I’d Promised Myself a Quiet One

A text. A dancefloor. A night that asks for nothing but your body, your breath, and a bit of surrender.

A long read. A long night. This isn’t a love story — but it’s about intimacy. About friendship, basslines, bodies. About surrendering to the kind of night that finds you when you stop trying to hold it all together.

Itchin & Scratching by Denzil Forrester (2019)

1. I’d Promised Myself a Quiet One

Work had drained me — again — and I’d half-resigned myself to a solo Friday night of YouTube algorithms and leftover carbonara.

Then, at around 6:30 p.m., a WhatsApp message buzzed through:
“You in Town?”
Tobias.

No emojis. No context. Just that.

With Tobi, no plans often meant the best nights. Ours is the kind of friendship that doesn’t decay with distance. We could go months without speaking, then fall back into the rhythms that built us: irreverent, impulsive, a little too intense.
A pint. A glance. A shared playlist.
And suddenly we’re nineteen again, or twenty-one, or whatever age we were when the world still felt malleable.

We met at university — bonded over gap year hangovers, half-baked theories of inequality, a shared mistrust of the Tories, mutual hedonism and a disgust for surface-level anything.

He’s the kind of handsome that feels inherited — a six foot Germanic European with a posture and hairstyle that implies old money, but a mind that questions it. There’s a certain elegance to him, but it never tries too hard.
One of the few straight men I trust to keep pace with me on a dancefloor.

“Clearly hanging with you,” I replied.

By 7:30, we were standing outside a pub on Broadway Market, pints in hand. That East London stretch where DJs, developers, finance bros and creatives in wide-legged trousers dissolve into one another under the pretence of casual cool, and a delusion that they’re not part of the same gentrifying machine.

We talked about Palestine, BlackRock, burnout.
Then sex. Then music. Then festivals.

I rolled a cigarette.
He was scanning the street — eyes drifting in that soft, strategic way that always meant he was looking for someone.
Probably a girl with sharp cheekbones and even sharper banter.

We were always each other’s wingmen — unspoken, low-effort, and surprisingly effective.

The street was buzzing like it was waiting for something.
The night was beginning to lift — and it had teeth.

2. When the Night Started to Breathe

By 11, we’d migrated to Farringdon and graduated to negronis.

Space Talk was a moody, dim-lit bar that felt more like someone’s living room than a venue — low ceilings, brick walls softened by oversized houseplants, leaves spilling over velvet chaise longues as though a jungle had been curated for intimacy.
There was a queue outside, but more for optics than capacity. The kind of place that relied on mystique to feel essential.

Party 2000 by Syd Mead (1977)

The crowd was curated, beautiful, performatively casual. It was a soft-entry scene — Europeans with unearned confidence in expensive trainers and half-finished MBAs — too much taste and too few convictions.
West London kids, out on an East London safari, looking for grit but not ready for dirt.

It felt like a scene from a ski après or a beach bar in the South of France — all loose limbs and curated ease, as if the night had already been rehearsed.

Tobias and I leaned against the bar sipping our drinks, already swaying. The music was good — deep house, warm bass, tracks that moved just enough.
Maybe it was Daphni’s Yes, I Know — all loops and lift as if the DJ was teasing out a climax he didn’t plan to deliver.

I could feel the bass building in my chest, in my thighs.
But this wasn’t what I needed.
It was too managed. Too intact.
My body wasn’t craving rhythm.
It was yearning release.

Tobi started to dance like a charming glitch — angular at first, then loosening into something light and unpredictable.
I caught him scanning for women. I raised an eyebrow. He smirked. I looked around too.

Mid-sway, facing Tobias, just over his shoulder, I locked eyes with a Marseille type. Tousled dark curls, golden-brown skin, a jawline that looked forged rather than grown.
He was handsome, no question — but maybe too kept. The kind of guy who knew he looked good under coloured light.

Still — he smiled. And I smiled back.
Something fluttered. A flicker of vanity, then desire, then something gentler — the kind of feeling that lingers even when the glance is gone.

But even that wasn’t enough.
The night still felt managed. Contained.
Even the bass had structure. No grit. No rupture.
It was pleasure with rules — and we were hungry for collapse.

At some point just before two, Tobi caught my eye. No words. Just a nod.
I followed him out.
The Uber was already waiting.

3. No Pictures. No Proof. Just Presence.

The Uber didn’t take long. Ten minutes, maybe.
But long enough to feel the shift — the night was in motion by the time we reached The Pickle Factory.

No mirrors. No velvet ropes. No curated lighting schemes.
Just scuffed walls, a low ceiling, and one windowless room where the bass bled through the brick.

Even outside, you could feel it — the low-end thump of the sub-woofer like someone knocking from the inside.
The queue curled down the street, half-lit by the faint orange glow of Hackney’s streetlights, half-eclipsed by cigarette smoke.
Someone slapped a sticker over my phone camera.

No pictures. No proof. Just presence.

