Thread: English 2352 {DearestDarling & Dane Stalling}

You hurt and abuse tellin' all of your lies. Run around sweet baby, Lord how you hypnotize. Sweet little baby, I don't know where you've been. Gonna love you baby, here I come again. The song always made Luke feel trippy, detached from his body. He flashed back to high school, sitting in his old Falcon behind an abandoned barn, blasting Zeppelin I and staring glassy eyed at the moon. The blue lights and strobes that flashed around the bar added to his disorientation, and he found himself looking down at a girl pressing herself into him. She wore solid black contacts that looked like black holes in her deathly pale face. She laughed at the expression on his face, and rolled away into the press of the crowd. His anger backed down, not gone, but numbed by the atmosphere. It was hot in here. He went to the bar and couldn't make himself heard to the bartender, so he just pointed at someone else's Heineken. The band was good. Very good. The singer was a girl that gave the song a completely different interpretation without losing any of Zeppelin's intensity. The passages that had Robert Plant pushing hard were a relaxed, sexy growl in her voice. He'd have to get the name of the band. They might be worth checking out later if the rest of what they did was this good. He took a swig of his beer and looked up at the stage. He choked. Rosalie was at the mic, staring at him. The band was into the abstract break and Rosalie was echoing the moaning of the guitar, making it sound like she was making love to the music, to the sheer volume and press of humanity in the bar. Luke's phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked it. Isobel. Again. He snagged his beer and pressed through the crowd to the bathroom and hit the answer icon. Where the hell are you? Just, he said, and his mind went blank. He had nothing to say. He could hear Rosalie in the next room crashing through the climax of the song. It sounds like a hippie orgy. You better not be at a strip club or something. No. Oh come on. I stopped for a beer. Band is really loud. You have beer here. What's wrong with you? I needed, he said, and again, he didn't know what to say, ...a break. It sounded lame even to himself, but he realized it was true. Oh. You need a break. I've been working on the Morgan case ten hours a day for a week and you need a break? You teach football players how not to fail classes so they can keep on giving each other concussions. How stressful can that be? Luke was losing the thread of the conversation. You go out for toilet paper and you end up at a rave or whatever screwed up shit you're wading through as we speak. Well pass the rolls around, asshole, and don't come home without the fucking yeast. It took him several seconds to realize she wasn't in his ear any more. He sighed and slipped his phone back into his pocket. The song ended and Luke half expected to hear Your Time is Gonna Come up next, but it was something he hadn't heard before. A complex chord progression like something Yes might have done in their London years. Three beers later, Luke had hung his blazer on the back of a chair and loosened his tie. The band had seduced the crowd and they hung on every chord, and booed when they took a break. Luke twisted in his chair to order another beer and when he turned around, Rosalie was sitting across from him, frowning.