Siren
Photograph by Aneta Bartos
SIREN
by Averil Dean
“This isn’t happening,” Dean said.
He pushed back from the console, crossed the control room and collapsed on the studio’s battered sofa. The knee of his jeans was torn, leaving a lattice of frayed cotton threads across a crescent of pale skin.
He plucked disconsolately at his guitar.
“It needs to be quieter,” he said.
I tucked my hair behind my ear and leaned in, glancing briefly at the scrawled lyrics, then at Dean’s profile. Even in the dead stillness of the control room, I had to strain to hear the opening chords.
A bit of a false start, so he began again.
He carried the frail, gentle little verse on the barest breath, almost a whisper. But its power was undeniable. The song had come from that deep well in his chest, that haunting, mournful place where he’d found “Lucy” and “River Life” and the handful of other ballads we’d recorded over the previous two years. Most of the time, Dean Carrig’s voice was pure punk rasp, a throat-popping scream. But he shrank “Cold on the Ground” to the size of a homeless man with a half-full shopping cart.
The smallness was what the track needed.
been under the bridge for twenty long years each night I see Annie through my bitter tears poor Annie my baby, how she was found shot through the heart, cold on the ground in a grave of her clothes, all scattered around“Wait.” My voice sounded like a wind chime after Dean’s melancholy drawl. “Stop, just hang on a minute.”
I turned off the fans and the phone, and relocated a couple of mikes. Clearly, this was going set me up for a massive headache when it came time to add the overdubs. But Dean was in the zone. He could have been in an airfield and I would have run down the tarmac, trying to divert traffic.
We all felt that way about Dean. Blade-thin and lost inside his clothes, he had the hungry, hollow-eyed look of a street urchin. He was always unshaven and often seemed to have cut his own hair with a pair of poultry shears, but he possessed an endearing raggedy charm that drew people to him.
He was brilliant. And he was loyal to his friends. That’s why I was there.
“This is it,” I told him, settling in my chair. “Go. Right now. Do whatever you think you need to do.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and blew a last puff of smoke out the corner of his mouth. He slumped back, laying along the couch with one leg curled underneath him, the other tapping gently on the floor.
my days on the street are ending at last then will I be free from the sins of my past? poor Annie my baby, how she was found shot through the heart, cold on the groundHe reached the end and sat up, shook a feathery lock of blond hair from his eyes. His ancient gray sweater had a hole in the chest, right under the neckline.
“Let’s hear it,” he said.
I turned to the board and played it back. Just like that, after all those frustrating takes in the main room, we had the core of the track. I imagined the cool subdued pulse of Alex’s bass, providing momentum. The chorus, underscored by a heartbeat of drums. Like all their music, this melody was simple as a child’s song; its impact came from the haunting depth of Dean Carrig’s voice.
“Let’s double it,” I said.
He lit a cigarette and handed it to me, then took one for himself. “Lainey, we talked about that.”
“I really think–”
“I don’t want to double it.”
I swiveled my chair back and forth a couple of times. Dean could be stubborn when he got stuck on his original vision of a song. Sometimes he refused to let the recording take its natural course. But a double-track would give the chorus the buzz it needed, the fullness, the waver. I thought he’d agree if he could hear what I had in mind.
“John Lennon did it.” I attempted a smoke ring, which hovered feebly in the small space between us.
“You have to pop your jaw,” he said, demonstrating.
“For the chorus,” I said. “Just for the melody, and we’ll have Emmett do the high harmonies.”
“Shit. You’re gonna double his part too. I know how you are.”
“We don’t have to use any of it. If it sucks, we’ll leave it out. But the chorus needs to come in just a little bit rounder.”
“I want it quiet.”
“It will be quiet. Trust me.”
“Fine.” A grin spread across his face. “You’re a pain in the ass, you know.”
I shrugged.
He dragged slowly at his cigarette, gazing at me through a veil of smoke. Something in his expression, the flicker of his eyes down the front of my Cat in the Hat tee-shirt, made me uneasy. Heat flashed across my skin. I swiveled to the control board and busied myself until the blush had passed.
The diamond on my left hand winked up at me.
