We both step forward simultaneously, closing the last few feet between us. He loops his arms around my waist, and his fingers brush the exposed skin between my shirt and waistband, thrilling and hot. I go to rest my head against his chest at the same time as he bends down to kiss me, so he ends up planting his lips on my forehead. Then, as I tilt my face upward and he stoops to try again, I crack my head against his nose. He jerks back, wincing, bringing a hand to his face.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” The music is so loud, I can’t even hear my own apology. My face is flaming. But when he draws his hand away from his nose, he’s smiling. This time, he bends down slowly, with exaggerated care, making a joke of it—he kisses me cautiously, slides his tongue gently between my lips. I can feel the music vibrating in the few inches between our chests, beating my heart into a frenzy. My body is full of such rushing heat, I’m worried it will go fluid—I’ll melt; I’ll collapse into him.
His hands massage my waist and then move up my back, pulling me closer. I feel the sharp stab of his belt buckle against my stomach, and inhale sharply. He bites down lightly on my lip—I’m not sure if it’s an accident. I can’t think, can’t breathe. It’s too hot, too loud; we’re too close. I try to pull away but he’s too strong. His arms tighten around me, keeping me pressed to his body, and his hands skate down my back again, over the pockets of my shorts, find my bare legs. His fingers trace my inner thighs, and my mind flashes to that room of crisscrossed underwear, all of it hanging limply in the dark, like deflated balloons, like the morning-after detritus of a birthday party.
“Wait.” I place both hands on his chest and shove him forcibly away. He is red-faced and sweating. His bangs are plastered against his forehead. “Wait,” I say again. “I need to talk to you.”
I’m not sure if he hears me. The rhythm of the music is still drumming beneath my ribs, and my words are just another vibration skating alongside of it. He says something—again, indecipherable—and I have to lean forward to hear him better.
“I said, I want to dance!” he yells. His lips bump against my ear, and I feel the soft nibble of his teeth again. I jerk away quickly, then feel guilty. I nod and smile to show him okay, we can dance.
Dancing, too, is new for me. Uncureds are not allowed to dance in couples, although Lena and I used to practice sometimes with each other, mimicking the stately, grave way we’d seen married couples and cureds dance at official events: stepping evenly in time with the music, keeping at least an arm’s distance between their chests, rigid and strict. One two-three, one two-three, Lena would bellow, as I would practically choke from laughing so hard, and she’d nudge me with a knee to keep me on track, and assume the voice of our principal, McIntosh, telling me that I was a disgrace, an absolute disgrace.
The kind of dancing I have known is all about rules: patterns, holds, and complicated maneuvers. But as Steve draws me closer to the band, all I can see is a frenzied mass of seething, writhing people, like a many-headed sea snake, grinding, waving their arms, stamping their feet, jumping. No rules, just energy—so much energy, you could harness it; I bet you could power Portland for a decade. It is more than a wave. It’s a tide, an ocean of bodies.
I let myself break apart on it. I forget about Lena, and Fred Hargrove, and the posters plastered all around Portland. I let the music drill through my teeth and drip out my hair and pound through my eyeballs. I taste it, like grit and sweat. I am shouting without meaning to. There are hands on my body—Steve’s?—gripping me, pulsing the rhythm into my skin, traveling the places no one has ever touched—and each touch is like another pulse of darkness, beating softness into my brain, beating rational thoughts into a deep fog.
Is this freedom? Is it happiness? I don’t know. I don’t care anymore. It is different—it is being alive.
Time becomes a stutter—the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums. And although Steve is next to me, and then behind me, drawing me into him, kissing my neck and exploring my stomach with his fingers, I can hardly feel him.
And for a moment—for a split second—everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.
Then Steve is pulling me away from the band and leading me into one of the smaller rooms branching off from it. The first room, the room with the mattresses and the couch, is packed. My body still feels only distantly attached, clumsy, as though I am a puppet unused to walking on its own. I stumble against a couple kissing in the dark. The girl whips around to face me.
Angelica. My eyes go instinctively to the person she was kissing, and for a second time freezes, and then jump-cuts forward. I feel a seesawing in my stomach, like I’ve just watched the world flip upside down.