His eyes lit up. “Research purposes?”
“We’d better wait until after you tell me the rest. Then I’ll be able to imagine it thoroughly and determine if the dance was a factor.”
He laughed, and I could tell he didn’t believe me, but it didn’t matter. He propped himself up on his elbow, animated now, his free hand gesturing as he spoke. “There’s this big mirror in the bathroom. It looks old, like it was already there, I guess. Not like the rest of the decor. Anyway, we were kind of checking ourselves out, vibing, getting excited for being in the cage. And Sky’s a great dancer but he’s a menace. He doesn’t check his radius, and he bumped me.”
“How?”
“Hip-checked me. I went flying.” He demonstrated the trajectory with his hand, a small body sailing through space. “Oh! That’s right. I fell toward the mirror. And I remember thinking,oh shit, the glass is going to break, and I was afraid I’d get hurt if it shattered. Because my health insurance is shit.”
He paused. The animation drained from his face, replaced by something thoughtful, uncertain.
“But the glass didn’t break,” he said.“I think I kind of went through.”
“You think? You don’t know?”
“I wasn’t facing it when I fell, but I know I fell in that direction. And when I would have expected to hit the mirror, it was like thesurface gave beneath me. Like falling into water, except it wasn’t wet. It was…” He shook his head. “I don’t have a word for what it was.”
“Then what?”
“There was no transition. One minute I was falling, spinning around to try and catch myself, the next I was in a field with a mouthful of grass.” He let out a breath.
“So, the mirror was some sort of magical portal or passageway.”
“Is that a real thing? Going through a mirror? We have a story like that, where I’m from. A girl goes through a mirror into another world.”
“I’m not familiar with such magic, but that doesn’t make it impossible. The Fae tap into base elements like iron, water, and wind. The elves draw power from living things. A mirror portal... that is something else entirely. Perhaps its nature is tied to the one who passes through it.”
“What about humans?”
“Most humans don’t have a well deep enough for magic, but rarely, one is born with abilities, with a deep well of magic inside them. They call themselves mages and use spells, potions, song and dance to focus their power. Speaking of dance, I wonder if yours somehow focused the magic. Perhaps we should explore that possibility.”
“You sure you’re not just asking me to twerk for you so you can stare at my ass?”
“Of course not. I need to observe your dance to see if you were accidentally using magic.”
He stared at me. Then the grin broke across his face like sunrise, sudden and blinding. “My ass is pretty magical. I understand why you might want to observe it.”
“I want to understand the physical circumstances of the event.”
“You want me to twerk for you.”
“I am conducting an investigation.”
He was already off the bed, naked, unselfconscious, luminous in the firelight.
“There’s no music,” he said.
“I imagine you can manage.”
“Oh, I can more than manage.”
He started slow, humming a soft tune as he danced. His hips moved first, a lateral sway, lazy and deliberate. Then the movement traveled downward, isolating the lower half of his body. His backside began to move independently of his torsoin a way I had not previously understood the human body was capable of.
I sat up.
The movement accelerated. His hips rolled, his spine undulated, and the muscles of his bottom contracted and released in a rapid, rhythmic pulse that was the most provocative thing I had ever witnessed. His feet shifted on the stone, finding a beat that existed only in his head, and his arms came up, loose and flowing, and the whole of him was moving now, a coordinated wave of muscle and rhythm and shameless, joyful sensuality that turned the firelit room into something else entirely.
He looked at me over his shoulder. His eyes were bright, knowing, and the smile on his face was the one that had been disassembling me from the moment we met.
