Page 2

“You don’t know a single thing I’d be right about.”

“I know you’re aware of every place we’re touching.” He leans in to say it over the music, and the lean is the proof, his mouth at the edge of my ear, his shoulder pressed full against mine. “Your breathing changed when I sat down. It hasn’t gone back. You’ve been counting the inches between my mouth and yours since I leaned in the first time.”

A beat, then the partial curve breaks into something close to a real one.

“Or I’m describing myself, and you’re about to tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re not wrong,” I say. “My breathing changed, the inches are correct, and you’ve clearly done this enough times to have a script. The problem is I’m too smart to find a script attractive, which means it isn’t the script working on me, it’s you, and that’s worse, because a script I could rule out.”

Kalliopi would adore him. The thought arrives fully built, and it cuts clean, the surgical kind, no ragged edge. She’d take one look at the suit and the lane the crowd opened and put her mouth to my ear and say, " Go, " in the voice she used when she’d already decided for both of us, which was most voices she had. She decided things for me because her read on people ran as true as my read on money, and now the one person alive who was right about the half of life I get wrong is in the ground at St. Michael’s under fresh dirt and a wreath I picked because she’d have hated lilies, and I couldn’t bear to give her flowers she’d hate.

He sets his glass down and tips his chin at the dance floor. “Up.”

“I don’t dance.”

“You won’t be dancing.”

I go even though I knew the size of the mistake and walked into it at full speed, because tonight that’s the whole assignment.

The bass takes me before he does. He sets a hand at the small of my back and turns me into him, the front of him to the back of me, none of the polite distance-testing the men my age do, no question folded into it anywhere. He decides where I am, and that’s where I am, and his palm spreads over my stomach through the thin black fabric to keep me there, and we move.

I’ve danced. Not like this. There’s a roll to him that starts low and climbs through everywhere we touch, and my body answers before I’ve cleared it, my spine curving, my hips picking up his timing like they’ve been keeping notes in a hand I don’t recognize as mine. I get my hands on him because I want to, twisting one back to grip his thigh, dragging the other up his forearm where the sleeve’s pushed back, and the man is carved, no give anywhere, all of it earned and not for show. His mouth comes down by my ear, not speaking, just present, his breath against the side of my neck, and a current runs through me I’d file under cold if there were a degree of cold anywhere in this building.

His cock is hard against the curve of my ass. I can feel the whole length of it through two layers of cloth, the weight, and it throws a jolt straight down between my legs, a clench, a wet heat so fast and so total that I make a sound I never approved. He hears it. His hand presses flatter against my belly, drags me back into him, rolls up slow, so I learn exactly how hard and exactly how much there is, and my whole nervous system throws every breaker at once.

“You’re thinking again,” he says against my ear. “I can feel it land in your shoulders.”

“You cannot feel me think. That’s not a sense humans have.”

“Yours go up an inch every time the brain starts. They’re up an inch now.” His hand slides to my hip and presses me in. “Put them down.”

“That’s not how thinking functions, you can’t just issue a directive to a—”

He rolls up into me, and the rest of the sentence dies in my throat and exits as breath, and I feel him go still against my back for half a second, like he’s saving the sound to take out later.

“You were saying,” he murmurs.

“Your cock is big.”

He laughs. “It sure is.”

I turn in his arms, because if I’m going to lose an argument I’ll lose it to a man’s face, and that’s the second error, because his face this near in the blue light beats the back of him, the dark eyes and the silver and the mouth still holding most of its smile in reserve. I plant a hand flat on his chest to buy distance, then just leave it there, feeling his heart run at half my rate, which I find personally insulting. The distance is a fiction anyway. Even turned around with a hand braced between us, he’s hard against my stomach, too much of him for the gap I made to mean anything.

“You’re unhinged,” I tell him, because it’s a finding and I deliver my findings. “You walked up to me and decided you were doing this before you’d heard me speak. You were right, which is the deranged part, because nobody’s that sure of a stranger unless something’s wrong with them.”

“I prefer the term wickedly charming.”

“That is not the boast you think it is.”

“Tonight it’s exactly the boast I think it is.” He brings a hand up and pushes a curl off my face, his thumb dragging along my jaw, and I feel that small drag everywhere, down into my back teeth. “I knew I wanted you from the door. The dress is doing you no favors, by the way. It’s doing them for me.”

We’ve stopped pretending it’s dancing. We’re pressed together using the music as a cover story, his thigh between mine, and every small movement drags the seam of the dress against my clit through fabric I’ve ruined, until I’m working myself against his leg in front of a hundred strangers and can’t find the part of me that’s supposed to be ashamed. Both his hands are on my ass now, holding me down against his thigh, moving me, his mouth at my throat, and I’ve got two fingers fisted in his jacket.

“You’re a bad idea,” I tell him, because it’s true and I say the true thing. “You’re also exactly the bad idea I came here for, so I’d rather not waste it standing up.”

He grins, the full one finally, the one he’d been rationing all night. “Then tell me where.”

“There’s a bathroom,” I say. “Past the end of the bar.”