Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

So the pressure is getting to me. As I said before, I’ve been re-re-editing the Chapters I already wrote. I’m currently at the 1999 Grammys scene, where he attends arm-in-arm with Beyoncé on the red carpet. She sits beside him as he wins four Grammys.

Should I just write them going wild that same night for the R18 Chapter that’s been pressuring me? I also think it makes sense after more than 200 Chapters have passed, especially since he’s an Incubus and there is no sex.

She’s just shy of six months from turning [@g£], and it’s not like he wouldn’t do it with a s¡xt££n-year-old or a forty-year-old. From the information I collected, she also lost her virginity at around this age in our world.

Since he’s an incubus, a high-pressure, high-glamour night like the 1999 Grammys could naturally escalate into an intense scene.

So should I go through with it? Second thing: the same circumstances apply to the scene where Paris Hilton pulls him into her room and they get freaky. He just uses magic and watches her going wild with her fingers She will be 18, if you’re wondering.

Should I also change that scene to make it his first if Beyoncé changes doesn’t happen? It’s about 50K words away from Paris scenes, though. What are your thoughts, without considering the age factor?

And reply quickly, as I am currently writing this.

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******

He was *really, really really* nice-looking. He was nice-looking in the magical way that certain rare things in her small world were vastly more themselves than other things. Like how her favorite, worn-out stuffed animal was somehow vastly more of a stuffed animal than the other stuffed animals on her bed. Like how his songs were vastly more *music* than the noisy songs on the radio.

He was, somehow, vastly more of a *face* than any other face she had ever seen. His dark hair, his sharp jawline in the tuxedo, and those impossible, piercing blue eyes made her stomach do a very strange, fluttery flip that she had never experienced before. It was the purest, most innocent, devastatingly complete inception of a first childhood crush.

She looked up at him accepting the golden trophy with the unblinking attention of a six-year-old who has just definitively decided that something is entirely worth her full attention for the rest of the evening.

”He’s so pretty,” Selena stated simply, pointing a small finger at the television screen.

Her mother, folding laundry on the couch behind her, looked up at the broadcast. ”He’s very talented, Sel,” Mandy corrected gently, offering the standard adult assessment.

”He’s so pretty *and* he’s so talented,” Selena countered instantly, speaking with the logical precision of someone for whom these two specific traits were not competing categories, but rather a perfect, magical combination.

Her mother smiled behind a folded towel, clearly appearing to be managing a very fond kind of amusement at her daughter’s sudden, intense infatuation.

When Marvin stepped up to the podium and smoothly said something that made the intimidating Grammy ballroom erupt into genuine laughter, Selena laughed out loud too.

She had absolutely no idea what the joke actually meant; the Hollywood context was completely over her head. But the laugh was highly contagious, in the magical way that certain magnetic people’s laughter actively produces joy in observers completely independent of the actual content. It was the raw quality of his genuine amusement transmitting itself outward through the screen and filling the small Texas living room.

”He’s very funny, Mama,” Selena giggled, bouncing slightly on her toes, her dark eyes shining.

”I see that, baby,” her mother chuckled.

”I really like him,” Selena declared, stating it with the simple immovable finality of a six-year-old whose mind is permanently made up. She had found her prince.

”Yes,” her mother agreed softly, watching the twelve-year-old boy completely dominate the global stage with ease. ”I think a whole lot of people do, especially girls like you.”

---

Twenty one-year-old Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll was intensely watching the Grammy Awards from the humid living room of her family home in Barranquilla, Colombia.

She was watching on a bulky television set that was receiving the live American broadcast with the slightly compromised, staticky signal quality typical of South American international transmissions in early 1998. This meant that certain spectacular moments on the screen possessed a mildly pixelated, fuzzy quality, which Shakira had quickly learned to mentally compensate for by moving herself significantly closer to the screen, her dark eyes narrowed in concentration.

She was not a normal twenty one-year-old girl. She had been performing since she was eight. She had already written and released two full studio albums in Colombia—*Magia* and *Peligro*. They had been extremely modest commercial performances that had not broken through regionally, but they had definitively demonstrated, to anyone in the Latin industry who was actually paying attention, the undeniable quality of her raw artistry and unique vibrato.

