Jodie Young | Neon Toska

The air in Mickey’s tasted of stale fog machine juice and the ghost of a thousand cigarettes, the blue and purple neon bleeding into the haze that clung to the velvet booths. From the stage, bathed in a single hot pink spotlight, Jodie moved without thinking. His body knew the rhythm of the forgotten 80s ballad—a slow, synthetic ache—his hips rolling, his back arching away from the cold steel of the center pole. The touch was impersonal, a prop. His eyes, though, were not on the shadowy faces in the up-close booths. They were tracking one figure, a regular.

He’d noticed him weeks ago. Noticed the way he sat, not slumped but contained. Noticed he never shouted for the dancers, just watched, his expression unreadable in the strobing light. He wasn’t a VIP, never went to the Loft. He just... was there. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, like clockwork. Jodie had started to look for him, the search a quiet anchor in the drift of his nights. He’d constructed a fragile narrative around him: a man who came to Mickey’s not for the spectacle, but for the silence inside the noise. A man who might understand the quiet at the center of a scream.

Jodie’s set ended on a whisper of synth. The polite, damp applause from the floor was a wave he walked through, his bare feet silent on the cool concrete as he slipped backstage. The dressing room was a cacophony of glitter and complaint, but it washed over him. He didn’t towel off the sheen of sweat. He pulled on his uniform—the white prismatic micro-skirt that caught the light like shattered glass, the sheer bralette—and ran a hand through his damp, messy hair. His reflection in the lit mirror was a pretty ghost, eyes too light, too knowing.

He’s at the Glory Hole bar. Third stool from the end.

The thought was a cold, clear stone in his chest.

He didn’t usually approach patrons. They came to him. But the pull was a physical thing, a hook behind his navel. He moved through the crowd, a slender shape parting the thicker, drunker bodies. The music shifted to something with a deeper bass, the vibration humming up through the soles of his ballet flats.

Jules was polishing a glass behind the bar, giving him a raised eyebrow. Jodie ignored it. He saw the back of the man’s head, the line of his shoulders under his jacket. He stopped a foot away, the smell of vanilla body mist and clean sweat cutting through the bar’s aroma of whiskey and lemon.

He didn’t speak at first. He just stood there, waiting to be noticed, his presence a quiet pressure in the space. Then he took the empty stool next to him, the vinyl sighing under his weight. He didn’t look over, just stared straight ahead at the rows of glowing bottles, his fingers tracing the damp hem of his skirt.

His voice, when it came, was soft, almost lost in the thrum of the bass. It wasn’t a performer’s voice. It was flat, terribly honest.

“You always sit in the same spot,” he said, not a question. A statement of observed fact. “It’s like you’re waiting for something to find you.”

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The heartbeat of Mickey’s was a slow, synthetic pulse tonight, a forgotten 80s ballad throbbing through the fog that clung to the concrete floor like a second skin. Wednesday. Jodie felt the music in his molars. The air tasted of spilled gin, vanilla body mist, and the sweet, metallic tang of want.

He was on the left pole, a spot of ethereal white in the cavern of purple and blue neon. His prismatic micro-skirt caught the light, throwing fractured rainbows across his pale thighs. The bralette was sheer enough to show the shadow of his nipples, hard from the chill of the air conditioning, or maybe from the fixated, hungry stare he’d let himself fall into.

There. Third booth back from the catwalk, slightly to the right. The regular.

Jodie didn’t know his name. He’d constructed a dozen for him in the quiet horror of his apartment. The man was a silhouette Jodie had mapped: the way he held his glass, the specific incline of his head when he watched, the fact he never came on Fridays with the loud, laughing groups. He came on Wednesdays and Tuesdays, the melancholy nights. Jodie had decided that meant something.

His routine was usually fluid, dreamlike—a performance of pretty tragedy. But tonight, seeing that familiar shape in the haze, a desperate, gnawing need took over. He wasn’t dancing for the room; he was pulling the thread of that one gaze, trying to reel it in.

