Kinda set myself up to be screwed on both sides here.
I walked into open space as Selena Gomez cued up. This was the closest I came to satisfying the hunger: getting into the middle of a crowd and letting go, letting myself fully fill this shell I lived inside. It started slow. Every other beat a snake of muscle moved beneath my skin, tightness sliding through me as if I came alive only in segments. When the track intensified I started hitting each beat, throwing in a step, a snap turn, my hands playing off my body percussively. Another guy worked in and we shuffled side by side, white sneaker soles flashing. Sweat painted my arms with a neon sheen. Then I stopped feeling the moves, stopped calculating the next step. I simply existed as motion, kinesis, blur. Energy at a slow vibration. Pure flow.
The track faded out and another thumped in and I felt eyes on me. The guy I’d danced with gave me a bro shake. A trio of girls squeed at us. My blood burned, lasers firing in my veins.
This was what I dreamed of in those long dark nights when my body wasn’t mine. Someday, I told myself, you’ll stand among them and they’ll see the boy you are.
It never got old, feeling like me.
The moment I saw her a thunderclap of silence filled my skull. Everything went dim, stillness spreading from the point where our gazes met. Black ringlets tumbling around her face. Pale hazel eyes, a vivid contrast against dark skin. Tight leather molding to slim curves. Gorgeous, but that wasn’t what arrested my attention—it was the way she looked at me. Not coy, not like a fan who’d watched all my vids, but as if she knew me. Really knew me.
We clocked each other across the dance floor. She raised one brow and dissolved into the crowd.
I was on her heels in a heartbeat.
I lost her in the shift and sway of bodies, the ocean of hot breath and damp skin. My pulse was still amped from dancing. Not just from the dancing now. Before T I’d feel instant chemistry with certain girls—lingering eye contact, slow smiles that felt like falling. The sense that instead of air we were surrounded by some clear ether that rippled when we moved, let us feel each other without a touch. After T it became hyperintense. A hard shot of adrenaline, a spinal jolt. Girls’ glances hit me physically now in a way that was impossible to ignore.
This girl’s glance made me ache harder than I had in for-fucking-ever.
I caught sight of her again, the swish of dark hair gleaming, gone, like ink trickling through the crowd. There she was in the foyer, rounding a pillar. Up the stairs. Across the catwalk while the living sea surged below, movements stamped in freeze-frames as the rave lights flickered.
The girl looked over her shoulder straight at me. Smiled.
When I reached the dead end of the catwalk, she’d vanished.
How the hell?
I stood in a stream of people, scanning. I hadn’t seen her double back and slip past. Either she was very good, or I was getting rusty.
And I wasn’t getting fucking rusty.
She beat me, somehow. Outmaneuvered me.
Impossible.
And it was quarter to midnight.
I slunk back downstairs. Wandered into the game room with its glow-in-the-dark billiard tables, dartboards tracing the walls like luminous star charts under the black lights. Maybe a quick display of dominance to patch up my ego. There was always some drunk asshole trying to impress. I headed for the small crowd thronging around a likely candidate at the dartboards.
It was her, lobbing a dart dead center into a bull’s-eye. In the ultraviolet it burned blue-white, a shooting star.
The crowd cheered.
She rolled another dart between two fingers, smiling. Her leather jacket shone.
Flick of the arm. Bull’s-eye.
More cheers. An offer to buy her a drink.
I leaned on a table. Without her looking at me I could sense her awareness. She knew I’d find her here. She wanted me to.
Interesting.
I watched her toss the remaining darts in the shape of a smiley face. The bartender poured her a Guinness on the house. She murmured something, and he set another pint before the empty stool beside her.
Then she turned and looked at me again.
I took the empty seat, raised the drink.
“Cheers,” we said at the same moment.
Our heads tipped back. We watched each other through thick glass. The beer was the color of coffee, and as bitter.
“You’re very good,” I said.
“Actually, I’m very bad.”
“I meant at darts. And losing a tail. But I like bad girls.”
“Are you a bad boy?”
British accent, silvery, a sterling precision to her words. London, I guessed. Her curls bounced when she moved, filled with a thousand tiny spirals of light.
“Depends who you ask,” I said. “How’d you lose me on the catwalk?”
“Trade secret.”
I rolled a sip in my throat, savored the taste of loamy earth. “You were a step ahead. Leading me around like a dog on a leash.”
“Now, why would I do that?”
Because you know about us.