Alana

"Wanna get a drink?" Michelle was on her back. She was recovering from being out of breath by lying still looking out of the bay window. The dim ambience of San Francisco's common luminescence, free utility, filled those parts of the room that did not foster easy shadows.

Even on the oblique her eyes reminded me of someone else, almond or brown, reminded me of someone far more important in my carpet bag history of lies and deceit. I noticed whilst in the midst of my minute reminiscing, with a cruel twist of difference, her nose was utterly different. The eyes remind, the nose diverges, she is different, I am older, things move on, we just fucked, she wants a drink, snap out of it.

"Yeah, either that you do some cooking"

She looked at me from the window and shot me her trademark smile. I think I had the same smile in my arsenal. I think that particular physical twitch bonded us before we even spoke, sameness. Her smiles are a language unto themselves and that particular crescent yelled "fuck you I cook for no man". She sprung into action fishing out a new pair underwear from the drawer, dressing faster than I had undressed her the alcohol secretly sending her subliminal beckoning urging her onwards.

It was obvious that we were both done with sex for the moment and I took that mutuality as a queue to retrace my path of sin from the bedroom back to the living room picking up my clothing like some reverse roadmap from a flesh themed gingerbread house.

We weren't out her front door a minute and she's on her cell phone mustering some sort of gathering, or divining plans to join an assortment of oddballs she works with or fucks irregularly, or whomever. I don't mind her friends, I prefer mine, I prefer the rich sufficient types and their Bentley coupes that live up on Nob Hill, but clearly this was not my night.

The bar was gaudy, and the colors were fresh out of a Power puff Girls episode, at least that was the feeling. The huge disco ball suggested that Meat Loaf might jump onto the empty stage at any minute, and there was a collection of fake New York crowd mingling in the subtle club glow. A rhubarb of a hundred conversations failed to intoxicate me, I'd seen scenes before and resisted them enough to know that anything being said in this bar was devoid of merit simply because it was in the wrong city.

I'd just been fucked within an inch of my life, she got her wish to be on the bottom then flipped me like she'd been studying judo for a decade and finished the act. It didn't matter, even in this den of wannabe losers the loudest thing wasn't the humdrum of the conversations or the bastardization of 80s music into some sort of mix, it was the squelch of my own fuckdar going off without my finger on the trigger.

I am a compulsive sex addict, there you go, it's out now. I'm scanning all of the time, looking at necks and navels and thighs and feet and boring my eyes into the crotches of teenagers at the mall and menopausal divorcees at art galleries without real conscious thought. I'm superficially required to appraise your fuckability before I hear that you're a Nobel winner or that your sump pump business is failing. This of course goes on in my mind and unlike my early twenties, there's a filter established now that prevents me from being a complete jackass.

Three pings register as I cross the floor, three other than the rolling debauchery that is Michelle's ass in black cords and her golden shoulders revealed by a wife beater continually distracting me. Two were individual looks by nondescript San Francisco semi- attractives near the end of the bar. They both couldn't resist the glancing, they were both here for a purpose, they are both needing to be fucked, they are both slaves to their tingling clitoris and it's manic hatred of their lack of social promiscuity. The third was a little more interesting, green tshirt, jeans and a pony tail holding red hair back tightly in a handle almost too irresistible to consider pulling.

Alana as I later found out had red hair, weak chin, and an Irish accent. Her gaze drifted to me and stuck me like an arrow through the eye as I casually scanned past her daring myself not to take notice. It failed, she caught the grip of my recognition and quickly looked down, then back, then down again. I was already past her, resorted to fixating on Michelle's pert backside as we crossed the room to her group. Alana was Michelle's friend, and per my sex addiction I'd had her in my cross hairs for eight seconds and already I wanted to fuck her, not that men need sex addiction tendencies to fall under that spell.

I decided to play nice, pay attention to Devon, the one friend of Michelle that I had met. He was startlingly handsome and witty and unlike most men fitting that description in San Francisco, he wasn't gay. Other people in her gaggle were mere shadows, just me, Michelle, Devon, and Alana held any place in this court.

I was impressed by Devon's appreciation for the finer points of the new Superman movie's box office success. Seems that we both knew people who worked on that film, who moved to Australia for their duration, and who now were back in the US looking for a new job. California is a small world, and nobody really wants to know about how well I get on with Devon regardless of how pithy and elegant the conversation was.

What was crucial was my developing interaction with Alana. This always happens to me. Getting an attraction that is self evident between two people, and it is instantaneous and regardless of extenuating contexts or graces, invariably the sea parts and you end up in their face in some bizarre moment of judgment.

"I think Billy Joel was right." I was two feet from Michelle, and the same distance from Devon, yet Alana was about six inches from left side nursing a gin and tonic, her eighth from my recollection.

"you're obscure" Alana's Irish accent was melodic and rolled exactly in the same way that her well presented rack pushed the circumference of her tshirt. Her strappy bra's black line was arched over her shoulders, the left one was exposed by the way she rested back on her heels and tilted her head to the right as if her left ear was the one responsible for filtering my bullshit.

"what the hell does that mean then?".

"just by lookin at you, I can see that Catholic girls start much too late".

I was cocky, self centered, likable in a Colin Farrel you just can't hate me way. My delusion was in full swing but the difference between psychopaths and me is that my delusion had already laid seed in Alana's reptile brain triggering unwanted electrical impulses down her spine and focussing on how her panties were now rubbing against her stiffened and moist clitoris.

Green eyes, red hair, such a genetic freak. Somehow she was completely un-Californian enough to almost make me slip a minute in locked in her exotic but disapproving gaze before I resumed my forward posture back to listening to Devon describe something mundane about the insurance industry.

I'm almost sure Alana's body temperature elevated as she struggled to get her wee head around my comment. It was a stupid comment, but she was drunk and I was cute and hot so I probably could have told her that her earlobes were water melon seeds and she'd have considered it plausible.

"I started young enough." Bratty, her red hairedness made me think perhaps it might be possible for me to have a shot at impregnating Lindsay Lohan.

Now Alana had her full attention on me and I was busy listening to Devon describe shit I was totally not interested in while quite without her knowing, I was picturing my face buried in between her legs, or perhaps Lindsay's, while she screamed something about God and virginity in her highly charged sex filled accent.

It was not that I didn't care that Alana had lost her virginity somewhere between the age of 16 and 22, I was on auto pilot. I was destined to make her crazy enough to go out of her way to prove herself to me. The fact that it took eight gin and tonics to get over her genetic resistance to alcoholic inhibition removal is interesting but immaterial.

Michelle looked at me as Alana finished her fuming sentence. At that moment I was not sure if Michelle knew what was up or not, but as she's probably smarter than me, she probably did. The good thing was that as this odd dynamic developed the night became more and more interesting.