the class what to do
I came home shaken, but not deterred
A long angry note pinned to my favorite shirt
said “this little girl is two hands worth of handful—
bossy and brazen, a little dictator.
This little girl is two hands worth of handful,
rein her in now or you’ll be sorry later.”
But what if I was born this way?
What if I don’t want to change?
Some years go by, I join the girls’ choir
But I feel the need to kick it up higher
The choir director, he doesn’t agree
So he kindly imparts this guidance to me.
“Don’t you know little girls all sing like angels
With soft pretty voices and white wings and halos
You can’t go on singing your own melody
Louder than everyone, in your own key!”
What do I do? I start my own band.
Where I can be as loud as I am
But then you show up with your Les Paul in hand
And everything changes from what I’d planned
I fall so hard for you, I’m so afraid
I can’t stop pushing you far, far away
I’m a little dictator, so bossy and brazen
When will you pack up and head for the pavement?
But you stay there standing as I fall apart
I take your thunderbolt right to my heart
You catch me falling like stars to the floor
You don’t turn me down, no, you turn me up more
and say
Loud is how I love you
Loud is how I know you’re there
Stay loud so I don’t lose you
I will follow the sound of you anywhere
Keep reading for a special excerpt from the next Hub City romance,
STAY UNTIL WE BREAK
coming soon from InterMix.
Sonia
Thursday, August 10, 1995
Nyabingi Dance Hall, Morgantown, WV
w/Atilla Stigmata
Stars on the Floor Tour—Day 1
I don’t know if everyone has that special someone they masturbate to, but I do and it’s Cole McCormack, the bass player for my best friend’s band, Stars on the Floor. The only problem with having Cole McCormack as your chronic masturbation fantasy is that he’s everybody’s chronic masturbation fantasy—and he knows it.
But how could he not? He’s a strapping, ruddy-skinned, dark-haired Irish boy from north Jersey with eyes that shimmer like Jamesons over ice and nimble lips with a reputation all their own. So I can only conclude that the reason he’s kissing me right now is because we aren’t home in New Brunswick, where on any given night Cole has his pick of make-out partners. We’re in West Virginia, and Soft has just wrapped their first show of this tour.
It’s not you, it’s the road, I keep telling myself as he has me up against the side of the van, his lips pressed to my own as his enormous, beautiful bass-playing hands hold me in place. Even as I’m kissing him back with all the sexual gusto I’ve got in me, I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything. Cole isn’t into me like this—if he was, he’s had every chance to show me before now and he never has. Not once in the three years that we’ve been friends. Not even at his birthday party last month when I got drunk, crawled into his lap and flat-out asked him to make out with me. If he was interested, that would have been a good time to let me know, right? But instead he pried me off of him, carried me to his room and put me to bed. Alone. And the next day when I woke up in his bed, still alone and fully clothed with a raging hangover, he acted like it never even happened.
It must be something about the road.
I’m sure it’s a mistake to let him kiss me at all, but he caught me off guard, the way he reached for my arm and said, “Sonia, wait a second,” like he was going to ask me for change for a ten. But he didn’t ask me for change, oh no. He spun me around to face him and when I was all confused and said, “Do you need change or something?” he laughed.
“No,” he said. “I just want to check something.”
“What?” I squinted at him, clueless, the light over the back door of the club casting a fuzzy halo around his head.
He bent down and brushed his lips against mine, so gently at first I wasn’t sure he meant to do it. But when I wrapped my arms around him and opened my mouth against his and he backed me up against the van, it was pretty clear then what was happening between us, even if I still can’t believe it. Now I feel like