let it steal away.

She squeezes back. “Just be yourself. You were doing so well…” She looks down and I move one ratty boat shoe inward, ashamed that I’ve got even more to hide.

“I think… I think I’m supposed to be a better version.”

“Olive Eyes,” she peeps, softly swaying from my hand like an angel. Take away the streetlamps and she could light up the whole block a wedding-time ivory.

Yes, I’ll be him for her. I lurch forward and pull her into an embrace. Not tight or loose. Not casual nor imposing. Just right.

And maybe that can mean… mean in the infinite possibilities of the universe… we can merge. Me into Olive Eyes. He into her. Us into a euphoria that outlasts this ketamine.  

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BIO:

Paige Johnson is EIC of Outcast Press, which will be releasing Slut Vomit II: an Anthology of Sex Work very soon. It features her, James Jenkins, and Mark Burrow in addition to 17 other authors. Her work has also appeared in Urban Pigs Press’ HUNGER anthology with an ironic tale about a bulimic cam girl, their Unintended Consequences call with a story called ‘White Lies’ about these very characters surrounding the dealings in Miami’s ultraclub LIV, and a couple of pieces for UPP’s inaugural poetry issue called Journeys. The latter are now published in her illustrated poetry book Citrus Springs about bittersweet feelings in and out of Florida, pharmacy romances, and artistic pursuits.

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