Across the dance floor.
He was looking at her. Standing stock still, even as Bryony went on jiggling and shimmying around him. His lips were parted, his jaw slack, like he’d just received a terrible shock.
The jazzy music played on in manic frenzy, but it seemed to fade into a dissonant drone in the back of Luna’s head. She felt a strange, almost mystical sensation overcoming her senses. Like everyone else in that crowded room simply faded away, and there was no one there but her and Mr. Grimm.
“Luna?”
Ward’s voice snapped her back roughly. Shaking her head, Luna turned her gaze up to him. “Powder room,” she blurted.
His brow crinkled. “What?”
“Powder room. To, um, powder my . . . my whatsit. My nose. You know.” She wrenched out of his arms, backing away. “I’ll . . . I’ll be . . . It’s just around that way, right? I won’t be a moment. Um.”
She turned and fled the dance floor. Shoving her way rather roughly through dancing couples, taking more than one elbow to the ribs as she went, she achieved the back of the building and slipped into a dimly-lit side passage. A trio of ladies making their way in a pack shuffled past her, trailing long streams of cigarette smoke behind them. It created a weird, surreal haze, and Luna coughed, eyes watering. She found a door marked LADIES and burst inside, relieved to discover a single space rather than stalls. She slammed the door, threw the bolt, then sank back against it with a loud exhale of, “Gods!”
Pressing both hands to her cheeks, she stood for some moments, just breathing. Then, moving rather jerkily, she hastened to the sink, fumbling with the taps, bent over and splashed water on her face. First cold, then hot, then cold again. This done, she straightened and peered at herself in the glass. Droplets ran down her cheeks, dripped from her chin, and her eyes stared back at her, oddly hollow and haunted in the weird, low lighting of the shaded thaumatic bulb overhead.
One trembling hand rose from the sink, and she pressed two fingers to her lips.
So. She’d been kissed.
And how did she feel about that, exactly?
“I’m not sure,” she whispered.
In all of Auntie Arabella’s darning-basket novels, the first kiss was always a moment of supreme significance. Fireworks and butterflies and butterflies made out of fireworks. That sort of thing. Right?
It was never just . . . lips smashing.
“Unless all those trashy romance writers have been having us on all this time,” Luna whispered. Her brow darkened into a scowl. “Butterfly-fireworks my foot!”
Then her face crumpled, and she gripped the porcelain sink once more. What waswrongwith her? Seriously, Ward was an absolute hunk, as the girls at Mrs. Boggs’s Boardinghouse for Young Women of Good Character would say. He’d come through for her tonight too, hadn’t he? In the moment of crisis? And he’d been nothing but clear about his romantic intentions all this while, and . . . and . . . couldn’t she somehow manage to dredge up at least one firecracker-butterfly for his sake? She owed him that much, surely.
Luna closed her eyes, bowed her head. And in the darkness behind her eyelids, it wasn’t Ward she saw, peering down at her with such hopeful expectation.
It was Mr. Grimm.
His face, across the dance floor. Staring at her in that way that made her skin go hot and cold.
The way he’d looked at her . . .
That look . . . it was . . . it wasn’t . . .
It wasrevealing.
It spoke volumes. In a language far beyond words. A language which the two of them shared and no one else. Because she understood him. And he understood her, as no one else ever had, ever could, ever even attempted.
Luna bit her lips, shivering where she stood. She found herself suddenly remembering that mistletoe kiss from two weeks ago. Or the mistletoe “mouth bump,” as she’d always taken pains to call it in the privacy of her own mind, refusing to acknowledge it for what it was. But whether or not that moment fit the legitimate, trashy-romance-novelist definition of a kiss, the moment which followed after—that moment when Mr. Grimm hadlookedat her, very much as he’dlookedat her tonight—was undeniable. She could see it again: an expression of burning pain, so agonizing and so beautiful, it made one absolutelyacheto enter into that pain with him and, by so doing, to transform it into glory.
“Oh gods,” Luna whispered.
She needed to find him. She needed to get back out onto that dance floor, catch him by the arm, drag him away to somewhere private, and explain! But explain what? That she didn’t mean to kiss Ward. That she didn’twantto kiss Ward. That right now, more than anything, she wanted to go home.
Only home wasn’t the garret room over Mrs. Boggs’s Boardinghouse for Young Women of Good Character.
Home wasn’t even a quaint little cottage, tucked away on a hillside in the remote Crimble Mountains, overlooking the sleepy town of Greater Snoring.
No. Home had been transformed into something else entirely. A nook behind the shop counter. A cane chair beside a squat old stove. A cup of tea pressed into her hands and a solemn promise that the dibble-dab was, indeed, remembered. Home was the scent of fresh flowers, the irritable croak of a fusty old raven, the tinkling of little brass bells.
