We brew our magic touch into our bottles, and then once more to ensure we’ve got enough for the audience. The stagehands take the bottles of shine, pour them into shot glasses, and start to pass the glasses around to the crowd. And then the place explodes into a beautiful chaos, and the rest of my troupe, sans Grace, begins to descend into the madness themselves, each grabbing a shot of shine from a nearby stagehand’s tray.
This time Alex and I go with them. I don’t meet Grace’s eyes as I move with Alex to the floor, even though I hear her call after me as I move to the stairs, “Joan, wait, where are you going?” Because I’m kind of as surprised as she is that I’m actually going through with this, and yet I also don’t want to stop.
Alex looks around. “Do you want to stay on the floor with the audience?”
No, I want you for myself. “The underbosses aren’t using the VIP lounge tonight, since Gunn’s on the road. We could go there.”
“How gracious of Gunn.” Alex smiles. But I can tell he’s nervous, maybe as nervous as I am. “Lead the way.”
As soon as we get to the small lounge along the left corridor, I close the door behind me and spellbind it, lock it tight. The room’s cozy: a few chairs, a little round table, and a sofa. A room meant to serve as a clandestine meeting spot, for Gunn’s bigwig guests and the underbosses who trade schemes behind magic concealments. But right now the room is ours. And it feels charged, dangerous. Alex and I have been alone before, but not like this.
“You sure you want to go through with this?” Alex raises his shot glass of shine.
Shine will always have dark edges, thanks to Uncle Jed and the way he ended up losing himself in the bottle. And yet, I want so much more from Alex, and I know shine is the only thing that will let me escape myself, let me have him, in the here and the now. “I think so.” But I know so. I want to wrap a cocoon around us. Just for one night, I want to know you in a way I can’t form words around, in a way that I’m positive only magic can say. “Have you ever tried it before?”
Alex peers into his glass. “A few times. In darker days.” When he next looks up, his eyes hold a strange mix of warmth and hunger. “I have a feeling it will be different with you.” He touches his shot glass to mine. “If you want to jump, I’ll jump with you.”
And then, before I get cold feet, I take the shine and swallow it.
It burns a bit on the way down, feels like I’m drinking pop heated over a stove, but when it hits the center of my gut, it spreads across my loins like warm honey. And then the warmth rushes up from my core to my throat and spreads around my mind. The world sparks to life, dances, tilts, and I stumble and collapse into the corner. There’s hysterical laughter pawing at my ears before I realize it’s mine.
“Whoa,” I whisper, then laugh and look at Alex, who’s stumbling into a seated position on the floor next to me. I laugh again. “The word ‘whoa’ is so strange-sounding, isn’t it? W . . . H . . . O . . . A . . .” and then I can literally see the letters, W, H, O, A, come floating out of my mouth like little word balloons.
“Here.” I grasp at the air, giggling, trying to wrap my fingers around the A that continues to float up from my mouth to the ceiling. “An A, for Alex.”
I keep the little letter trapped in my hand like a firefly and try to hand it to Alex. But he’s already collapsed onto the floor, back to the ground, sprawled out and looking up at the ceiling of the lounge, like the shine has somehow broken it open to the heavens.
Wait, it has.
“Oh my God.” I lie down, straighten myself out beside him, and look up at a thick swirling constellation, a dusty, bright collection of moving, blinking stars.
“This is insane,” Alex whispers next to me. He glances over at me, his eyes as bright and wild as the stars. “Do you think this is what shine feels like for people without the magic touch?”
“Shine’s probably even more intense for them,” I say. “Because we see a world that’s full of the possibility of magic”—it feels very important that I explain this to him—“but normal people, well, they just see the world.”
“Wow,” Alex deadpans. “That’s deep, Joan.”
He laughs, and I go to punch him playfully, but he ducks away from me and scrambles to his feet. And then he pulls me up, folds me into a foxtrot pose beside him. “We need music,” he whispers.
A nonexistent phonograph jumps to life, crackles through our sanctuary in the middle of the Shaws’ VIP lounge, and then the sultry voice of an unknown crooner wails through the space. Both of us burst out laughing, and then we begin to dance. The foxtrot, then the Charleston, then Alex begins some complicated tap maneuver he somehow continues halfway up one of the walls, before he collapses into a fit of laughter on the floor.
The music’s tempo becomes slower.
Then Alex stands up, approaches me. He takes my hand and pulls me closer. And this time I don’t just smell his trademark scent of soap and that almost spicy cologne—I smell something heady and fresh, all-encompassing: the scent of possibility.
“We got lucky that the room isn’t being used tonight,” Alex says. “It’s better being here, alone with you, than sharing you with the entire crowd on the floor.”