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By day, it was chaos.

Tarot readers.

Pop-up potion stalls.

Food trucks and fake seances and kids in tiny vampire capes.

By night?

It turned feral.

Live bands.

Bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder.

Pirates. Wrestlers. Lumberjacks. Devils. Angels.

Every man seemed hotter in costume.

We bar-hopped.

We danced.

We got hit on shamelessly.

A pirate tried to buy Sage a drink.

A lumberjack asked me to dance.

And for the first time since the summer exploded, it felt good.

Not desperate-good.

Notprove somethinggood.

Just… good.

Wanted.

Alive.

At one point, Sage leaned close and shouted over the music, “See? We’re not broken.”

I laughed. “We’re just under renovation.”

She raised her glass. “To renovations.”

We clinked.

And in the middle of the noise and costumes and lights, something loosened in my chest.

Not healed.

But breathing again.

For one night, at least, the world wasn’t ending.

It was dancing.