Chapter 2: Elevated Desires
The climb up to the booth was a journey into another stratum of noise. The metal steps vibrated with the sub-bass, a constant tremor underfoot. The air grew hotter, thicker with the smell of warm electronics, spilled beer, and the particular sweat of concentration. From up here, the dance floor was a mesmerizing, pulsating organism, a sea of bobbing heads and flailing limbs.
“Fuckin’ hell,” Jan breathed, her eyes wide as she stepped onto the platform. It was smaller than it looked from below, a cramped altar of technology bathed in the cool glow of LED levels and the warm orange of valve amplifiers. “This is it.”
Marcus slid past them, back to his decks with the ease of a pilot in a cockpit. He gave a nod to the booth assistant, a lanky kid with headphones around his neck, who looked at the girls with blank curiosity before slipping away down the steps. They were alone in the sky.
The view was dizzying. Clara gripped the metal railing, her knuckles white. The drop below seemed immense, the crowd a writhing abstraction. The music was clearer here, each hi-hat crisper, each synth line a physical ribbon winding around her ribs. The E sang in her blood, translating the height into pure, soaring energy. The shyness was a discarded skin on the dance floor somewhere. Here, she felt powerful.
“Get yourselves sorted,” Marcus said, not looking back, his fingers already dancing over the mixer, nudging an eq knob. He nodded towards a cooler box tucked behind a monitor speaker. “Cider’s in there. Help yourself.”
Jan didn’t need telling twice. She rooted in the melting ice, pulling out two cold, wet bottles of White Ace. She cracked them open on the edge of the equipment rack, handing one to Clara. The cider was sickly sweet and cold, a shocking contrast to the heat. Clara drank greedily, the liquid spilling down her chin onto her chest. She didn’t wipe it away.
Jan surveyed the booth, her energy needing an outlet. The broad, low ledge of the main speaker stack, pointed out at the crowd, caught her eye. With a defiant, gleaming look at Marcus’s back, she hoisted herself up onto it, swinging a leg over so she was straddling the giant monitor, facing the room. The speaker thrummed powerfully between her thighs. She threw her head back and laughed, raising her bottle to the faceless crowd below.
“Jan!” Clara giggled, shocked and thrilled.
Marcus glanced over his shoulder. A slow smirk spread across his face. “Make yourself at home,” he said, his voice dry.
“I am!” Jan shouted back, rolling her hips against the vibrating cabinet in time with the beat. She was a silhouette against the storm of strobes, a dark queen on a mechanical throne.
Clara watched her, feeling a surge of heat that wasn’t just the drug. It was pride, and recklessness, and a deep, aching want. The booth felt like the center of the universe, and Marcus was its intense, focused gravity. She moved away from the railing, drawn to the core of the noise.
She stood beside him, close enough to feel the heat radiating from his body. She watched his hands, long-fingered and sure, as they cued up the next record, the ritual completely absorbing. The headphones were around his neck now, the cord snaking across the console. The scent of him was different up close—soap, a faint musk, and something metallic.
“You make it look easy,” she said, her voice barely audible, but he heard her.
“It’s not,” he said, meeting her eyes for a second. His gaze was dark, consuming. “It’s climbing a mountain and trying to take everyone with you. This track here,” he tapped the spinning vinyl, “is the tricky bit. Gotta bring ‘em down gently before you send ‘em off again.”
He was letting her in, showing her the mechanics of the magic. It was intimate. Clara took another swig of cider, the sweetness cloying in her dry mouth. The pulse of the music was in her teeth, in the base of her skull. Jan’s joyful whooping from the speaker stack was a counter-melody.
Marcus finished his mix, crossfading smoothly into a track with a deep, insistent, almost tribal groove. He straightened up, stretching his back. He finally turned to face her, leaning back against the console, the lights painting his face in shifting shades of blue and red.
“Enjoying the view?” he asked, his eyes flicking to Jan, then back to Clara, holding her.
“It’s different,” Clara said. She felt bold. The pill dissolved the space between thought and action. She put her bottle down on a spare piece of racking. The world had narrowed to this hot, loud, elevated box. To him.
She took a half-step closer. Her green eyes were unwavering. The curious, hungry look from the dance floor had refined itself into a single, clear intention. Marcus didn’t move, just watched her, his expression unreadable, though a muscle twitched in his jaw.
Without a word, Clara sank to her knees on the gritty, cable-strewn floor of the booth. The move was shockingly graceful. The denim of her jeans was tight. She looked up at him, the strobes exploding in the air above them, casting her face in stark, alternating black and white.
From her perch, Jan saw. Her dancing hips stilled. A fierce, possessive smile touched her lips. She watched, a spectator and a participant, her own breath catching.
Marcus looked down at Clara, his chest rising and falling a little faster. He gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.