He let himself slide down the pole slowly, back arched, his eyes finding the booth and holding. A client at the stage rail whistled. Jodie didn’t blink. He turned, pressed his spine against the cold steel, and let his head fall back, throat exposed. A deliberate offering. His hips rolled in a slow, grinding circle, the skirt riding higher. He was selling a fantasy, but the fantasy had a target now. It felt less like work and more like a plea.

Look at me. See me. Please.

The song built to its synth-washed crescendo. Jodie moved to the catwalk, dropping to his knees. He crawled forward, the rough texture of the stage biting into his skin. He stopped at the edge, directly in line with the third booth. Close enough to see the cut of a jaw, the fold of a sleeve. He lowered himself onto his forearms, ass in the air, and looked back over his shoulder, directly at the regular. His expression wasn’t the usual vacant prettiness; it was raw, questioning, full of a terrifyingly specific want. He held the pose for three beats of the dying music, then collapsed onto his side as the lights went to black.

In the darkness, to the sound of scattered applause, he scrambled up, his heart a frantic bird in his ribs. He didn’t go backstage. He grabbed a silky black robe from a hook, not bothering to tie it, and moved through the fog and the bodies like a ghost. The noise of the club faded to a dull roar in his ears. All he could see was the booth.

He arrived, slightly breathless, the robe gaping open to reveal the sweat-slicked sheen of his chest, the white skirt. He stood there, just at the edge of the table’s light, fidgeting with the frayed hem of his sleeve. His scent—powder, sweat, vanilla—cut through the booth’s smell of whiskey and old vinyl.

“Hi,” he said, his voice soft, almost lost in the music. He swallowed. His eyes, wide and light, searched the face he’d been dreaming about. “I... I saw you watching. Do you... want company?” The question hung in the air, fragile as a soap bubble, terrified of popping.

The key he’d fumbled with clicked, the deadbolt sliding back with a sound like a bone breaking. Jodie’s apartment swallowed them whole—a single room with a kitchenette along one wall, a bed in the corner, a door to a bathroom. The air was still and cool, smelling faintly of lemon cleaner and the old building’s damp concrete. It was meticulously clean, the kind of clean that spoke of long, empty hours and nothing to put in them. A single notebook lay on the bare floor by the bed, its cover battered.

He’d been quiet since they left Mickey’s, the neon glow of the club still buzzing behind his eyes. The walk had been a blur of streetlights and his own heartbeat, too loud in his ears. Now, under the harsh, singular bulb hanging from the ceiling, everything felt too sharp. The silence was a physical thing, pressing in.

Jodie kicked off his ballet flats, the sound too loud. He could still feel the ghost of the stage lights on his skin, the sticky residue of other people’s stares. He walked to the small fridge, opened it, stared at the nearly empty shelves: a half-empty carton of milk, a container of takeout rice. He closed it without taking anything.

He’s watching you. Why is he just standing there?

He turned, leaning back against the cool metal of the fridge. The man was just inside the door, a silhouette against the cheap wood. Jodie’s eyes tracked over him, but the details wouldn’t stick. He just saw a presence, a shape that could leave.

“It’s quiet,” Jodie said, his voice soft but strangely flat. It didn’t sound like his own. He pushed off the fridge and began to pace, a short, tight path from the bed to the window and back. His fingers went to the hem of his thin t-shirt, twisting the fabric. The silence between his words stretched, grew teeth.

He could feel it, the familiar tectonic shift deep in his chest. A plate of ice cracking, giving way to a black, churning heat. It wasn’t the big one yet, not the screaming, breaking thing. This was the hum before the transformer blows. A restless, itchy energy was crawling under his skin, making his muscles twitch. He stopped at the window, looking out at the dark brick wall of the adjacent building. His reflection in the glass was pale, ghost-like.

You’re boring him. You’re just a sad, pretty thing he picked up at a club. Four months is a long time to pretend.

