Damn. There goes my concentration. His hand feels so good. The slightest bit of contact with him turns me inside out. I’m not used to this feeling. I don’t know what to do with this feeling. It doesn’t fit in my life. It fits in a song, and I don’t know how to make it fit for me.
“So this may sound cheesy, but the real key is to let go. Let go of the need to check where your hands are, or to look constantly at the neck of the guitar.”
I nod.
“So what I want you to do is close your eyes.”
“Close my eyes?”
“Yes, close your eyes. I know it’s going to be real hard for you not to be in control for one second, but trust me.”
“Oh, ha ha,” I tease.
“Yes, McKenna. I’ve already picked up that you like to be in charge.”
“You’re astute.”
“I am. Now do as I tell you. Close your eyes.”
I do as he tells me.
“So you have to just feel where your fingers are. So here’s the green note.” He places his finger down on top of my index finger, playing the green note.
Mmm…
“Here’s the red.” He presses his middle finger against mine, playing the red note now. I want to lean into him, to fall against him, and feel his chest on my back. I want him to wrap his arms around me, and hold me tighter as he teaches me to play. I want to feel his touch. I want contact. I want it so badly, I don’t know how I’ll ever play a song because I am living and breathing only one thing right now – the wish to be closer to him, my back curved into his front, his arms wrapped tight around me, our bodies beginning to entwine.
“And here’s the yellow.” He keeps his ring finger against mine, playing the yellow note. Then he holds the note. His fingers are playing my fingers, and my entire body feels like a tuning fork, vibrating hotly from his touch. “So you want to feel the notes, not look at them. Just know when green comes up, your index finger presses down. When red appears, your middle finger. When yellow shows up, your ring finger.”
I played arcade games for fun when I was a kid, for release when I was left curbside by my ex. But I have never used video games as foreplay. I have never known video games could be foreplay. Here with Chris in some semi-private room at an electronics store, of all places, it feels like foreplay. It feels like he could turn me around, place his hands on my cheeks, and pull me in for a kiss. The kind that makes the world fall away. That leaves you powerless to resist, helpless to do anything but be consumed with an endless kiss. Nothing else matters, and the kiss is all there is, all there was, all there will ever be.
Until it becomes more than a kiss. It becomes heat in your blood, and a roaring in your ears, and you have to clutch the guitar so you don’t turn around and show your hand to him. Show it in your eyes, and in the way you part your lips, and in the words that threaten to tumble from your lips. Words like I want you so much.
Words I pin down inside me so they can’t escape.
He leans in a little closer this time and nearly whispers in my ear. “You can open your eyes now.”
I inhale deeply and open my eyes. I feel wobbly from the way he’s touched me, from the way I’ve let my thoughts spin into a dark and dangerous place of possibility. It’s one thing for me to visit with his mouth in my fantasies; it’s entirely another to witness my thoughts spin wildly with him inches away. He grasps my shoulders so I don’t fall. Then I press start on Poison’s Talk Dirty to Me. I hit the green notes, then the red notes, then the yellow ones. Then the next set and the next. I even nail a long note, then another, then a whole sequence of so-called “star-power” notes, and I give in to the game. I channel all my desire right now into the playing, and I am jamming here, rocking out to a video game, the pseudo-music taking my mind off the fact that I want Chris to talk dirty to me.
I finish my first song. I raise my hands in the air. Victory.
Chris smiles, big and wide, the teacher proud of his student. “Fast learner are you,” he says in Yoda’s voice.
“You’re a Star Wars geek too!”
He shrugs sheepishly. “You want to play some more?”
I nod vigorously and then spend the next hour knocking out several more songs and even making it through my very first guitar battle, where I own the guitarist from Rage Against the Machine after two tries. By the time we turn off the game, I am feeling pretty energized. So I buy my own used copy of the game and walk out of the store with Chris.
“Want to grab a bite to eat? I know a taco shop around here.”
“Abso-fucking-lutely.”
So I take him to a hole-in-the-wall taqueria, a true Mexican place, with orange Formica booths and countertops and a menu that’s half-English, half-Spanish. We order chicken quesadillas to share and two Diet Cokes.
“I don’t want you caffeinating alone,” Chris says to me, as he carries the soda cans and two glasses back to the table.
“How gallant of you.” He pushes a can toward me. I squeal inside with delight. He didn’t open it for me. He didn’t rob me of the soda-can-crack-open. He is gallant. I open my soda and pour it into a glass. He does the same with his.
“Gallant McCormick, that’s what they called me in school.”
“So where’d you grow up? Let me guess. San Diego? Since you have the whole California surfer look going on.”
He shakes his head. “Brooklyn of all places, but I hate cold, so I got the hell out of town for college.”
“Where was that?”
“Stanford.”
“Stanford?”
Ha laughs. “What? Just because I’m not wearing a pocket protector or a business suit?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I just was surprised. I guess because you’re so laid back. You’re the video game guy, you’re a hipster. You don’t seem like a Stanford stiff.”
“I studied software design.”
“Wow. You know some serious shit.”
“That I do.”
“So what’d you do after college?”
“Got a job designing software for video games,” he says. The waitress brings us the quesadillas. Chris says thanks and she leaves. “I did that for a couple years and then decided I wanted to do my own thing. So I started consulting, doing business strategy and whatnot for companies in the gaming space. Got asked to speak at conferences, then started video blogging, then the video blog turned into a TV show. And here we are now, me and my gaming empire.”