Clara’s fingers, which had felt so clumsy with her bottle moments before, were steady now. They went to the button of his jeans. The metal was cool. She popped it open. The rasp of the zip was utterly absorbed by the wall of sound, a private sound in a profoundly public place. She tugged, the denim yielding.
Above them, a massive mirror ball began to spin, catching the follow-spots and fracturing them into a thousand spinning shards of light that whirled across the upturned faces of the crowd, across the walls, across the intimate scene in the booth. For anyone below who bothered to look up, the figures were just silhouettes, blurred shapes in the sacred, elevated space. A dance of shadows.
Clara didn’t look down. She kept her eyes locked on Marcus’s, her gaze luminous and defiant. The last of her shyness had not just melted—it had been incinerated. Here, in the noise and the light, with Jan a rapt audience, there was no room for it. There was only the relentless pulse, the heat, and the act.
Marcus reached out one hand, not to guide her, but to rest it lightly on her head, his fingers tangling in her hair. It wasn’t a tender gesture. It was an anchor, a claim. His other hand remained braced on the console behind him, his body a taut line.
Jan watched from her speaker, the vibration now a completely different frequency thrumming through her core. She felt a jolt of something complex—protectiveness, envy, a dark thrill—all woven together by the chemical in her bloodstream. She took a long, final pull from her cider, her eyes never leaving them.
The music began to build again, Marcus’s next selection rising from the depths, a shimmering cascade of notes gathering over a foundation of tense, muted kicks. He’d planned this transition ten minutes ago. Now, it was the perfect, unwitting soundtrack. His breathing hitched, his gaze finally breaking from Clara’s to look out over his kingdom. The crowd was a blur of anticipation, feeling the climb in their collective gut.
He looked back down, his expression a mask of intense concentration that had nothing to do with the records. The climb in the music mirrored the tension in the booth, a exquisite, tightening wire.
Just as the track reached its zenith, poised on the very brink of the drop, the booth door banged open. The booth assistant, the lanky kid, shouldered his way back in, a box of new records under his arm.
He stopped dead.
His eyes went wide, taking in the scene: Marcus against the decks, Clara kneeling before him, Jan statue-still on the speaker stack, all frozen in the strobing light like a illicit Renaissance painting.
Marcus’s head snapped towards the door. His hand tightened in Clara’s hair for an instant, a reflex. Then, with a calm that seemed superhuman, he gently but firmly guided her head back, his other hand moving swiftly to fasten his jeans.
The moment shattered.
The kid stammered, “Uh. Records. You said you needed…”
“Cheers. Put ‘em there,” Marcus said, his voice rough but controlled, nodding to a crate. He didn’t look at Clara, who was slowly, gracefully, rising to her feet, her face unreadable. He looked at Jan, who stared back at him, a slow, challenging smile spreading across her face.
“Bang on time, that drop,” Jan said, her voice loud and bright, slicing through the awkwardness. “Gonna be a big one, is it?”
Marcus turned back to his decks, his pilot’s focus slamming back into place. The track was still hanging, sweating on the edge. The crowd’s roar was a distant waterfall.
“Always is,” he muttered, and with a swift, decisive motion, he slammed the fader.
The drop crashed over the Hacienda like a tsunami of sound. The crowd screamed its release. In the booth, the noise was all-consuming, wiping the slate clean. Clara picked up her cider, her hand perfectly steady. She walked to the railing, standing beside Jan, looking out at the cathartic chaos below. She didn’t look at Marcus. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a violent, excited rhythm.
The assistant scurried back out. The spell was broken, but the charge remained, arcing between the three of them, hotter and more dangerous than before. It wasn’t over. It had just been wired into the mains. Marcus mixed with a new, furious intensity, the music turning harder, darker. An invitation. A challenge.
Jan leaned close to Clara, her lips brushing her friend’s ear. “You alright?”
Clara turned her head. Her green eyes were alive, galaxies spinning in the strobe. A smile, small and secret, touched her mouth. “Never better,” she said. And she meant it.
And she meant it.
The booth door clicked shut, sealing them back into their loud, private world. The assistant’s shocked face lingered in the air like smoke, then dissipated. The gigantic drop Marcus had unleashed was still shaking the building’s foundations, a seismic release that made the metal grille under their feet hum. Jan slid off the speaker stack, landing with a soft thud beside Clara. She linked her arm through her friend’s, a solid, knowing pressure.
“Little twat,” Jan shouted into Clara’s ear, grinning. “Timing of a fuckin’ funeral director.”
Marcus didn’t look at them. His shoulders were tense, his movements as he beat-matched the next record just a fraction too sharp. The cool control he’d worn like a jacket was gone, ripped away. What was left underneath was raw, exposed wire. Clara watched the line of his jaw, tight in the flashing dark. She saw the rapid pulse in his throat. The interruption hadn’t broken the spell; it had cranked the tension tighter, making everything feel more illicit, more urgent.
