InterReality

Prologue

The soft glow of table lamps pushed gently against the smoky darkness of the small night club. A leftover hint of cheap cologne and powdery perfume floated through the twenty-first century smoke-free room. Only one person inhabited the night club, her dark silhouette mingling with the shadows of quiet musical instruments on a wooden platform the breadth of the room.

Aster Hart swayed to either side, her head back, her long dark hair trailing her hips by a half beat. She opened her eyes, deep brown, moist and nearly round, only slightly elongated at the sides of her slim delicate face, pulled sensuously by thin lines of mascara. Dropping her arms, Aster trailed a finger down the outer seam of her tight black jeans.

Aster stopped. Her silky black shirt, loose at the waist, flared a few times as if it didn’t yet realize that it too should stop. She grabbed a mic from its stand, brought it to her full ruby lips and softly started singing.

Going through her nightly warm-up, letting her voice rise, fall, trill, Aster envisioned couples sitting at the small round tables, hands entwined atop the velvet table spreads. They smiled. They looked longingly at each other. Her voice a barely noticed, yet comforting, path drawing the couples closer together. A quick shy peck. A passionate, familiar kiss. She moved them and in turn, by their reaction, they moved her.

Returning the mic, Aster took a deep breath and exhaled slowly through a pin prick opening in her lush red lips. Her favorite song she sang last. It was meant to suggest to her paired audience that the night had only begun.

On the second note, Aster faltered before skillfully resuming. She turned to the instruments behind her. They were inanimate and still.

Yet, she heard a rhythmic pulsing, a faint whispery thudding. It wasn’t her heartbeat, but it was a heartbeat. While remaining distant and at the edge of her hearing, it felt like it was delicately caressing her ear from lobe to just inside the dainty cavity. Not a tickle but a warm touch. As it trailed down her neck, back up and over to her other ear through a sheet of silky hair, Aster shivered and nearly lost her song. The shiver fell down her body to her toes trapped in spiked heels, and then was quickly replaced with a warmth that surely made her skin glow.

The faint beating slid into her head. Aster gasped between two words, her mouth rounded, her lips dewy. As she regained her composure the feeling left; the quiet heartbeat vanished.

What was that? She wondered.

Her song progressed to the final chorus, the prelude to the final verse: powerful and fulfilling but also seductive, leaving her couples wanting more. That’s when Aster nearly fell to her knees, her body fluid and almost completely out of her control. That’s when a very different beating heart—again not her own—pounded into her ears, shaking her soul.

Words left her lips, pitch perfect and emotionally driven; but she couldn’t hear them over the thud-thud-TH-thud, thud-thud-TH-thud. Heat burst down her fingers, spreading rapidly through her quivering body and exploded in her core. She painfully squeezed her eyes shut. White flecks of light danced across her blind vision. Her back arched; her breasts heaved. She didn’t know if this heartbeat intended to destroy her. She didn’t know if she might want it to.

Aster had never had such an experience. She was afraid she liked it. Afraid it liked doing this to her and wouldn’t relent.

A quiet squeak from the club’s front door shattered the moment as suddenly and as violently as it had come upon her. The last note of her favorite song failed to be voiced and its silence left the empty room expectant and hollow. The missing piece of the otherwise perfect song left the room with only speculation: for whom did that unvoiced note ring?