I take a sip of the lemonade he handed me and let the sweetness cut through the sour taste Grant and Jessica left in my mouth. Around us, the party is in full, gorgeous swing. Fairy lights catch the edges of people's smiles. Maren is dancing with Luna. Ben and Harper are making the rounds, arm in arm.
Someone cranks the speakers, and the DJ — who I'm fairly sure is just Knox's cousin with a laptop — launches into a string of crowd-pleasers that drag people onto the makeshift dance floor like a gravitational pull. Mason and I drift toward it withoutexactly deciding to, the lemonade abandoned on the nearest flat surface.
We dance until my carefully pinned hair goes limp with humidity. Then we keep dancing. At some point Maren materializes out of nowhere, brandishing a tube of glittery red lipstick like a weapon.
"Hold still," she commands, and before I can protest, she's drawn a wobbly heart on my cheekbone. She spins to Mason and does the same to him. He takes it with considerably more dignity than I did.
"Maren's love stamps," Luna shouts over the music from somewhere behind us. "She's gotten half the room."
"It's my signature," Maren says, already hunting for her next victim.
I look at Mason. He looks at me. We both have glittery red hearts on our faces. He grins — slow, easy — and something behind my ribs flutters hard enough to bruise.
Then a hand that doesn't belong to me lands on Mason's shoulder.
An omega in her mid-twenties I don't recognizes slides between us with the confidence of someone eight drinks deep. She presses her palm flat to Mason's chest and tilts her face up at him with a smile so wide I can see her back molars.
"Dance with me?" she says. Or slurs. The line between the two has clearly blurred.
Something hot, sharp, and intensely unpleasant twists under my sternum. I take a small step back, giving them room I absolutely do not want to give, while every territorial instinct in my body screams at me to shove her into the nearest folding table. I settle for giving her the evil eye.
Mason catches her hand and eases it off his chest. "I think your friends are looking for you," he says, nodding toward a cluster of women waving frantically near the bar. His voice is calmand shockingly gentle. For a guy who usually has the diplomatic grace of a wrecking ball, watching him delicately redirect a drunk stranger is genuinely startling.
Shelby pouts, but she's too drunk to hold onto disappointment for long. She pats his cheek, smearing Maren's lipstick heart, and wobbles back toward her group.
"Your heart's smudged," I say as Mason turns back to me, because it's the only safe thing I can think of.
"Fix it for me?"
I reach up and press my thumb to his cheekbone, rubbing at the red smear. His stubble is rough under the pad of my finger, his skin warm. He stands very still. I realize I've been touching his face for a beat too long and start to pull my hand back.
He catches my wrist gently, his fingers circling the bones of it. "You missed a spot," he says.
"I didn't," I murmur, the words slipping out on a low, involuntary purr that I absolutely did not authorize.
"You sure?" His voice is low, his eyes hungry in a way that makes the venue feel very, very small.
"Pretty sure," I manage.
He lets go of my wrist, but slowly, his thumb dragging over the thin skin on the inside of it, sending heat spilling from my collarbone to my toes. His hand finds my waist again, pulling me back into the sway of the music, and his mouth dips close to my ear.
The song shifts into something slower and Mason doesn't step back. His hand tightens on my hip. I rest my fingers on his shoulder and let myself lean in.
Around us, the lights blur into a warm, gold haze. I can feel his pulse in his wrist where it rests against my side, and for one suspended moment, the party and the noise all dissolve into nothing.
Then Luna crashes into us with a shriek, trailing Maren behind her, both of them flushed and laughing. "Raffle's about to start!" she yells, grabbing my arm.
***
Luna hauls me through the crowd like a tugboat dragging a barge, and I barely have time to glance back at Mason before we're swallowed by the crush of people gathering near the stage.
Knox is behind the folding table they've repurposed as a stage-adjacent command center, a fishbowl full of raffle tickets in front of him and a microphone that keeps feeding back every time he breathes near it.
"All right," Knox says into the mic, with all the theatrical flair of someone reading tax code. "First prize. Gift basket from Lakeview Provisions."
He pulls a ticket. Reads a number. A beta woman three rows back screams.
Second prize goes to Mr. Hannigan, who wins a set of monogrammed golf towels and looks like he might actually cry about it.