* * * * *
We used the double-track, of course. For the melody.
As predicted, Alex struggled to match Dean’s funky 5-string acoustic–and with no click track, the timing for both bass and drums was all over the place. I nitpicked relentlessly with Dean behind me in the control room, saying quieter! quieter! while Emmett rolled his eyes and mimed obscene gestures with his drumsticks.
That song was lot of work. In some areas, we had to punch bar by bar to get the languid, hypnotic eeriness Dean was after. The track ended up a little out of tune, as a matter of fact, but somehow that added to the exhausted brokenness of the song and lyrics.
When ”Cold on the Ground” was finished, the album was finished.
The night we wrapped, I returned to my hotel room and kicked off my shoes, laid back on the taut, cool covers with that last minor chord progression rippling through my mind. Watertight was going to be a very successful record. With the juxtaposition of hooky melodies and that cauldron of nails in Dean’s throat, Siren was bound to find a wider audience than the Sub Pop scene the band had dominated with their first album. And the young girls would fall hard for Dean Carrig.
As I had.
I packed a pipe and smoked a half-bowl of weed, then heaved myself off the bed and went to fill the tub. While the water ran, I sent my husband a text: Hey hon. We’re all done here so I’ll be home tomorrow. I hope you haven’t drunk all the tequila, because I’m dying to cover you with lime juice and salt and then lick you clean. See you soon. . . .
But it wasn’t my husband I thought of as I undressed and sank into the hot water. Through the bubbles, I could see bits of my tattoos: a vine of delicate cherry blossoms, undulating over my ribs; the familiar, fuzzy, home-drawn peace sign on my wrist; a decade-old post-traumatic-breakup tattoo–the scripted word please on the smooth curve of my pubis.
I laid back until my ears were surrounded by the tender crackle of a thousand bubbles. I let my hands drift down my body. The small, smooth hoop of my nipple ring passed under my palm. I flicked it idly, imagining the way it would click against Dean’s crooked white teeth.
Before leaving the studio, we had kicked back in the control room–Alex and Emmett in side chairs, Dean on the edge of the couch, me perched in my nest of boards–listening to the rough tracks in the order we had in mind for the album. In the middle of the third song–the mack daddy, the big-hit-we-know-it–Emmett had given a loud hoot, rocking in his chair as though he’d been blown backward by a hurricane.
“Holy shit,” he said. “Did we do that? How did we do that?”
I had laughed, out of pride or relief, or simply because of the comic expression on Emmett’s face.
“You’re a fucking genius, man,” Alex said to Dean. “That’s tight.”
“No,” Dean said. “That’s all Lainey.”
For a moment, three pairs of eyes had rested on me.
I thought of that again as my fingers inched southward, stealthy under the bubbles, past the please to the small firm nub of my clitoris.
I rewound the scene in my mind, imagined them undressing me in that shabby control room. Emmett behind me, pulling back my hair. Alex winding the neckband of my shirt around his two-toned finger, heavy fat dreadlocks dripping like ink to his shoulders. They would reveal me, bare my skin, discover my tattooed invitation and my hidden jewelry while Dean watched the whole thing go down.
The album was a tsunami, so darkly beautiful that I’d have fucked the music itself it I could’ve clamped it between my legs. The vibration of Alex’s bass snapped over my skin, plucked at the tips of my breasts. The remorseless beat drove my desire to a hot demand.
I closed my eyes and lost myself to my favorite pipe dream.
* * * * *
Behind me, Emmett’s body is pressed to mine. I feel the hard thickness of his dick against my ass. He slides his hands under my tee-shirt, strokes me, teases a bejeweled nipple from the top of my black lace bra. His breath is a small warm gust at my ear.
Take off your shirt, Lainey, Dean says from the couch.
But I can’t do it myself. My hands won’t obey. I can allow but cannot instigate.
Emmett feels my hesitation and tugs my shirt up and over my head, tosses it to the floor. Alex pops the clasp between my breasts.
