Too cold for thin nylons.
I turn around.
I need a bathroom.
The downstairs bathroom has a line of six girls leaning against the wall waiting to use it. I don’t have the patience for this.
Gianna catches me by the elbow. “There’s one upstairs that’s off-limits to the rest of the party.”
I grin at her. “Thank you.”
I take the stairs quickly before any of the six girls can suspect there’s another bathroom they don’t know about.
The upstairs is dark and quiet. The bedroom doors are shut along the hallway, all of them, like a hotel. There is one open door on the left. I sigh in relief. The bathroom. I walk in and shut the door behind me. The noise of the party drops by a register — the bass still there in the floor under my feet, the muffled lyrics of whatever just started downstairs, but everything else falling away.
I look at myself in the mirror. My halo is leaning hard to the left. My cheeks are flushed from the dancing and the alcohol. But the six seconds of eye contact and watching him run outside has me crawling out of my skin.
I unzip my bodysuit and figure out, with some difficulty, how to pee in this impossible costume. Wings off, bodysuit all the way down, nylons down, and somehow tangled. For the five seconds, I think about Blue.
He is insufferable. That’s what he is.
I thought two years would mean something would change.
This just feels like high school all over again.
I’m not trying to go back there.
I pull the costume back on.
I try to zip it.
It catches.
It catches half an inch above where my zipper started, and it won’t go up or down, and I mutter a swear word at it and try again, and it sticks again. I hold it shut with my fingers and tell myself I will find Mila downstairs and have her do it.
I step out of the bathroom into the dim hallway. I turn to walk toward the stairs.
And Blue is at the end of the hall. My stomach plummets.
He has stopped in his tracks.
He’s standing maybe ten feet from me at the top of the staircase with one hand on the banister, like he was about to come up and saw me coming out of the bathroom and froze with one foot still on the top step.
He’s staring at me.
His eyes are dark. They are very dark — the kind of dark his eyes get when he has been drinking but not enough to be drunk, when his guard has come down half a notch but not all the way. I hate that I know what they look like when he’s clearheaded. I hate that I know what they look like when he is drunk. I hate that I know the difference. I hate that I know his eyes at all.
His eyes tell a story of whatever he is going through with just one look.
Right now, they are a storm.
I’ll never forget when he told me his father — the one he doesn’t know, the one who left when Blue was two — named him Blue because he was born with eyes the color of his mother’s, and his mother wanted to name him Sky, but his father had saidno, that’s a girl’s name, his name is Blue.The asshole didn’t even stick around to see how good a son he has. I couldn’t imagine being named by a man whose face you don’t remember.
I stare back at him, mortified, because I’m holding my costume together with my hand.
He looks down at my hands.
I shiver.