Jan felt it too, a crackle in the air like before a storm. She let go of Clara’s arm and took two steps towards the console. She stood right behind Marcus, so close her chest almost brushed his back. She could smell the hot electronics and his sweat.
“You’re all wound up,” she said, her voice a low murmur that cut through the fringes of the music. Her hand came to rest on the small of his back, feeling the muscles tense further under her palm. “Need to relax, maestro.”
Clara watched, her previous boldness crystallizing into something more deliberate. The echo of his weight on her tongue was a ghost. She moved to Jan’s side, her green eyes reflecting the spinning lights of the console. She didn’t speak. She simply reached out and traced a finger down the sweat-damped track of Marcus’s spine, over the fabric of his t-shirt.
He shuddered. A record cue point bleated, unattended. He fumbled with a knob, the music wavering for a sickening second before he locked it back in. His breath hitched. “Fuckin’ hell, girls.”
“Just helping,” Jan purred, her hand sliding around his hip. Her other hand found Clara’s, pulling it forward, placing it on his other hip. They flanked him now, a living, breathing cage. The world below was a throbbing, distant dream. Up here was the only reality: the heat, the smell of him, the overwhelming need to chase the feeling that had been so rudely interrupted.
Clara went back to her knees. This time, there was no hesitation, no silent question. The fabric of his jeans was rough under her fingers. He was already hard. The metallic rasp of the zip was a tiny, definitive click in their capsule of noise.
Marcus gripped the edge of the mixer, his knuckles white. He tried to focus on the waveform scrolling on the screen, a meaningless green river. He needed to cue the next track. He had maybe ninety seconds. A low groan escaped him as Clara took him in her hand, her touch firm and knowing.
Jan watched, her own breath coming short and sharp. The sight of Clara, of Marcus’s head falling back, was a key turning in her lock. She hiked up her short skirt, not for an audience, but for herself, for the sheer friction of it. She leaned her back against the cool metal of a rack, her eyes fixed on them. Her fingers slipped underneath her waistband, finding the wet, urgent heat there. She moaned, the sound swallowed by a crashing synth.
Clara’s mouth was hot and insistent. She took him deep, her throat working, a practiced, eager rhythm that left him dizzy. Her eyes were open, looking up at the strained ecstasy on his face. The vibrations from the speakers travelled up through the floor, through her knees, syncing with the pulse between her own legs. She was both the performer and the audience, lost in the gritty, salty taste of him and the primal sound of Jan’s pleasure beside her.
Marcus was unraveling. The professional distance shattered. His hips gave a small, involuntary jerk. One hand remained, death-gripped, on a fader, making tiny, subconscious adjustments. The other tangled violently in Clara’s hair, not guiding, just holding on, anchoring himself to the sensation as it threatened to pull him under. The music was a beast he was barely taming, a storm he was riding blind. Sweat dripped from his brow onto the vinyl below.
“That’s it,” Jan gasped, her own movements quickening, mirroring Clara’s rhythm. Her gaze was a laser, burning into the intimate connection before her. “Look at her. Fuck, look at her go.”
He did. He looked down, and the sight of Clara, so utterly consumed, tipped him over the edge. A harsh, choked sound was torn from him. His body went rigid, a live wire strung taut. For three agonizing, beautiful seconds, the music, the crowd, the whole spinning world dissolved into pure, white static.
He came back to the sound of his own heartbeat thundering in his ears, dissonant against the four-four kick. Clara was pulling away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, a look of dark satisfaction on her face. Jan was easing her hand from her underwear, breathing heavily, a lazy, triumphant smile on her lips.
The track was ending. The breakdown was approaching. With a surge of adrenaline that felt like panic, Marcus pushed off from the console. His movements were clumsy, fueled by a desperate, post-peak clarity. He grabbed the next record, his hands shaking slightly. He slotted the needle, his ears straining for the cue point through the haze in his head.
He mixed it in cleanly. A miracle. The new rhythm, deeper and more driving, took over the room. He finally turned to look at them, his chest heaving. They looked back, flushed and fierce, a matching pair of beautiful wreckers.
Jan straightened her skirt. Clara stood up, her legs steady. She picked up her half-finished bottle of cider, took a swig, and handed it to Marcus.
“You looked like you needed that,” she said, her voice hoarse.
He took the bottle, drank deeply, the sweet liquid a shock. He managed a ragged, breathless laugh. “You’ve no idea.”
He ran a hand through his long hair, composing himself, the mask of control slowly reassembling. But it was cracked now. They’d seen behind it. The power in the booth had shifted, subtly but irrevocably.
Jan stepped close to Clara, leaning in to whisper. The roar of the new track covered her words, but Clara nodded, a slow, agreeing dip of her chin. Their adventure had found a new, more dangerous gear.
