Dancefloor Love is Our Exclusive Extract from the New Erotic Publication PULP Zine

Words: Bee Beardsworth | Photographer: Layla Kosima

This feature is from PULP Zine, an erotic zine co-created by Jack Rowe and Megan Wallace.

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“Dancefloor love is a real thing,” she proclaims, looking me dead in the eyes as she bites into a Magnum. The chocolate shell breaks with a whip-sharp snap. The white creamy innards have already found a slither to trickle out of, the sticky sweet lacing from the wooden stick down her fingers. Lying on the sharp unkempt grass of a too-hot Berlin park, I’m telling her about my latest club romance.  

I had a hunger. My belly has been filled with butterflies as I’d premeditated on this night, letting the little insects thump against the walls of my stomach as I’d imagined endless threads of possible interactions and chains of events. There is something so excruciatingly thrilling about the anticipation of a situation that you are familiar enough with to be able to build an expectation but that is still too new for you to have a full grasp on. 

A sense of pressure. Buddhism says that the root of all suffering is desire but I can’t seem not to let desire worm its way up from inside a hidden place within me, a tiny green shoot pushing through a crack in the pavement in spite of all that tries to stop it. Desire compounded with a yearning. Yearning not from a place of loneliness though (I don't consider myself a lonely person, I love being alone) but for a newness. 

A newness to lose myself in. Newness in the form of another person, another body. A new memory to replay obsessively like a note from a lost lover. A perfect stranger. 

Red light was throbbing through the steamy windows when I saw your face in the smoking area. Your eyes were so deep and dark - the darkest brown iris that blends seamlessly into a pitch black pupil, transforming the entire eye into a portal of bottomless night. Beautiful eyes that are still beautiful to me now, made so because of their tinge of sadness caught in the reflection, shimmering occasionally like a fish moving under a black lake’s surface. 

You introduced me to your best friend. I didn’t catch either of your names, there were too many noises, but it didn’t matter. I had slipped into the animalistic state where social norms seem superficial and superfluous. “We’re leaving soon,” she told me. Then she asked me for a line and then she didn’t seem to be going anywhere. 

I asked you to dance. I took your hand to guide you with me. Our fingers interlocking, palm to palm as holy lovers kiss, I pulled you to my spot on the dance floor. Slowly, slowly, we turned from two people dancing to dance partners, falling into a lustful temporary love. 

You ask if I have gum. I dig out the red crumpled packet and use my teeth to pull out a little rectangle. Wrapping my hands around your neck, I pull you close, pushing the gum into your mouth. Our tongues meet for the first time. Sticky, sweet, a fresh sting. “Strawberry?”

Always strawberry. 

The perfect stranger. 

“Do you want to fuck in the bathroom?” I’d never asked anyone that before. But I couldn’t resist. I was hungry. Feeling your body, your shoulders, your arms, your stomach, your body separated by the barriers of cotton and denim, it had become excruciating. The perfect stranger. I could be whoever I wanted.

“I need to go home.” 

Pushing you up against the wall, a goodbye kiss. Someone taps me on the shoulder. “Sorry, I just wanted to say - you guys are such a hot couple.” 

We say our goodbyes. I give you my number. I only realise afterwards that I don’t even remember your name. I wonder if I will ever hear from you again. 

Dancing alone, eyes closed in the strobe lights, I feel hands close over my flanks, fingers digging into the soft flesh by my hip bones. 

“I thought you were going home.” 

You take my hand and guide me. The party is nearly over and the bathrooms are half empty. You push me against the wall and I moan, you bite my neck and push my skirt up over my hips. One hand pinning my neck against the wall, the other pulling my knee up around your thigh. I open my eyes and stare at my reflection in the mirror, watching you eat me as I dig my nails into your hair, my other arm flung up against the black tiles, the walls glistening with moisture that is smeared by my own sweat like tyre marks on a dark highway. I draw breath sharply, like someone has cut me with a piece of glass, as you press your fingers inside of me. I am my fantasy, surrendered to a stranger who knows what I taste like.  Always strawberry. 