The men grow heavy around me. There is an urgency, a quickening. Each one of them seems hell-bent on distracting me from what it is I’m doing. Alex kneels at my feet, pulls off my skirt. He presses his nose to my panties and inhales, releasing my scent with a groan, muttering and nipping at the lace. He slips his thumbs under the fabric from the sides–an exploration, a question, which I’ve answered by saying nothing.
My heartbeat kicks up, sends a melting warmth over my skin. Every nerve ending is exposed to the music and the possibility of what these men may do to me. I am a one-woman bomb squad, trying to control an impending explosion. I am the conductor of an orchestra run amok.
Alex slides down my panties and tosses them to Dean. He licks me once. Twice. His tongue flicks up my cleft and I feel the slip of my own juices on his lips.
Please? he says, running the pad of his thumb along my tattoo. Please what, baby?
Fuck me, I think. With your mouth, with your cock. I want to ride the crest of this music. I want you and Emmett and Dean to fuck me in turns, to roll a vibrato between my legs, to pound the chorus into my body and leave me wrung out and sweaty and filled to overflowing. I want my mouth full of you and my mind full of Dean, while Emmett’s dick collides with my cervix and presses me for more. That’s what I want.
I’m dizzy, shaking with greed, and have to reach behind Emmett’s neck to steady myself. His jeans bite against my bare back, and I realize dimly that I’m the only one undressed. They have me disheveled, compromised, and I’m embarrassed by that but too far gone to recover my pride and walk away.
Emmett tilts my chin, lifts me a little, and takes my mouth. His tongue flicks past my teeth. He tastes of cinnamon–hot and strong and bittersweet. When I stretch on tiptoe and twist to meet him, he growls approval. His entire body is tense. And I know he’s worried, the way all men worry when they get this close to the prize.
Don’t stop me, he’s thinking. Don’t pull back, don’t take what I need. Don’t get in my way.
Dean holds my crumpled panties to his nose. His gaze never leaves me. I get the sense that he’s orchestrating the whole thing, masterminding the consummation, patiently waiting his turn. He unzips his jeans and slips a hand inside. I see the bulge of his fist, the glistening tip of his cock, and I feel a sneaky pride. That hard-on is for me. I put it there. I’ve wound the three of them up tight, yet I’m the smallest, weakest person in the room–a tiny yellow boat in the eye of the storm.
Alex drapes my leg over his bare shoulder. His mahogany skin is kissed with blue light like the burnished rolled edge of a tavern bar. And he feels that solid, that smooth and warm in the crook of my knee. He sucks my clitoris through the gap between his front teeth. That feels like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I whimper and moan, but my cries are absorbed into the music, crushed under its weight. A rhythmic pulse rolls through me. Alex’s ropy dreads scratch my thigh and I close my fist around them, holding his mouth to my seam, silently begging him not to stop. My pussy is the superfine pinnacle of the music and the beat and the room full of masculine energy. A crisp, sparkling treble note builds, holds, then begins to break.
Climax hits me like the chorus of a rock anthem. Swollen and rushing, driving, an exhilarating breathless major chord, a long satisfying note, then a deep breath.
Dean watches from the edge of his seat, his dick in one white-knuckled fist. His lips are parted and a fine sheen of sweat has formed on his forehead and over his lip. His recorded voice is a scream on the rough track, but he hasn’t said a word since my bra hit the floor.
run baby, go on run baby and I will chase you, and I will take you run baby, run away baby I wanna chase you before I taste youBehind me, Emmett has skinned out of his tee-shirt and jeans. He kneels, but instead of turning me to face him, he pulls me straight down over his lap, lowering me with unerring aim down the length of his cock. He drops his forehead to my shoulder and holds me still, with an attitude of pure relief. He’s inside. It’s like some kind of heist, like he and his buddies have hijacked my body and until this moment he was not sure they’d pull it off. He presses a grateful kiss to the back of my neck. Then he begins a slow grind. With his hands on my hips, he’s in confident control of our rhythm. He rocks me up and back, right in time, with the occasional hard cymbal smack on my ass and long, appreciative strokes of his fingers down my spine and between my legs.