Our guy was already waiting.
A nod. A murmured exchange. Palms met.
MDMA, maybe coke, maybe ket. Maybe all three.

We weren’t trying to be clever. Just ready.

Inside: blackout.
Sweat-hung air. Lights strobing off-beat, like the room had developed its own pulse.
No stage, no mirrors, no names on the walls, no crowd choreography — just noise and heat and skin.

The DJ wasn’t playing music.
He was commanding it.

Argonaut by Extrawelt.
Industrial techno. Undignified. Unrelenting. Unapologetic.

It hit us like machinery mourning.
A track made of static and smoke, heavy-limbed and slightly unhinged.
No melody. No uplift. Just friction, distortion, and a bassline so deep it felt prehistoric — as though it had been vibrating underground for millennia and only now clawed its way up to drag us with it.

The kind of composition that doesn’t ask you to dance — it demands submission.

Tobi and I did what we always did — found the speaker stack.
There was no conversation. Just instinct.
We stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the abyss — the sound pouring out of the wall and into us.

Then the come-up.
First in the legs — a quiver, like electricity testing the voltage in my joints.
Then the jaw — clenched, involuntarily, like it knew what was coming.
Then the breath — shallower, faster.

The edges of the room started to dissolve.
Lights blurred like water smeared across glass.

And suddenly, I wasn’t in the club anymore.
I was part of the infrastructure — wired into the bass, sweating through the walls.
I was synced to something ancient — a primate rhythm, all pulse and instinct.

The bass didn’t just fill the space — it overwrote it.

There was no thinking. No posing. No managing the moment.
The only option was complete submission.
To the DJ. To the floor.
To the sweat and the smoke and the bodies beside me.

And in that submission — in that complete surrender — came something unexpected.

Freedom.

Tobi turned to me.
Eyes wide. His linen shirt clinging to his chest.
His smile was slack, blissed-out, like his face had forgotten tension altogether.

He pulled me in, wrapped his arms around me.

“I love you,” he murmured, as if it had always been true and only now found its moment.
“Thanks for this. Thanks for being in my life.”

I didn’t speak.
I didn’t have to.
The bass had already swallowed everything that didn’t matter.
And we let it.

4. This Is Where We Let Go

Tobi drifted back into the crowd.
And then — him.

He wasn’t trying to be watched.
That’s what made it worse.

He was shirtless.
Hair long and dark, slicked to his temples but wild at the ends, catching flecks of red light like he’d conjured them.
A silver necklace clung to the base of his throat, and sweat traced slow paths down a toned, hairy chest that looked almost sculptural.
Not clean-cut. Something older. Earthier.

His shoulders were broad, his body moving not with effort but with obedience — like he wasn’t dancing so much as being moved.
Eyes closed, his pink bottom lip caught gently between his teeth.
One hand at his waist, the other slicing small arcs in the air like he was drawing symbols only he understood.

He didn’t perform.
He surrendered.

By now, the music had shifted into something unapologetic.
“Overdrive” pulsed through the space like a spell — relentless, tribal, wild. No melody. Just command:

Free your mind
Feel the ecstasy
Overdrive

The crowd had fully given in — bodies soaked, grins unhinged, every person locked in some private communion with the beat.
They were convulsing. Locked in a trance.

We were no longer individuals.
We were one system, moving, twitching, alive.

I was no longer high — I was possessed.

And through all of it, he danced.
I gravitated toward him — not walking, not choosing, just magnetised.

He opened his eyes, finally, and looked at me.
Direct. Soft. Certain.

“Got a cig?” he asked, leaning towards me — his voice low, already halfway gone.

I nodded, reached for my pouch, rolled one for him with trembling fingers.
He took it. Lit it. Inhaled.
Then passed it back to me.

We kept moving — bodies swaying, sharing smoke, breath, a rhythm that didn’t belong to us.

When the bass dropped again, he leaned in, grinned, and offered me something tiny in the palm of his hand.
A wrap. A shard. A suggestion.

I didn’t know what it was.
Didn’t care.

I gave him something in return — maybe MD, maybe something else — we dipped our keys and took it together, no questions asked.
Not to numb. Not to escape.

To fall deeper.
Deeper into the night.
Deeper into each other.

If the music was god, we were ready to offer up our bodies. The come-up had climaxed to the melody:

Take me high
Increase the energy
Energized
Living wild and free

Chemical Conviviality, Bedwork by Soufiane Ababri (2023)

We danced in tandem.
Still no touch. But our bodies were syncing — orbiting like we’d rehearsed it in another life.

Our hips aligned, breath rising in unison, eyes sometimes locking, sometimes avoiding — it was too much. Too close.

He knew exactly how to move. So did I.
Not for each other. With each other.

My shirt came off.
His skin was slick.
Mine, burning.

We were glowing with sweat — not sparkling but drenched, as if our bodies were leaking out everything we’d been carrying all week.

And in that heat, in that chaos, something passed between us.

Not words. Not intention.
Just need.
Not to claim him. Not even to close the space between us.
Just to be close. Closer.

