arcade club
It takes ages for you to shed the shadow of the nightmare completely. You tend more towards the melancholy. Normally independent as a cat, you’ve been unusually keen to hang around today. Occasionally you touch me out of the blue and I gather it’s just checking I’m still here. While I relish the attention, and I take your poking hand and kiss the fingertips in turn, your disquiet unsettles me. So I decide to distract you.
Hence: We pull up to the Arcade Club in Kirkstall, a three-storey building plonked between two retail parks that houses all manner of games.
“Everything free to play,” I say as the till-driver closes a wristband on me. He holds out another day-glo band and you extend your hand to receive it. “Ground floor is big games like driving simulators, modern shooting games, modern Japanese arcade games. How’s your Japanese?”
“Patchy,” you admit, scanning the room. The ceiling lights are dim but the room is lit by literally hundreds of arcade games. A Luigi’s Mansion game stands imposing by the entrance. Two young brothers play a game where the controllers are literally football-sized pigs they must wobble back and forth. The air is thick with the sound of competing rhythm games and, it must be granted, a significant minority of smelly nerds.
I pat a life-sized statue of Sonic and drag you into the chaos. As distractions go it’s pretty compelling. “First floor, classic stuff. They even have an original Pong cabinet.”
“Classy.” A group of kids jostles you as they are shepherded out of the arcade. One of them, a young girl of maybe nine, stops and looks up at you with reproach. You give her a broad and toothy grin and she pales, running off to catch up with her family, casting many backwards glances.
“Oh, I guess it’s six, they’re switching to adults-only.”
“I can help speed up that process,” you say, still grinning at the disappearing kid.
I spank you on the backside, but am secretly pleased. You already seem a hundred times better. “Leave the little ones alone, they have made precious memories today.”
“I can help them remember those memories for the rest of their lives…” You catch my hand before it can spank you again and place it around your hips, snuggling in a little. “Go on, O tourguide. Where first?”
Second-floor VR comes first because I love me some Beat Saber. You try to throw me off by loudly insisting that Synth Rider is better. I film you as you play because the way your little belly and butt jiggle when you lunge or stomp your foot is both cute erotic.
We explore the whole place together. You spot games you recognise and pull me over. I guide you to my favourites. Invariably one of us smashes the other. It’s like we’re wired completely opposite. Which makes sense, I guess.
I’m showing you this ridiculous ping-pong ball-throwing game on the ground floor when you spot her. I continue flinging a chain of balls, you’re craning your neck to examine her across the room.
She’s a talk, dark-haired metal-alt-girl and she seems to shine with this sort of light. Dark green lipstick and smoky eyes, black hair shaved on one side and otherwise astonishingly straight in the humid interior, all wrapped up in a Pac Man T and jeans that end in tall and heavy silver-worked boots
She’s cute. Very cute. But there’s a surprising number of cute alt girls here. What made her catch your eye is the way she interacts with the mismatched group she’s with. Effortlessly graceful, she keeps people switching between games they love, diffuses frustration, spots people getting left behind or left out and engages them, brings them back into the fold.
It’s a dance. One you can see clearly from across the room. She probably doesn’t even know she’s doing it and you want to know how she does it. You picture yourself in her shoes, sensing and plucking the lines of connection between those around you, manipulating their actions and thoughts as you squat in the middle, serene as a spider. Occasionally, with the barest twitch of a leg, directing one of the flies caught in your web to spiral towards you…
She’s a master manipulator and she makes the roof of your mouth ache.
When I turn to find you have wandered off I smile to myself. My wild cat is back.
You contrive to talk to someone from the group. A girl with broad, good-natured face and not a huge amount going on in her head. Together you play an insane game with zero English text and dozens of button-bashing mini-games. You let her win and affect growing frustration.
The discord brings over the light-filled alt chick.
“Oh! I don’t think we met love, I’m Lorna.” Up close she smells like watermelon. Her dark green lipstick is watermelon-scented. You just barely manage to avoid dribbling, it’s been a while since lunch.
“Raven.” You extend a slightly over-formal hand and Lorna accepts it with a grin. A grin that threatens to acquire a blush under your intentionally overlong eye contact. Your hands remain clasped for the duration. “A pleasure.”
She’s thrown, for the first time you’ve seen that happen today. The girl you were playing with says something, but you open your lips and shape them as if waiting your turn to speak. Lorna’s attention fails quite to fall on her friend, who is ignored in favour of you. The soft Burgundy lips which caught her attention release your words from their stasis: “Would you like to play?”
Lorna’s almost imperceptible connection with her friend drops away and, as you make a bond with her, you take the attention.
“I’d love to play with you.”
Two hours you spend dismantling her group, stealing each scrap of attention for yourself. Deprived of Lorna’s cohesion the group fragmented in the end, disparate subgroups wandering off or leaving together.
Lorna’s whole attention was on you by the end. You’d absorbed it all. And Lorna pours a lot into her connections.
The firedoor slams open so hard it’s a wonder it doesn’t splinter. You and she stagger through, driven by the force of her kiss on your lips.
You stumble backwards and catch hold of her to break your fall. She is dragged off-balance and could probably keep from falling but seems only to care about tasting your mouth. So you both collapse into the dense box hedge that makes this place so secluded.
You both laugh against one another’s lips. You push her away to get you feet under you. Your lips taste like watermelon.
It looks like Lorna might be about to pounce on you but you get there first, wrapping her in a tight embrace and practically devouring her face as you both stagger two steps backwards into the rough stone of the building.
“I never get to do this,” she breathes, hands curled in your hair. “Never feel like this.”
“Shut up and kiss me. Really kiss me.”
She complies, but it’s unfair. Your mind is slightly elsewhere. Those razor-thin blades creep out from your back, sharp as metaphor and twice as insubstantial. The woman pinned inside the curl of your arms doesn’t feel how they graze her surface, never cutting her but finding each line of connection. Most are minor—acquaintence, colleague, new friend. Your exquisitely sensitive tendrils feel each severed link as a tiny reflexive coil, like her soul trembles. It reaches out, and so Lorna feels pain in her heart but pours ever more into the kiss, unwittingly forging a desperate connection with you.
A blade finds and destroys a link to a distant brother. You feel her shudder in your arms but force her still to kiss you. Grandparents are pruned one by one. Aunts, uncles, old friends. Lorna kisses you and is cut adrift from the world. You feel her becoming unanchored, barely able not to lose herself.
The passion of the kiss had changed. Lorna is desperate, forlorn. You, on the other hand, kiss rhythmically, regular as a swallowing throat.
Snip, and Lorna no longer knows her father. She weeps but still your lips press against hers and so she kisses back.
The final one is the hardest, but it, too, breaks. Lorna is alone, except for one person. One person in all the world stayed with her and accepted the burden of each missing connection. She would do anything for you now. You are her whole world.
The line of bundled, twisted connection travels from her spirit right down your throat. The only sensuality left in the kiss is that of a snake pulling down prey. With each swallow you tear the soul like velcro from her body. It takes time but before long she is sinking into your astral body, engulfed in a void where she will never feel connection with anyone but you for the short time she can feel anything at all.
You still support her living, vacant body. Almost as an afterthought you lower your lips to her throat. Waste not, want not.
You find me on the vr again. I smile blindly at you through the headset when you walk up to me. I know you’re there. You are my downhill, my home.
“Had fun, Rey?”
Or maybe I just heard the liquid gurgling from your tummy.
“Made a friend. Home now? Wanna cuddle.”
I pull off the headset mid-song and stride over to embrace you. You fold into the hug as well. Don’t think I didn’t notice that belch over my shoulder.
“Do you smell watermelon?”