“Well, why not?”
“I told you. Because it will get you into trouble.”
“And you care about that, in between all the suffocating.”
“I didn’t suffocate you. It was just a trick, not a serious threat,” he said, and as he did, he leaned down. His hand shifted on her back, until it felt like more of an arm around her than a thing to guide her into the right moves. And just as she went to push him away, she saw all the other girls with their dance partners. Lifted up and twirled like ballerinas in a music box, as the music hit a certain note.
Then felt the air beneath her own feet.
Saw the room spin, all around her.
Before he set her back down, and retook her hand and her waist, and went into whatever the next move was. Because theseweremoves, in some kind of set pattern. Everybody was doing the same thing. But what struck her about this was not the fact that he had done this with her.
It was that she had been doing it, without thinking.
She hadn’t stumbled once. She hadn’t been clumsy.
She swayed when he swayed and spun when he spun, and somehow it all just seemed to fall into place. And of course, some of that was him guiding her, she could see that. His hand was firm on her back. He led her smoothly into certain gaps between other couples.
But she couldn’t deny that this didn’t cover all of it.
“Are you making me understand this dance?” she asked.
Then looked up at him, in time to see his irritated expression.
“If you’re asking whether I’ve thralled you, the answer is no.”
“You say that like it’s weird for me to wonder, when it would explain so much. Why I came to you for lessons. Why I keep coming even though you’re cruel. Why I came tonight, after all the ways you tortured me. And then the other thing, the other stuff that happened, the—” she fumbled out, every part of her trying to say without saying. Acknowledge what she had felt, without acknowledging it.
But he just slipped in first, before she could manage.
“So that’s how you’re explaining desire to yourself.”
“It makes more sense than actually feeling it for you.”
“Maybe you just felt it for the situation. For the sudden touch.”
“That hardly seems like enough to cover what it did to—”
She cut herself off before the last words. Mostly because she realized how those last words sounded. Like she been overwhelmedwith pleasure, or something similarly ridiculous. But it was too late. His expression was all smug amusement.
“Glad to hear it was good for you. I had no idea I was so talented.”
“Talented at fucking with my mind maybe.”
“If I had really fucked with your mind, you would know.”
“And how do you figure that, when the whole point is to make it impossible?”
“Because it feels likethis,” he said, the last word so low and dark she knew what was going to happen. She even braced for him to say something that would turn her brain to soup. But what she didn’t expect was everything else, around the words he spoke.Hear me; hear me and do not fear what I am, she thought she heard him say, soft as syrup, and now even lower and deeper and darker than before.
Then all around them, everything just seemed to stop.
People froze mid-twirl, mid-kiss, mid-cry of delight.
Someone had thrown confetti in the air; it hovered there, in a spray of color. She could see a girl’s teeth, caught just as she opened her mouth to laugh. The wild eyes of people in the middle of a revelry, now unable to come back down to earth. It was like moving through a painting calledThe Bacchanal.
Because theyweremoving.