And then — his right hand found mine.
Firm. Certain.

He didn’t ask.
He pulled me through the crowd, up the stairs, toward the toilets.

And I let him.

5. Too Close to Pretend

Inside the cubicle, the world hushed.
The door clicked shut behind us.

Fluorescent honesty.
No strobe to hide behind.
No bass to drown the silence — only its thump, muffled and distant, like a heartbeat down a corridor.

My own heart was doing too much.
Too fast. Too loud.

And for the first time that night, the chaos around me felt still.

He leaned back against the door.
Still shirtless, chest rising and falling.

In this light, I saw him properly — and it undid me.

Pale skin, flecked with freckles across his collarbones and shoulders.
Dark hair curling at the tips, damp and wild, falling into his eyes.
Blue eyes. Sharp. Curious. And kind.

A contrast so clean, it felt staged.
He looked like a painting that had been made to sweat.

There was something British in his beauty.
That almost-accidental kind of charm.
Something about the set of his mouth.
The quiet confidence in his posture.

Middle-class softness buried under a hard boy exterior.
Bristol, maybe. Or Cambridge.
He probably tried to sound tougher than he was.

But in here, under strip lighting and chemical stillness, there was no mask left.
Just him.
And me.
And everything I’d been resisting all night.

“You’re beautiful,” I admitted, softly — not because I had planned to, but because I couldn’t not.
He smiled.
That smile. That impossible smile.

“You’re late,” he responded.
His voice was deep. Pronounced.
Clean vowels with a casual lilt — like someone who’d read poetry at open mics and also knew how to hold a fight.

Even that made me want him more.

He leaned further against the door.
And I moved forward.
Not in hunger, but in need.
Like my body had waited long enough to catch up to its desire.

I reached behind him, one hand sliding down to find the curve of his arse — solid, perfect, already pressing back into me.
The other hand moved gently through his hair, brushing it from his face so I could really look at him.
See all of him.
Admire what had somehow escaped me until now.

I leaned in slowly, kissed his neck first — soft, deliberate — then brushed his hair back and found his lips.
Finally.

The kiss was slow. Intentional.
Like it was the only true thing left in the night.

Our embrace was soft and full and aching.
Tongues tentative at first, then certain — like we were remembering something our bodies already knew.

Our bodies finally speaking a language we’d been writing all night.

We didn’t have to cross a line to feel like we’d arrived somewhere new.
What passed between us didn’t need a name, or a finish.
It was enough to feel chosen.

But something passed between us anyway.
Something wild.
Something holy.
Something that said: you’re not alone in this noise.

---

A knock on the door.
We looked at each other.
He grinned.

“Let’s go,” he whispered.

We left.
Uber. Mine.

6. Reflections — What We Left in the Smoke

There are nights that leave marks.
Not bruises — impressions.
Like fingerprints on the soul.

That night didn’t save me.
It didn’t heal me.
It didn’t give me answers.

But it made me feel infinite.
Just for a few hours.
Not because I was clever or kind or careful.
Just because I was there — sweaty, grinning, high, present.

In that moment, I wasn’t a résumé or a role model.
I wasn’t someone’s “strategic hire,” nor was I anyone’s checkbox.
I wasn’t explaining myself.
Or shrinking myself.
Or trying to impress anyone in HR-approved prose.

I was a body. Desired. Alive. Free.
I was moving — with Tobi, with strangers, with the music, with myself.

That night was about release.
About letting go of the polish and precision I wear Monday to Friday.
About giving in to the hunger for chaos, for closeness, for sweat.

It was about friendship — the kind that doesn’t ask for updates or apologies.
It was about music — heavy, pulsing, unrelenting — that rewired my nervous system.
It was about joy — not the curated kind, but the messy, euphoric, heart-racing kind that makes you forget what you were holding.

And yes, there was him.
There was a kiss.
There was sex — good sex.
Intense. Passionate. Almost reverent.

Maybe it was his first time with a man.
Maybe not.

But in that moment, we weren’t dissecting meaning.
We were giving in.
To the night. To the feeling. To each other.

And for what it was — it was enough.

I saw him again a week later, at a pub in Islington, holding hands with his girlfriend.
He didn’t see me.
Or maybe he did, and chose not to.

But I didn’t feel bitter. Or confused. Or even surprised.

We shared something.
That’s all.
And sometimes, that’s the point — not to define it, but to let it exist.

That night wasn’t about permanence.
It was about presence.

It was a reminder that I am allowed to want.
To dance.
To be touched.
To be held — if only for a moment.

That night didn’t fix me.
But it let me feel whole, if only for a few hours.

And that’s something I won’t forget.

We came undone on the dance floor.
We dissolved into the bass.

And when the sun rose, we weren’t broken.
Just changed.

P.S. If this piece made you feel something — even a little — I’d love it if you shared it with someone you think might feel it too. Or leave a comment. Or just like it so I know I’m not whispering into the void. You know… standard digital intimacy.