I don’t know what I am now. To them, to me. I’m someone else. Some female archetype, a receptacle, a prize to be shared. I open my mouth for Alex and do my best to accommodate his thick, dark branch of a cock. His scent is woodsy, warm, and he tastes like smoked salt. When I get him to the back of my throat, he pulls my hair and gives me a little cautionary pressure on the back of my neck. Don’t stop. Don’t fucking stop.
And I can’t. I won’t. Because the music is pounding me and the band is plundering me and Dean is waiting his turn. I can’t fuck the music so I’ll fuck the musicians, Emmett and Alex, and Dean later on. But it’s the music I want inside me. It’s the music filling my ears, eyes, mouth and throat. My mind, my cunt. It’s the fucking blissful release of the chorus. The melody rises, smacks me with that double-tracked harmony and the snarling bass. Too hard, it’s too much. I begin to overflow. When Emmett’s fingers resume their tap-roll between my legs, I lose control.
We fall like dominoes. Emmett comes first, with animal-rough, staccato thrusts that pound at the drum of my cervix; then Alex, wrenching his cock from my lips, sending a milk-warm waterfall down my chest; and Dean, after all his careful machinations, spilling into his jeans.
There is a tense, drawn-out guitar note, morphing into a high-pitched whine.
That’s me, I think.
* * * * *
I sank back in the water. The bubbles were long gone. There was only me and the wistful please under my hand.
I got out of the tub and dried off with a huge fluffy towel, then sat at the desk and made some notes about the work still to be done on the record. It wouldn’t take much; we’d all agreed not to polish the soul out of it. A little compression, a little fairy dust sweetness.
The sky darkened, purple then black. I ordered room service and ate by the light of my laptop. I had a deadline to meet.
* * * * *
The club was sold out for Siren’s first show on the tour–a smallish gig, where they could work out the kinks and gauge the fans’ response to the new songs.
Dean had written “Gone a Day” to fill a specific place at the opening of their set. He’d noticed that the crowds at Siren’s gigs didn’t careen around the way most punk fans did; instead, they’d hop in place. He wanted to give them something to hop to, so for “Gone a Day” he’d literally bounced up and down for a minute to find the perfect tempo.
It worked like a charm. The crowd was hopping, which had the odd effect of making the room seem to shrink and expand in time to the music. The club had a pulse, a lung, a throbbing heartbeat.
This was it. Siren was the real thing. Greatness hung in the air, pulled us like a train of roller coaster cars, heavily and inexorably up.
I couldn’t have been still if I’d tried. I flung my hair and arched my neck and pounded out the rhythm with my shoulders. Some acquaintances from the label were at the show with me, but I was not with them. I was deep inside the music, where my fantasies lived, where Dean was watching me fuck his bandmates and getting off on the sight of his drummer’s cock disappearing inside me. Where they bent me over the console and took me from behind, one at a time, full of praise for the genius of my musical production and the tightness of my pussy.
The energy had risen to match the frenetic pace of the music. Buried in chords and daydreams, I didn’t immediately realize that I’d been jostled to the front of the crowd from the more sheltered space by the side door. I was carried like a leaf in a river of bodies, and the teenagers around me were huge, rough boulders in my stream. I took an elbow to the cheek and another between my shoulder blades. For the first time at any show, I felt a thrill of fear. The center of a violent mosh pit was no place for me. A bare-chested skinhead knocked me to the floor, where I was lost in a writhing, frightening tangle of legs.
I tried to get up but fell backward again and again. A heavy boot came down hard on my fingers, sent a knife of pain up my arm. Someone’s knee smacked my chin.
I thought, People have died this way. They go down in the center of a crowd and never get back up. Even in the chaos, the irony was not lost on me: I’d be killed by the music I’d helped to create.
A massive hand appeared from the crowd, advancing toward me. Behind it, the tense, professional face I recognized as the band’s new bodyguard. He plucked me off the floor by my elbow and hustled me backstage. As the door closed behind us, I heard Dean and Alex begin to smash their gear against the floor of the stage. These were desperate measures, the only sure way to end the set in a hurry and disperse the crowd.
“You okay?” The guard was already headed back the way we’d come.
I nodded, wiggling my trampled fingers.
“Stay back here, okay?” he said.
“Are you kidding me?”
