“Are you going to do anything about that?” he asks, nodding his head towards a corner of the room. When I turn I see Kath chatting to Bobbie Reynolds. She’s obviously telling some sort of story, but he’s not looking at her face. No, instead he’s looking down her shirt. I glare before turning back to Ben.
“Nope,” I tell him firmly. “Not going to do anything about that.” I have to stop myself from adding ‘no matter how much I want to’.
“You’re such an idiot.” He reaches up and ruffles my hair. “Come on. Let me help you find a dance partner. Josh is off snogging someone but I reckon I’m a pretty good wingman. Even if I can only get you a sympathy dance.”
Before I can protest, he’s dragging me across the room, placing me in front of someone called Alice and then pushing the pair of us onto the dance floor. I don’t want to be the guy who leaves a girl on the dance floor so somehow I find myself awkwardly swaying with her to a song I’ve never heard of. A guilty feeling swirls in my stomach. I literally just told Kath I didn’t want to dance, and now Alice is moving us closer and closer to the centre of the crowd. I try not to step on her toes as we shuffle sideways.
Alice’s nice. She’s tall, with braces and long brown hair that smells like that floral shampoo everyone uses. Not the coconut one Kath has. She’s wearing one of those sparkly tops that seem to be the unofficialuniform of this disco, and she’s just started telling me about her school’s hockey team when I spot Kath across the room.
She’s dancing with Bobbie and his hand is slipping lower and lower down her back. I glare at him, and I’m almost certain he smirks in response. What an idiot. I pull my eyes back to Alice as she starts talking about her plans for Easter.
You don’t want a girlfriend, I remind myself, when I see Kath still dancing with him during the next song.You don’t want a girlfriend. You want a world record. Girlfriends are distractions.I grit my teeth as Bobbie pulls her closer during another song. An hour later Alice and I have traded phone numbers, and her friend Chloe is chatting with Ben, making him promise that the pair of us will see them next weekend.
“I’ve got training,” I remind him.
“It’s good for you.” He pats me on the back. “Gets you out of the house. We could probably get Josh to come too. It’ll be fun.”
“What will be fun?” Kath appears with a glass of water. She takes a sip and then offers it to me. “God, these shoes are killing me. Sam, when we decide to leave can I have a piggyback home? Rule two.”
I’m about to respond when Ben cuts across.
“I’m making Sam come on a double, or possibly triple, date with me. He’s being boring and saying he isn’t sure about it. Convince him that he should come. He always listens to you.”
There is a beat of silence, and I watch her face carefully. But she just takes another sip of her drink, expression not changing at all.
“Oh really?” she says finally. “You should go. What are you guys going to do?”
“I’m not sure I’m going to go,” I say quickly, “I have training and stuff.”
“You should go,” she tells me, and my heart sinks. Maybe I was misreading things earlier when she seemed disappointed that we didn’tdance. “Anyway, I promised Bobbie that I’d dance with him again, so I’m just going to head over.”
I watch her walk away and wonder why it hurts so much.
It’s only in the last minutes of the night that I end up back with Kath, who finally drags me out onto the dance floor.
“Come on, Sam. With how athletic you are, I honestly can’t believe that you don’t like to dance,” she tells me.
“This isn’t even a dancing song,” I tell her as the faster track changes to Robbie Williams’s‘Angels’, and everyone starts pairing off. The amount of PDA on the dance floor in the darkness away from the chaperones is mildly unnerving. “I think this is basically an excuse for people to kiss.”
“Don’t be a killjoy.” Kath grabs my hand and pulls me close. “You can’t leave me on my own for the last dance.”
With her face this close I can see the remnants of her summer freckles that have stubbornly stayed put throughout the winter. Sweat is sticking some of her hair to her neck, and her cheeks are flushed.
“Are you finding this torture?” she asks.
I laugh. “Torture is potentially too strong a word. I’m just not as good at making new friends as you are.”
“Nonsense.” She squeezes my arm. “I’ve spotted literally every girl here checking you out, so you don’t need to worry about people saying no if you ask them to dance. And that’s without them knowing that you have a World Championship medal. Multiple medals.”
“Junior World Championship,” I correct, before spinning her into a twirl, much to her delight.
When she comes back to face me, she’s giggling.
“It’s basically the same thing,” she tells me. “And only a few years until you can do the real World Championships anyway. Or the Olympics.”
We sway on the edge of the crowded dance floor. I look down at the way the light dances across her face. I haven’t been this close to her in ages. I try to count the freckles across the bridge of her nose.
“What are you looking at?” she asks. “You look like you’re concentrating a weird amount. We’re not in the middle of maths.”
