Salvation (MWBB)

They are all working on their salvation here.  Working it hard, out there on the dance floor; a mish mash of heights and shapes, lit intermittently from above, cloaked in heat.  Product of proximity on the floor, too many bodies in too small a space.  The beat draws him in, loud and thumping; a double drum echo to follow a multitude of raised heartbeats.  Friday night salvation starts here.  Rhythm is the reason.  The only.  He feels it.  All.  The possibility and potential of where the night will take him.  Who it will lead to, as it leads simultaneously to his salvation.  The floor is beer sticky beneath his feet, soles tacky and protesting at their need to move, though the notes carry him too, destination bound.  Such is the pull to which he, too, must answer. 

Soon enough, he spots her.  No name.  No need.  She is a poem in imperfection, sway and sashay in the hips, hair mussed and tangled, slight glisten across her brow, smudge in the eyeliner; heat induced.  Smile on her lips, a secret she doesn’t care to share.  Not with him, hidden by the pillar, outsider on the outskirts.  Not so much with anyone.  No need; not here.  The answer is in the vibe; the pulse as the boards reverberate with strident sound.  The moment is what matters and she is carried by it; takes it with her, onwards into the night, beat beneath her skin.

Tonight is the night all too often lacking, where heels and toe tapping are loud enough to drown out the insistence of his need for sole salvation, carried deep within, hidden away.  Lovers laugh, life lives itself on and on, as an age old tune talks of sweet surrender; irony, too, rampant raging, something he is careful to note.  It is enough, for now.  He is able to take his leave without playing the crowd.  To resist the urge to draw them in.  Her, particularly.  Especially.  He doesn’t want to know her name, for her to learn his; momentary proximity eclipsed by what will follow.  Incubus.  The last word to form on a number of lips.  A number he doesn’t care to remember.  Has found reason to forget.  There is no pride in remembering.  The majority make it as far as ink – a misnomer – before the rest is swallowed by silence. 

Such reluctance is unusual, his reticence causing him to question it.  It is what he is; what he does.  Night after night, after night.  Cycle circles round and round, mirrored by the moves on the dance floor.  It is what it is. 

Still, she draws him in.  Again, nights later.  He knows it is a mistake to return; fails to fight it fully.  Lacking, perhaps, the will.  Whatever.  He is used of old to playing the voyeur.  Now, it fails to hit home as it should in the face of pillar box red lips, mascara and kohl.  That same secret smile.  Not for him.  Not for anyone other than herself, though tonight she dances amidst more than one admirer, circle cycling round and round.  

He turns from her, from pretty promise and possibility.  It is time to move.  Somehow, he fancies he prefers her where she is.

(540 words)

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Trying something new, this was written for Mid-Week Blues-Buster, which uses a music as opposed to word/picture prompt.  The resulting flash fiction can be anything from 300-700 words.