DEEP FRIED

The Thief and Her Lover.

It wasn't love at first sight. It was lust. An instinct so real that he didn't even bother fight it anymore.

Pure, unadulterated throbbing rippled within him as she gyrated her hips against another man's crotch on the dance floor. He was enthralled. There was something about the permanent grin on her face as she held her knees and rubbed the lucky drunk bastard vigorously, forcing him to move one step behind to maintain balance every time she changed rhythm. It was her, it had to be her.

He sat at the corner of the bar facing the main entrance on the one hand and the dance floor on the other. The Club, Rhythms, was less than two months old on this new spot on Moi Avenue. The premises it once occupied once hosted a church, then a bank, then a random shipping company that everybody said was the Devil's Den. It was dingy really, until a keen entrepreneur saw its bland potential and its ability to attract the lustful and the drunken. Build, and they will come. Stock, and they will drink. They came and drunk, and danced until the sun rose and the city below woke up.

At the door the burly guards would frisk you so hard they would know what you had for dinner. It was most likely chips, fries from that fast food joint on the opposite side. Sonford, home of the drunken and where the city goes to eat tonnes of cholesterol before going to the club to hunt and home for the final romp. Most of it, the fries and the kuku porno so wildly cut by a guy called Kanisa at the chicken stand next to the door, would end on the back seat of taxies. Or a flowerbed right outside the gate as the frisky pair waited for the watchman to wake from his slumber. Even more would end up in toilet bowls, at least for those who had avoided that last shot of whisky, or on jackets and bedsheets, for those unlucky to have gotten their marks for the night higher than was necessary. In a nocturnal system of sin, food was a carnal need only second to sex.

They should have called this club Decadence. Or a club like they do in Angola, a proper brothel where straight men go in through the main door and gay men use the back alley. Women, well, they were less subtle and had the young things delivered via taxis. But here in Rhythm it was less obvious. During the day, the silence almost reminded one that there was once a church here, and that the pastors pulpit had been right where the bar now stood, backlit by a system of shelves with as many different forms of alcohol as human beings are legally allowed to produce.

The grinning girl on the dance floor was as bland as they come, at least to the common eye. Other than her slightly inebriated eyes, there was little to read from her when she was not moving. Or when she took pauses to rest her over-strained backbone. The lucky drunk, clearly turned on by the pseudo-masturbation he had experienced in the last twenty minutes, was tired but confused. To leave her now would be to release her to the pack of hounds that was clearly eyeing her for the night. The boys and girls on the hunt in this dimly lit club. Hunters and huntresses united in one accord, to get laid. To get laid like bricks, like a railway line. But he looked like he needed to take a piss.

"Don't move, Ill be back in a minute." He said, shouted rather, in her ear as he grabbed her ass and walked away. She looked back at him and for a moment, remained in the same position her had left in, slightly bent forward, holding her knees and in mid-motion. As if her spine hadn't understood the message.

Almost immediately, a pack of hounds did descend on her. She was not interested. She was on the hunt too and she had made her mark for the night. He had a thick wallet and keys to a Mercedes. The gyrating to her was the first phase of her service, and she knew how to read a man like a children's book. As she waited for him to stagger back, she made her way to the bar, right next to the man seated at the corner, sipping rum and coke from a short glass and looking lonely.

"A glass of red dry wine please, whichever you have. Add two shots of tequila, and bring salt and lemons. Usisahau ndimu, sawa?"

She then scanned the bar, looking for a quick mark before her main mark came back. Then she saw him.