She was already, in her soul, a hardened professional. She operated in a context where ”professional” meant something slightly different from what it would mean globally in just three short years when *Pies Descalzos* exploded, but she was a professional nonetheless.

Therefore, Shakira was watching the Grammys tonight with the critical attention of a working professional evaluating her global peers, rather than merely a passive fan consuming cheap entertainment.

This did not mean the fan inside her was completely absent. She was both simultaneously. It was the beautiful configuration of someone who passionately loved music both intrinsically for how it felt, and obsessively as a mechanical craft that desperately needed to be learned, deconstructed, and mastered.

The *Marvin 1* EP had reached the coast of Colombia exactly the way dominant American music reached Latin America in 1997—through the delayed networks of pirate music distribution and massive radio syndication that connected the American market to the southern hemisphere. It usually involved a delay of several weeks, and a massive cultural filtering effect that meant only the most commercially powerful recordings ever actually made it through the noise officially.

Marvin’s EP had made it through.

It had smashed through the cultural barrier with enough undeniable force that Shakira had first encountered ’Battle Hymn’ on a local Barranquilla radio station long before she ever encountered it as a physical cassette recording.

She vividly remembered that very first hearing.

She had been sitting in the backseat of her father’s car, the windows rolled all the way down, the sweltering, Barranquilla heat pressing against her skin. The moment those impossible, wordless vocal harmonies poured out of the cheap car speakers, it had produced in her the exact, biological response she specifically associated with genuinely, historically significant music:

It caused the absolute stopping of all her internal noise.

Shakira was fundamentally not a person whose internal noise was ever easily stopped. She possessed a hyperactive quality of perpetual creative movement. She has ADHD.

Her brilliant mind was always running—melodies generating counter-melodies, Arabic rhythms finding Latin rhythms, English lyrics crashing into Spanish poetry. She possessed the exhausting energy of a born musician who was obsessively working even when she appeared to be sitting completely still.

Marvin’s music violently stopped all of that.

For the exact duration of each track, her perpetual mental movement completely ceased. There was nothing else in the world except his velvet voice, and whatever magic of the music was doing to her chest. It was a sensation she found incredibly difficult to accurately describe in Spanish, and had not yet even attempted to articulate in any other language.

She was therefore watching the Grammys with a massive, personal investment in what was happening on that stage. Every time Marvin’s impossibly handsome face appeared on the pixelated screen, her breath hitched slightly.

The crush was undeniable, a fierce, artistic infatuation with a boy who was only a few years older than her, yet seemed to hold the entire universe in his hands.

When Marvin gracefully accepted the Best New Artist award, Shakira sat in stunned silence on her living room floor for a long time after the speech concluded.

His poetic description of the music—*the open of something that finds the part of you that you’ve been protecting and makes it available to the air*—was a concept she deeply needed to sit with.

She had been aggressively protective of specific things inside herself for most of her young life. She was protective of the specific, goat-like quality of her unique vibrato voice, which she knew was unusual, and which she had learned to receive confused, mocking reactions to from local producers without knowing what to do with the criticism.

She was protective of the fluid quality of her dancing movement, which was also unusual and which she had spent years both explaining and refusing to explain. She was protective of the way she inherently understood music—not as a rigid sequence of technical studio decisions, but as a living, breathing, bleeding thing that required intense emotional attention rather than mechanical construction.

The wordless music on Marvin’s EP had somehow found all of those deeply hidden, protected things inside her. His voice had addressed them directly, intimately, as if his soul knew exactly where she was hiding them.

The music had produced in her the intoxicating feeling of being completely understood by an entity that did not even know she existed.

Which was, to an twenty one-year-old girl, the most disorienting, romantic form of understanding available on earth.

When the historic Record of the Year was announced, and Marvin walked smoothly to the stage for the second time that evening, Shakira leaned forward intensely, her eyes locked onto his face.

He was, she thought with a flush of warmth in her cheeks, utterly extraordinary in a way that had nothing to do with his biological age. She was eleven. She intimately knew what ”extraordinary” sounded like when she heard it, and she knew exactly what it looked like when she saw it. And she was hearing and looking at it right now.

She quickly grabbed the worn notebook she always kept nearby for musical ideas. She didn’t write about technical music specifically. She wrote furiously about the *quality* of the music’s emotional effect.