Crammed into a toilet stall, we locked eyes. I’d just called the bathroom “the smoking area of the rave” and you did one of those laughs that comes without opening your mouth, and is mostly just blowing air through your nose with a glint in your eyes. Almost a snigger. You looked at me and I looked at you and we held that gaze for a little bit too long whilst someone was crushing something on their phone on the lid of the toilet between us, and I couldn’t tell if you were laughing with me or at me. (I still can’t most of the time.) 

“He seems like such a dickhead,” I say to my friend, watching you watch me whisper in her ear. “Did you see him laughing at me in the toilet?” 

“No babe. No one else is thinking about you as much as you are. I think he’s nice.” 

Cab, security check, tickets, coat check. The party hasn’t become a rave yet, and I find myself standing against a wall, shivering slightly in my too-tiny skirt and mesh top, talking to you. I’m trying to impress you. Why the fuck am I doing that. I feel like I’m 6 years old and I’m being rude to the boy I fancy in the playground. 

Three of us go upstairs to the hot, sweaty, sticky dark dancefloor. Then there was two of us. Pacing around each other like cats, we are practically growling at one another, our eyes locked, fused, boring into each other. We are as close as we can be without touching, mirroring our bodies in an undulating snake charm. Each daring the other to break the barrier.  

Tilting my chin down and looking into your eyes longer than I should,

Your hand takes mine and spins me around, 

I push myself back against you, 

Arching my arm behind my shoulder to place it on the back of your neck.

I offer you some of my drink, 

You take a swig,

Nod your head and push your chin towards me, 

I tilt my head back, open my mouth

And you pour it from your lips into mine.

Looping my fingers through your belt buckles pulling you closer, 

You slip your fingers under my skirt, pushing the waistband and going a few degrees lower than friendly, 

We’re not going to be friends. 

It’s like everything stopped. We are the only people in that room; the only people in the fucking world.

“I need water.” 

I walk silently down a flight of stairs, you follow close enough for me to feel the air between us move. A magnetic pulse that was there since we first saw each other now a fully fused web of electric lines crackling and sparking.

You hand me a plastic cup filled with water, smoothly collecting one for yourself without closing the faucet. 

“We are going to fuck one day.” You don’t break your unflinching gaze or move a single muscle. 

I’m in love. 

The steps of the conversation between two bodies; 

Our sweat dripped together, alchemising into a sacred potion. Licking your neck as I pushed myself against you, wanting to melt into your skin and form a new self, infusing myself completely and utterly into one form with you that would mean that I would never be without you again. Never alone or lonely. I like to be alone but with you I could be forever never alone again. 

We go outside for a cigarette and now I’m leaning against the wall but your arms are around me and I’m not cold anymore and I’m not trying to impress you I am just telling you everything our faces are so close that I can feel your breath and see the place where you heart is beating in your neck and I want to tell you everything about me and I want you to tell me everything about you and I would tell you anything give you anything if only you asked me. 

Although not quite. 

“I want to fuck you in the bathroom.”

A lingering loyalty hangs over me, although that isn’t the full story. I want to fuck you but not here, not in a bathroom stall littered with old baggies and bits of toilet paper and a wet floor with mysterious dark puddles that might be piss and might be something else. Not while we have to keep quiet and someone is banging on the door and your hand is muffling my mouth. It’s like eating a piece of candy when you want to have a proper sit down meal with a delicious glass of red wine and take your time with every bite.

I know that you’re worth more to me than a fuck in the bathroom. I think you think I’m worth more than that. I don’t really know what you think but I think I know what you think as we slip into a territory of harmonised physical unity beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. 

The intense kernel of lust expanding, blooming like a bubble that holds just the two of us from everything except the music. We lose ourselves in each other like I’ve never lost myself before; we fall into k-time, g-time, c-time, 2cb-time, the timing of each others bodies and souls and heartbeats and the taste and smell of our skin and breath intertwining and collapsing into each other together over and over again.

I fell into you and on you and through you. Fog filled the air but I never lost the feeling of you. If I lost you I found you, knowing your place like something eternally mine. Holding me as the last song faded out, the glitter of the disco ball piercing the tears that fell down my smiling cheeks.

