Page 127

She takes my right hand and puts it low on her back. Then she moves it an inch and leaves it there.

“There.”

“That where you want it.”

“Yes.”

“Noted.”

She puts her other hand on my shoulder and starts, and it’s quick and small and most of it’s in the hips. I lose the first four and then I have it. Eighteen years of being told to move my feet before my head, and somebody has finally found a use for it.

Her hand presses very slightly on my shoulder, telling me where the beat is.

She doesn’t know I already have it.

I let her keep telling me.

The horns come up and the floor tightens. Whatever space we had goes to the people who want it, and Astrid comes in against me to keep it.

I put my left hand flat on her back.

Her hair has come down off her shoulder. There’s heat coming through the dress and the back of it’s damp where my palm sits, and every time the band pushes she’s closer than she was.

Then I take the hand off her back and put it where I want it, and I wait to see what she does about it.

She does nothing about it.

“You stopped counting,” she says.

“I did.”

“When?”

“When you put my hand where you wanted it.”

Her mouth goes against my jaw and stays there for a bar.

The band goes into something slower and the floor opens up enough to breathe in. She doesn’t use the room. She puts her mouth beside my ear instead, because it’s the only way either of us has heard a word all night.

“You told me about this band once.”

“I remember.”

“You were careful not to ask me.”

“You had a list.”

Her hand comes up onto the side of my jaw and stays there.

“I wanted to come.”

I turn my head. She holds it where it is.

“Do not look at me while I say it.”

She has never talked to me like that. I look at the stage.

“I had not decided anything yet. If I had danced with you then, I would have decided it here, with a band playing and your hand where it is, and I would have spent a long time afterward wondering whether I meant it.”