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Collateral Flirtation Thread Tracker
"Fashion" is on. The remix, not the album cut, the one that runs six minutes and has that extra synth layer underneath the brass that turns the whole room into a pulse. Adrian has it loud enough that it's bouncing off the marble and filling the suite and this is not up for discussion. This is not background music. This is the whole point.
"Okay so Ren sent me the address while I was still in the air," he says, to his own reflection, to Danny, to the general direction of the bedroom through the open bathroom door, "and I looked it up and I looked it up again and I looked it up a third time because the first two times I thought I was misreading it, and it's on this little street off Leblon that doesn't have a sign, which, that's not an address, that's a vibe and a prayer, but Ren has never steered me wrong on a venue, not once, not even that place in Tokyo that looked like a parking structure from outside and turned out to have the best sound system I've ever stood next to in my life, so I'm trusting it."
Forty minutes at the vanity. The marble counter has everything on it: products in an order that means something to him, six different brushes, a glass jar, a palette. The bathroom lighting is very good. His hotels always get the bathroom lighting right and Adrian appreciates this in a very specific and sincere way.
The rust eyeshadow is done. Both eyes, blended soft, the color sitting in the inner corners and along the lower lash line, that warm bruised quality that took twenty minutes to make look like five. He picks up a brush, taps it once against the heel of his hand.
"I honestly don't know how I'd manage without her and she knows it."
The song moves into its second movement, that long stuttering brass line, and Adrian's right hand moves with it for two seconds before he redirects it back to the brush. Then the bass drops under the brass and his hips go too, just slightly, a half-rotation that the music just compels, and he keeps talking through it without acknowledgment.
He leans in. The left side of the under-eye color is sitting fractionally lighter than the right. He picks up the smaller brush and corrects it.
He's in the high-waisted trousers already, the wide-leg black crepe ones, fluid enough that even the small hip movement sends them shifting, and nothing else yet. The blazer is on the back of the bathroom door. The marble counter has his oxblood nails and his ring and the rest of the night laid out in order.
"She said arrive before ten. Which is early. I know it's early, you don't have to tell me it's early, but the DJ transition is at midnight and the first set is the one and Ren has never told me a first set was the one when it wasn't, so we're doing ten."
The brass line comes back around and he sets the brush down without deciding to, turns away from the mirror, and does about eight full seconds of dancing in the middle of the bathroom floor. Not performing it. Just doing it, the way people do things alone in rooms when the song moves them to. His bare feet on the pale stone, the trousers moving with him exactly the way they're supposed to, and then the section ends and he turns back to the vanity and picks up exactly where he left off like nothing happened.
He picks up the oxblood polish. A nail on his left hand got smudged in the shower, the color down to nothing at the tip, which is not acceptable.
"I've seen this DJ before, actually, not in Rio, in Ibiza, a couple years ago, and the thing I remember about her is how she built the room over the course of the night, like she's not just playing tracks, she's constructing a story arc, and that is rare. And she always pulls in something local, whatever city she's in, she finds the sound that belongs to that specific place and she folds it in, so I'm hoping she goes full Rio with it, something with that low baile funk pulse underneath everything, or some bossa nova DNA buried in the mix, something that feels like this city at two in the morning when it's warm and everyone's moving and a little drunk and nobody wants to go home alone."
Left hand braced against the vanity edge. Small precise strokes with his right.
The song winds into its outro, that long fade of brass and synth, and Adrian tips his chin up slightly and mouths the last few bars at the ceiling with complete sincerity. Then it ends. He caps the polish, shakes his hand once, then blows on the patch-up job he's done. It'll suffice.
The next track comes in, something with a deep rolling bass that isn't Bowie, a transition track, and Adrian lets it run without comment. He moves back to the vanity mirror, assessing. Eyes good. Skin good. Lips deliberately pale, the color stripped back so everything lands on the eyes. Hair: the left side has committed to something, a cluster of curls going in a direction that has clearly made a decision without him. Humidity, why fight it?
"Are you almost ready?"
No particular urgency. He's not almost ready either. The jacket is still on the back of the bathroom door and the statement ring is still sitting next to the faucet.
A second transition track. He's moving through the room now, not dancing exactly, just not standing still, his weight shifting, picking things up and setting them down with his right hand, leaving the left to dry, the oxblood polish back in the bag, a curl sorted briefly and immediately released because it's hopeless.
Then "Golden Years" comes in and that's a different situation entirely.
He stops moving to listen to the first four bars. This is involuntary. Something about that opening always does this to him, requires a full stop and then a full commitment. He turns toward the bedroom doorway.
"Okay," he says, to Danny, to the room, "this is what I'm talking about."
And then he's dancing, properly this time, in the bathroom doorway, one hand braced on the frame for approximately one second before he doesn't need it anymore, moving through that Bowie groove that operates entirely on its own internal logic, hips and shoulders, the wide-leg trousers doing exactly what they're built to do when a person moves correctly, the crepe catching the light as he turns. He knows he looks good. Knows it well enough that it's not even a conscious thought.
He dances through most of the verse and into the chorus and then peels off back toward the vanity because the ring still needs to go on and he's a person with priorities.
"The last time I went dancing," he says, slightly breathless, working the wide-band ring onto his right hand, the oxblood nails catching the vanity light as he settles it in place, "was a brand thing in Milan and I use that word loosely because what I was actually doing was standing near a dance floor looking interested while someone photographed me looking interested. Don't think that will be the case tonight."
He looks up into the large mirror, eyes searching for @Danny Hernández to flash him a smile.
"The floor is apparently mosaic, which is so cool." He takes the blazer off the door hook and shakes it once, the black fabric shifting, those wide lapels falling open exactly as they should, the exposed basting stitch at the left shoulder catching the light in that way that looks deliberate because it is. "Most people think the floor is just where you stand. But the floor is where you feel the bass from your sole to your soul." He says it with a laugh and a wiggle to illustrate the feeling.
He shrugs the jacket on. Nothing underneath but skin, the lapels sitting open, the construction a juxtaposition of sculptural and whimsical. He doesn't go back to the mirror.
The playlist moves through another track he doesn't stop for, then two more, the bass from the street below finding its way up through the pale stone floor, the ocean gone flat dark blue through the glass, Rio doing what Rio does at this hour. And then "Let's Dance" drops in and that opening drum hit lands like a door being kicked open and Adrian points at the speaker on the vanity counter with one finger, a told-you-so directed at no one and everyone.
"Should we order some more booze up here?" he says, into the bedroom, toward where Danny is. "Pregaming is an important preparation for a night out dancing, you know."