The green room was empty for the moment. A leather sofa sagged against the wall, and around it sat a few rickety folding chairs, serving as coat racks. Someone had left a cooler under the plastic table. I opened it and dug past the beer for a bottle of water. Held it to my forehead, then took a deep swallow. My hand shook. Water trickled down my chin and pooled at the hollow of my throat.
A minute later, the band fell in the door, a roomful of thrashing fans behind them. The club’s security guards were grim, but the three musicians were grinning like schoolboys and smelled like a sack of wet pennies.
Emmett smacked a paradiddle on the back of a chair. His face was flushed with exhilaration and victory, and his chest gleamed in the cheap yellow light.
“Fuck, that was insane,” he said. “I’ve never seen a crowd turn so fast.”
Alex wiped his forehead with a handful of sweat-soaked tee-shirt. He held up the broken neck of his bass guitar. “I think your drumsticks are the only thing that survived, man.”
I found them some towels and handed out beer and congratulations.
Then I opened my purse and pulled out the master.
* * * * *
My husband was at work when I got home that night. I took a quick skinny dip, then sat on my towel at the edge of the pool, my wet hand slipping on the neck of my pipe. Drops of water streamed down my throat and trembled at the tips of my breasts. A comforting buzz filled my head.
My deadlines had all been met. I had worked hard; now I could rest and think about how Dean must have felt, hearing the crowd’s reaction to the new songs. What a rush. I imagined myself waiting in some shadowy niche. He would come offstage and find me, full of his triumph and raw male energy. He’d yank my g-string aside and jack me against the wall and fill me up, while around us, a thousand screaming fans were still cheering his performance. And my cries would join theirs. I would call his name–
A low squeak broke the silence. A clatter, as the side gate closed and latched, followed by the crunch of footsteps on gravel. I grabbed my towel and scrambled up, prepared to run for the door.
“Lainey?”
I put a hand to my chest. “Jesus, you scared the shit out of me.”
Dean rounded the corner of the house and materialized under the porch light.
“You didn’t answer the door,” he said.
I wrapped the towel around my breasts, and Dean’s eyes trailed up to my face.
“Yeah, well I wasn’t expecting company,” I said. “What are you doing here? I thought were going home.”
“I did. But we were listening to the master–Alex and Emmett and me–and we’re just fucking blown away. I had to come by and thank you in person.”
Dean kicked off his shoes, and we sat together with our feet in the cool still water. He picked up my pipe and nudged at the ashes with the tip of the lighter. The flame illuminated his crooked grin.
“I can’t believe,” he said, “that my little sister’s friend is suddenly this magician. I don’t know what you did in the mix, but you got something in there, locked in tight.”
“It’s not me.” I hit the pipe and passed it back. “I think this record really might be it for you guys. People were out of their minds tonight.”
He shook his head, and we sat in wondering silence for a few minutes.
“I used to think you were this annoying kid when we were in high school,” he said. “Such a smart ass.”
“Thanks so much.”
He laughed. “Didn’t stop me from watching you, though. Girl of a thousand tee-shirts.”
My heart rolled like a small sleepy animal in my chest.
I didn’t look away when he peeled off his sweater and jeans and dove naked into the deep end. I felt the cup at my lips and imagined the sweet wine inside. Tonight I could give it up to him. I could drop my towel and slide into the pool, form myself like water to his need. Or I could take him inside, offer him my husband’s bed. Let him fuck my mouth. I could swallow him down or wear his semen like a mantle over my tits. Make him breakfast in the morning, eggs and OJ.
Or maybe I’d fall in love, leave my husband, follow Dean around the world. I’d be his most ardent fan, waiting backstage with the other hangers-on, ready to part my legs at a moment’s notice for anyone he chose to see between them.
None of these things would happen because, weed-softened or not, my mind was clear. For the moment, I was custodian of Dean’s music and my marriage. My untenable fantasies were so many smoke rings in the air between us.
“Come swim with me,” he said from the shadows with sex in his voice.
The first mournful chords of “Cold on the Ground” drifted through my mind. The memory gave me just enough will power to keep my answer steady and my towel in place.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve already been in the pool.”