The note was scribbled in rapid Spanish, in her quick, messy handwriting, and it said: *El sonido que alcanza los lugares que no están disponibles. Encuentra cómo lo hace.* (*The sound that reaches the places that aren’t available. Find out how he does it.*)

She heavily underlined *encuentra cómo lo hace* three times, pressing the pen so hard it almost tore the paper.

She would spend the next several years finding out exactly how. The answer would permanently inform everything she did after.

When the telecast switched feeds to show Marvin navigating the chaotic press room, he made that brilliant, arrogant joke about telling the seven million people that his record wasn’t actually pop music and simply waiting for the fallout... Shakira burst out laughing.

It was the genuine, delighted, belly-deep laugh of someone encountering razor-sharp wit operating at the exact right speed, in the exact right register. She pointed a finger at the staticky television screen, looked back at her mother sitting at the dining table, and said in rapid-fire Spanish: *”¡Mami, mira! Es tan guapo, y es muy, muy gracioso.”* (*Mom, look! He’s so handsome, and he’s very, very funny.*)

Her mother smiled warmly, watching her daughter’s fierce infatuation blossom. *”Sí, mi amor. Es un rey.”* (*Yes, my love. He is a actor.*)

---

Fourteen-year-old Avril Ramona Lavigne was watching the Grammys in the messy living room of her family’s house in Napanee, Ontario, Canada.

She was not sitting quietly. She was watching the broadcast with the restless, bouncing energy of a teenager who had massive, unapologetic opinions about everything she was currently watching, and was deploying those fierce opinions in a continuous, rapid-fire internal commentary that occasionally surfaced as loud, sarcastic sounds.

She had been passionately singing for as long as she could remember. She had been writing her own songs on a beat-up acoustic guitar since she turned twelve. She wrote with the burning urgency of someone who actually had raw, angry things to say, had finally found a loud vehicle for saying them, and was never going to let anyone stop her from using it.

She possessed a voice that her local music teacher had politely described as *raw*, and that Avril inherently understood actually meant *something real that desperately needed refinement*. And she was currently in the painful process of refining it with the focused, stubborn determination that was her absolute baseline mode for anything she actually cared about.

She cared about music more than anything else in the world.

The *Marvin 1* EP had arrived in her small-town Canadian world entirely through her father, who had randomly bought the cassette at a record store because he had read a glowing review of it in a magazine and thought his musical daughter might like it.

She had liked it in the exact, rare way she liked very few things in life—completely, fiercely, and entirely without a single cynical reservation.

Which was not her default teenage relationship with things. She was fundamentally not an easy liker. She was in her punk goth phase. She had impossibly high standards, her standards were highly specific, and most mainstream pop garbage did not meet them.

The EP met them. All five flawless tracks.

The entirely wordless quality of it—which she had initially, stubbornly expected to find deeply frustrating, given her own massive personal investment in angry, lyrical communication—turned out to do something that standard lyrics hadn’t done to her. The sheer lack of words completely removed the easy, intellectual option of simply engaging with the text. It forced her to engage with the raw, bleeding music itself. It forced her to listen to the melody, the complex harmony, and the specific, terrifying qualities of his voice.

And what she found buried there, when she was forced to look at it, was extraordinary.

She thought deeply about what it would actually mean to write a song that reached rebellious, angry people the exact way Marvin’s music reached them. She obsessed over the technique. The specific, dark harmonic choices.

The terrifying way his vocal fry was placed in lower registers that literally produced physical, shivering responses in listeners. The undeniable quality of raw emotional honesty that she could clearly hear bleeding through her body with every single track.

She thought about his music the exact way she thought about most things she wanted to understand—with the absolute, stubborn intent to eventually be able to do it better herself.

She obviously did not possess Marvin’s supernatural, demonic assistance with this massive project. She had something entirely else: the stubbornness of a teenage girl who fundamentally does not accept the existence of a brick wall without first attempting to smash her head through it.

When his impossibly handsome face flashed on the screen for the Best New Artist announcement, Avril literally sat up on the edge of the couch cushion and started bouncing her leg.

”Come on, come on, come on,” Avril chanted in a quiet, urgent undertone. It was the tone of someone who has already definitively decided what the outcome should be, and is verbally encouraging the universe to not screw it up.

When his name was finally announced, she produced a loud, triumphant sound that was approximately, ”YES!”

*****

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