Feeling Good - The Story of Sam & Henry

Prologue

The room was swathed in pulsatile blue light, the sound of the bass so absurdly loud that the walls were actually vibrating. I moved slowly down the hallway at the back of the club, toward the VIP section, where a few of the servers and kitchen staff from the restaurant where I work had gathered. We'd been invited by some out-of-town investment banker-types to join them at the club; earlier in the night, they had thrown down thousands of dollars at the restaurant on expensive scotch, and now were invariably trying to consume their weight in blow in the VIP section of the club.

I pondered making my way over by the DJ booth where one of the waiters I was friendly with was chatting up some woman but decided against it because it would mean having to walk past the Gang of Wall Street, who were currently doing body shots off of Amber and Kimmy, who were servers at the restaurant.

One of the bankers had been making eyes at me all night after meeting me at the restaurant when their table had insisted – loudly – that the chef responsible for making "the amazing fucking food" had to come out to be showered with their drunken, drug-fueled accolades. When I had emerged from the kitchen, wiping my hand on a towel hanging between my legs they were utterly surprised that said chef was a woman. Not a single one of them managed to make actual eye contact with me for a full three minutes, instead they ogled absentmindedly at my breasts or at one of the tattoos on my right arm that appeared to just peek through my rolled up sleeve.

Idiots like these both fascinated and repulsed me in equal measure.

I stretched my hand along the left side of the wall, which was wet and sticky from who knows what. The subtle bumps of the wall felt like gooseflesh, and my fingers began to tingle with the rough, almost sandpaper-like texture. At the end of the hallway I turned, looking out on to the crowded dance floor. The sea of people looked like they were part of a symbiotic organism, all moving in different ways, yet somehow aware of some collective consciousness. It's like each person had agreed, for just this moment, to forget their individuality and surrender to the rhythmic collective. Desiring exactly this type of oblivion, I moved to the center of the floor and shut my eyes, the sweaty gyrating bodies welcoming me like a fucking Borg cube made of sound and blue light.

The clientele in the club were a bit hoity-toity for my tastes, but the music was blowing my mind, and I was totally losing myself in my own little world dancing in the middle of the floor. Although there were bodies all around me, moving and swaying in time with the beat, I started to feel the presence of someone behind me. I turned my head and saw a male body. He was at least a head taller than me and when I leaned my head back into his chest, he bent down, and I could feel the stubble of his chin on my neck. He smelled like aftershave and sweat. He didn't touch me at first, waiting for me to determine the extent to which our bodies connected.

I turned around, keeping my eyes closed, not wanting the reality of physical attraction to play any role in my decision to touch him. I laid my hands on the soft, subtle curves of his chest. He was wearing some sort of button-down shirt that was opened at the top. I ran my hands over his broad shoulders, he was solidly built, like a rugby player or someone who works with their hands for a living. I then moved my hands down to his waist and pulled him closer to me, so that our bodies were velcroed together from our knees to our necks.

The crush of bodies around us pushed us closer together, leaving an angstrom-sized space separating my breasts from his chest. Taking the proximity of our bodies as the invitation in which it was intended, he wrapped his thick, muscular arms around me, pulling me even closer to him, without actually groping me.

A particularly deep baseline started, and I leaned my head back and opened my eyes to look up at him. He was looking up toward the ceiling, droplets of sweat pooled at his temples and dripped from the end of a single black curl hanging over his cheek. The darkness of the club obscured details of his face, but he had a soft smile and an angular jaw.