Back on the floor, and this wasn’t dancing the way my friends danced. Slower than that. His hand found my waist and stayed there. The space between us closed, and I let it. The song could’ve been anything; I wasn’t really listening to it. I was listening to the choice we were both making in the next four minutes.
“You’re good at this.” His breath was warm against my neck.
“I’ve had practice.”
Calliope’s cackle came from somewhere behind me, and I didn’t have to turn around to know all three of them were watching. They were probably betting on how the night ended. They were probably already right.
The song slowed, and his hands slid lower. “So. What happens after this?”
I pulled back enough to look at his face. Interested. Available.
Why not?
“We could get out of here if you want.”
“I want.”
Forty minutes later, we were walking through Bushwick. The streets had dropped quieter the way they did past the main drags, after the people who came out for the bars had stopped existing in this part of the borough. Calliope was on her way home with Sierra. Raven had peeled off at her corner with her usual benediction.
“You sure about this?” she’d said, eyes sharp under the busted streetlamp. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“So. Everything?”
She snorted. “Fair. Have fun. Be safe. Don’t catch feelings.”
“Never do.”
Now it was Alex beside me in the humid air and the kind of buzz I knew from a hundred Friday nights. This part, the walk part, was always easy. The before-anything part. Nobody had decided who was going to be a disappointment yet.
My building was a converted warehouse, four floors, the kind of placethat had been a sweatshop in some prior century and was now apartments nice enough not to be depressing. I knelt at the entrance to dig my spare key out from under the fake rock.
“Really?” Alex laughed. “It’s the most obvious hiding spot in human history.”
“Everyone says that.” I unlocked the door.
The apartment did the trick the way it usually did. Event planning gave you an eye for making small spaces look like decisions instead of compromises. Strategic mirrors. Lighting that wasn’t overhead. The exposed brick I’d never painted because the day I tried, I realized I didn’t want to. Fairy lights on the ceiling, which was Calliope’s idea three years ago, and I’d never taken them down because they did exactly what she said they would.
“Nice place.” Alex was not looking at the apartment.
“Thanks.” I tossed my keys on the counter. They slid further than I meant. “Drink?”
“I’m good.”
We stood there for a beat. The fridge hummed. Then he closed the distance, and his mouth was on mine.
I kissed him back. Beer and mint gum, the chest of someone who took his lifts seriously, his hands already on my shirt buttons, practiced. Mine went to his belt the way mine always did. Shorthand. Negotiation by hand.
We made it to the bedroom with most of our clothes off, and the rest came off at the foot of the bed. Belt buckle on the hardwood. His t-shirt somewhere I’d find later.
He put me on the mattress and looked at me. I let him look. The fairy lights threw enough glow that I could read the want in his face, which was the part I always liked best. The part where someone hadn’t gotten what they wanted yet, the part where you got to watch them want it.
“You’re gorgeous.” Five hundred guys had told me that, and somehow it never got annoying.
“I know.” I pulled him down to me.
What followed was good. Practiced. He knew what he was doing, and so did I. Hands, mouths, skin, the choreography I’d done in enough bedrooms to do half-asleep.
Even moving with him, half my brain was already running the exit calculus. Cab vs. subway, when to shower, what version ofI have a thing tomorrowI was going to use.
