I smiled. “It’s…nice. Yeah.”
Ivory pulled me past the bar and around the crowded dance floor to snag us a booth in the back corner of the club. A buxom waitress, bulging from her black patent-leather skirt and a red corset, came to take our order. Her springy blonde curls bounced even after she stopped, and her cheeks were bright from too much rouge.
“I’ll take one of the house’s reds.” Ivory snapped the menu shut and handed it back.
I reviewed the list, trying to decide.
The waitress used her whole body to roll her eyes. Good thing, too, because I wouldn’t have noticed her annoyance otherwise.
“Are you going to order, or what?” she asked.
Ivory pointed to a selection on my menu. “You’d love their Bordeaux. It’s fabulous.”
“Okay, the Bordeaux it is.”
Eye-Roll Barbie snapped her order pad closed and stomped off. She returned impossibly fast and slammed our drinks—wine served in tall beer glasses—on the table.
“Sixteen-forty.” She held her hand out and tapped her foot until Ivory forked over the cash.
Once she took off, I turned back to Ivory. “So where’s the ever-elusive Adrian?”
“Books, Sophia? Really?” Ivory frowned. “He’s the DJ. We’ll catch up with him after hours. For now, we drink!”
Great.
For the next hour, we chatted while tossing back drink after drink. I wished I could tell her about the voices, but my gut told me to wait, to test the waters first before revealing something that would most certainly make me sound crazy.
***
IVORY CONVINCED me to join her on the dance floor. The dark music quickened my pulse and one song blended into the next: smooth, enchanting, hypnotic.
A gathering of voices, somehow clearer than the music, swelled around me, reminding me of the real reason I’d agreed to come along. If I didn’t take a break, I’d burn out before I got a chance to talk to Adrian about his books. I hollered to Ivory that I would meet her at the table.
On my way, I passed a group of women piled into one side of a booth, crowding a decent-enough man. Two other men sat across from them. The lady-killer captured my gaze, and a cool sensation, followed by warmth, tingled my brain. For the first time in weeks, my mind grew quiet. But, instead of the calm I expected, the silence was unsettling.
He leaned across the table to one of his male friends. After they exchanged words, the friend rose and approached me.
“His name is Marcus,” the friend of the woman-collector said, leaning in close and speaking over the music. He was shorter than me and smelled of beer and disinfectant. “He’s visiting from Damascus. Would you like to join him?”
No thanks. “I’m sorry, I was just—” I glanced around for an excuse, but found nothing. “You’ll have to excuse me.”
Dazed, I hurried back to my table, plopped into my seat, and scanned the crowd for Ivory.
But Ivory was not who caught my attention first.
A young man by the bar, clad in dark-washed jeans, took a final sip of his wine and slipped a tip for the bartender under his glass. His fitted black shirt showed the confident set of his shoulders, the contour of his chest, and his trim waist. The way he dressed, the way he carried himself…he looked both entirely in control and completely reckless at the same time, standing out in the sea of people as though the crowd had parted around him, though that wasn’t the case.
The case was, he was sexy as hell.
And I hated him for it.
When his gaze captured mine, he offered the briefest of smiles. A curious swooping pulled at my stomach, and I quickly glanced away. When I dared to peek again, he’d seated himself at a nearby table beneath the golden glow of one of the wall sconces. I dreaded the idea he might catch me staring, but I couldn’t stop myself. His toasted-almond hair fell forward to shroud his eyes, and flickers of blue—or was it green?—peeked through the disheveled strands.
The whole thing felt strange, as though I’d seen him before, seen him from this same distance.
It was then, with his body turned away from the table and one foot resting on the opposite knee, that I realized how I knew him. His shoes—dull, black shoes with a red outsole—gave him away. He was the mystery man who’d been outside my window the night of my positive energy ritual.
I should’ve marched over to him and told him off, but what was I supposed to say—‘How dare you walk down a public street and look at a woman throwing flower petals out her window?’
His eyes flickered to mine as though my staring had drawn his attention. There was an intensity in his expression, something dark as his gaze slid over my body, assessing me, and I started surveying the room in hopes he’d think our eye contact had been accidental.
No one looked at me like that, let alone someone so absurdly handsome.