No one will ever know me like you did then, lost in you completely, in love on the dancefloor. 

The first time we met was in an ex’s kitchen. Glistening morning sunlight illuminated you like Alectrona, the tiny wispy bits of your hair appearing like they were catching fire at the ends. You were telling a story about a bacchanalic acid trip under a full moon on a beach at the bottom of a cliff. As the sun rose you had been found buried under the sand, reverted back to an algae, suspended in a primordial reality. 

Clutching my cup of tea with my knees pressed up to my chin, wearing an old football shirt, I hung on your every word like a biblical prophecy. I knew then that you would change my life. 

I doubt you thought anything of me. 

A part of your being evaded me. There was this translucent thread of otherworldliness that seemed to make you distinctly different from the world you moved through, like a shimmering spider web of secret knowing that I couldn’t clearly see unless it caught the light in the corner of my vision. 

The next time I saw you were dancing on top of a raw steel radiator, above the dancefloor, wrapped in silvery grey fishnet with a face of glitter and berry stained lips. You were not of the same world as we were but this time it felt wrong. It hurt me to look at you as you danced around a broken part of yourself, letting the cracks spread with each footstep instead of resting and allowing the gaps to mend. 

Then you dug yourself out of the darkness and dirt.

A dance floor on a summer Sunday. A few exchanged words that permeated our skin and perforated our souls. We were both changed now, had both brought ourselves back from somewhere close to the knives. We had both crossed a line from light into darkness back to somewhere in the shadows where beams of sunlight fell through the gaps in the trees, flooding the forest floor. 

I caught myself mirrored in you as we danced and danced and danced. A conjuring took place, raising ancient hidden depths of something unspeakable and sacred from the concrete floor as you cast your spell over me. 

“Hi, sorry, can I just get a cup of ice with some slices of lemon? Thank you so much.”

The word feral derives from the Latin for wild beast. A feral creature is one who was once wild, was then tamed, but then reverts back to the natural, untamed state once again. 

To be feral with you was the most natural of all. Ice cubes melting on our naked skin, sucking the moisture mingled with sweet sweat and saltiness, aligning limbs to create shapes that felt like a ritual and a release. Mirrors can show you things you didn’t know were there, apparitions of entities hiding in the shadows and bared teeth and bite marks that appear under the full moon. 

Xeno-euphoria flowed through every vein of our enchanted bodies as we sang hymns with our bodies, carving through the air with nothing to stop us. Time became an idea imagined, fatigue was a choice. The performance of our lives that we were summoning was the only play on the only stage in the world. We were seduced by the beat, succumbed to it, and fucked it all night long. 

Sometimes you can hold someone so deeply that it is no longer holding. You can hold someone so deeply that you are burrowing inside of them, your entities bleeding over each other like ink running in the rain. Hold someone so deeply that you run into the broken parts of them, filling the cracks with yourself, holding them until the gaps mend. 

Home at midday, climbing the never ending stairs to your tower, heart beating like a snare drum. You let me tell you things I had never told a soul. Time was still an imagined idea but the edges started to fray, and my body buckled from the pressure. 

“I’ll take care of you baby. Don’t worry.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

A lilac bath, lavender wafting on the steam billowing. One hundred flickering candles. I sank into the potion, skin turning pink from the warmth, heartbeat slowing as I held my breath and let myself dissolve. 

“I never let anyone take care of me.” 

You held my damp head, running your fingers through the water-matted buzz. A holy water and a sacred touch, you cast a spell over me. Cool hands on my naked chest, brushing my breasts and caressing my neck. Our lips touch and pass a secret, the elucidation of knowing that I could now weave from a shimmering spider web. 

The club was lucky to have us. 

You can divide the world into two groups: people who go on a night out to meet someone and people who don’t. “You always wanted to get married. Maybe I’ll just pack it all in and we can get married and have a kid,” I muse, sitting on the edge of my bed, watching my ex put on their socks. “Don’t be ridiculous,” they said, fumbling fingers buttoning jeans. “You’re married to the dance floor.”

You can buy a copy of PULP Zine here.