Marcus watched them, the spent thrill in his veins now mingling with a sharp, predatory curiosity. This wasn’t over. It was just beginning. He nudged the bass eq higher, sending a thicker, more aggressive wave of sound over the crowd. An invitation. A promise.
“Stick around,” he said, his voice regaining some of its old gravel, though his eyes were still darkly unfocused. “My set’s got another hour in it. Gets deeper from here.”
Jan’s grin was all teeth. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
The remaining hour of his set unfolded as a fever dream of sound and light. Marcus played with a reckless, focused energy, driving the room through a gauntlet of relentless basslines and shimmering breakdowns. Jan and Clara held their post by the railing, two pillars amidst the chaos, their bodies moving now with a spent, languid grace as the peak began its slow, chemical descent. Sweat dried cold on their skin in the blasts from the industrial fans. They shared the last warm dregs of cider, their silence more communicative than any conversation.
The connection between the three of them now hummed on a different frequency. It was a live wire, stripped and raw from what had happened. Every glance Marcus shot their way was loaded, a silent acknowledgement of the secret simmering in the booth’s hot darkness. Clara’s earlier boldness had mellowed into a deep, heavy-lidded satisfaction. Jan’s energy simmered, watchful, a guardian and a participant all at once.
When the final track melted into a wash of ambient noise and the house lights stuttered on with a brutal, unforgiving glare, the spell broke with a physical jolt. The Hacienda was instantly transformed from a temple of shadow into a grim, concrete shell. Revelers blinked like confused moths, their dilated pupils punishing them. The floor was a sticky museum of spilled drinks and discarded flyers. The air, stripped of its mystery, smelled of bleach and stale bodies.
"Fuck me," Jan groaned, rubbing her eyes. "Feel like I've been dug up."
Clara just nodded, her throat too dry to speak. Her ears rang with a high-pitched whine that seemed to swallow other sounds. They watched from above as the crowd began its slow, dazed shuffle towards the exits, a zombie procession coming down from the heights.
Marcus was already in motion, his DJ persona sloughed off like a skin. He powered down the decks with economical clicks, his movements efficient. He carefully slotted his precious vinyl into flight cases, the ritual grounding him. He didn’t look at the girls until the last record was stored.
"Gimme twenty minutes to pack the motor," he said, his voice raspy from shouting over the music. He finally met their eyes. "Van’s out back. If you’re still about."
It wasn't a demand. It was a test. He snapped the latches on a case shut, the sound final.
Jan looked at Clara, a question in her raised eyebrow. Clara’s green eyes were weary but alight with a reflected glow, the night’s adventures etched into her satisfied posture. She gave a faint, almost imperceptible shrug. A yes.
"We'll find you," Jan said, turning back to him.
They descended the trembling metal steps, their legs feeling like someone else’s. The dance floor was a wasteland. They weaved through the stragglers, the magic now just a gritty residue under their shoes. The chill of the Manchester night hit them in the alley like a slap. They hugged themselves, breath pluming in the orange sodium glare. Around them, people laughed too loud or argued with taxis, the night's energy curdling at its edges.
They found him by a battered white Transit van, its side door open like a hungry mouth. He was heaving a heavy flight case of speakers inside, the muscles in his arms corded with effort. The sweat on his t-shirt had cooled. He looked older out here, just a bloke loading a van in the damp small hours.
"Need a hand?" Jan called, her voice scratchy.
He straightened up, wiping his hands on his jeans. "All sorted. Just this lot left." He nodded towards a few remaining boxes of records inside. His gaze travelled over them, assessing their state. The manic energy from the booth was gone, replaced by a more calculating calm. "You two look how I feel. Proper rinsed."
"Tell me about it," Clara murmured, her first words in what felt like hours. They were raspy.
He leaned against the van’s cold flank, lighting a cigarette. The tip flared, illuminating the sharp planes of his face. "So," he said, exhaling a plume of smoke that mingled with the fog of their breath. "You got a taxi to catch? Or do you want to come back to mine? It’s in Salford. Nowt special, but it’s got a roof. And a kettle."
The offer hung in the cold air, simple and massive. It wasn't about the kettle. It was about the unspoken continuation, about seeing where the live wire led when it wasn’t surrounded by strobes and a thousand witnesses. The silence stretched, filled only by distant shouts and the van’s ticking engine.
Jan glanced at Clara, a whole conversation in that look. The anchor checking in with her compass. Clara’s lips were chapped. She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, a gesture that held a trace of her old shyness, now overlaid with a new exhaustion and a simmering curiosity. The night had already torn up the map. Why stop here?
Jan turned back to Marcus, a slow, tired smile spreading across her face. It wasn't the wild grin from the speaker stack. This was something quieter, more definitive.
"Kettle sounds class," she said. "Let’s go."