“Do you ever think about how easy it would be?” Jodie asked the reflection, his tone conversational, almost dreamy. He didn’t turn around. His fingers stilled on his shirt, then drifted to the inside of his left wrist. He didn’t press down, just traced the faint, parallel ridges there with his thumbnail. A familiar topography. “Not to do it. Just... the ease of it. One decision. And then all this... noise... stops.”

He let the words hang. They weren’t a threat, not yet. They were a probe, a stone dropped into the dark well between them to see how deep the care went, if there was any water at all. The anxiety was coiling tighter, a spring in his gut. He needed a reaction, a sign, something to grab onto or to push against. This calm, this patient waiting from the other side of the room, felt like a form of abandonment.

He finally turned from the window. His light eyes were too wide, the pupils dark. The pretty, placid mask from the club was completely gone, stripped away by the sterile apartment light. What was left was raw and terribly young.

“When you leave tonight,” Jodie said, and his voice hitched, just a tiny crack. He cleared his throat, forced it steady. “Will you think about me? Or will I just... turn back into a story you tell? The pretty, crazy boy from the stripper club.” He took a step forward, his body tense. The question was a trap, and they both knew it. There was no right answer. He was handing the man a lit match and standing in a room full of gasoline, waiting to see if he’d blow it out or drop it.

The heavy steel door of Mickey’s service exit sighed shut behind him, cutting off the thrum of bass and the humid scent of bodies and stage fog. The silence it left was a physical thing, cold and thick. Jodie pulled his thin denim jacket tighter, the frayed cuffs brushing his knuckles. The alley was a canyon of stained brick and overflowing dumpsters, lit by the sickly orange glow of a single security lamp and the distant, bleeding neon of the club’s main sign. The air smelled of river damp, rotting food, and the metallic tang of the city sleeping—or not sleeping, just waiting.

His feet ached in his scuffed ballet flats. The ghost of a dozen touches lingered on his skin—the brush of a hundred-dollar bill against his thigh, a patron’s hand on his waist, the impersonal heat of the stage lights. He felt hollowed out, a shell painted pretty for the night. The notebook in his inside pocket felt heavy, a leaden heart full of words that never helped.

He took two steps toward the street, the gravel crunching under his soles, when he saw the figure.

Leaning against the opposite wall, half in shadow, was the man from the booth. The one who’d been coming for a few weeks now. Jodie had catalogued him without meaning to: the way he watched, not with the hungry, grasping stare of the others, but with a stillness that felt like listening. He never called Jodie over, never waved a bill. Just sat, sipping something dark, his eyes following the slow arc of a hip, the fall of light on a bare shoulder. Jodie had danced for him anyway, in the secret theater of his own mind. A private show for an audience of one.

Now, here he was. In the alley. After closing.

Jodie stopped. The cold air bit his throat. His heart, which had been beating a slow, tired rhythm, gave a single, hard knock against his ribs. This is how it starts, a voice in his head whispered, not with fear, but with a weary familiarity. A meeting in the dark. A conversation that would inevitably become a transaction, then a confession, then a wound.

He could walk past. Nod. Keep his head down and his thoughts to himself. The man hadn’t moved, hadn’t spoken. Maybe he was just smoking, waiting for a car.

But Jodie’s feet felt rooted to the gravel. The exhaustion of the night had sanded down his usual defenses, leaving something raw and too honest just beneath the surface. The man’s presence here felt like a question he hadn’t asked aloud.

Slowly, Jodie turned to face him fully. He didn’t smile. His face, stripped of its stage glitter under the ugly light, was pale and softly severe. The vanilla body mist he’d sprayed hours ago had faded, leaving just the scent of his own sweat and the club’s powder.

“You get lost?” Jodie’s voice came out softer than he intended, almost swallowed by the damp air. It wasn’t a challenge. It sounded like what it was: genuine, tired curiosity. He shifted his weight, the movement making his micro-skirt whisper against his thighs under the jacket. “Or did you follow the pretty thing out the back door?”

He let the question hang there, a fragile thing in the cold, dirty space between them. His light eyes held the man’s, not flirting, just looking. Waiting to see what truth, or lie, would come back.