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“What’s the difference?” Though he’d been to a good many black tie benefits and other philanthropic events where dancing had been required, it usually only involved a quick ceremonial sweep around the dance floor with an appropriately well-healed debutante.
“At the beginning of prom, you’d have one hand in mine and the other on my shoulder. By the end, I’d have my arms around your neck and you’d have yours around my waist.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” Stepping closer to her, he tightened the knot of his tie in an ode to his younger, painfully prim self. “I was a very shy boy.”
“True,” she said, reaching her delicate fingers up to loosen the knot again. “But I was a very persistent girl.”
Their eyes met for a beat of time that seemed to last forever.
“Last,” he said.
“Last dance it is.” Arlie kicked off her shoes. “I was definitely over these by end of prom.”
He let his hands land on the delicate swell of her hipbones. The warmth of her skin bloomed through the thin, silky fabric, radiating into his palms.
“Who did you end up going with?” he asked, trying his best to sound only mildly interested.
Raising an eyebrow at him, Arlie rested her hands over his, guiding them to her lower back.
“Kassidy.” Her breasts nudged his ribs as she reached up, lacing her fingers behind his neck as she began to sway in time with the music. “We created quite a stir.”
“I’m sure.” He began to move with her, his lower back aching with the effort of keeping his hips from grazing hers.
“Do you remember how the Lennox Finch chaperones used to use a King James Bible to measure the distance between couples?” Arlie asked.
“Vaguely. I wasn’t big into the social gatherings.” To Samuel’s irritation, and despite his most strenuous wishes, he felt the telltale heaviness gathering low in his groin. Perfect. He was officially his teenage self again, complete with inconvenient erections.
“But you came to the party after graduation,” she said.
Shit.
He’d been hoping she wouldn’t bring that up.
In those days, he and Mason had looked enough alike that they were frequently mistaken for each other by teachers and friends. Until they opened their mouths.
Mason’s mouth had been opened a lot that night.
Tongue-kissing his way through half the senior class, he’d finally made his way over to Arlie, who, for the very first time in their entire teenage career, seemed to be listening attentively to what his brother had to say.
Samuel remembered the stab of panic he’d felt when his brother leaned in, whispering into Arlie’s ear before disappearing out the back door of the house where they were illicitly gathered. Just then, their classmate hosting the party announced they would be playing seven minutes in heaven.
Quickly slipping into the small guest bathroom, Samuel had inspected himself in the mirror. He’d then taken off his suit coat and tie, and stowed them away in the linen closet next to a stack of folded washrags before popping the first three buttons on his shirt.
With hands shaking from pure, fizzy adrenaline, he had mussed his hair, turning this way and that to make sure it resembled Mason’s.
Once the rest of him looked right, he’d removed his glasses, hiding them behind a bottle of designer hand lotion before making his way down the hallway, fingertips trailing along on the wall to orient himself in space.
Luckily, the other partygoers had assumed he was drunk rather than disastrously near-sighted—an unexpected boon in his favor.
A crisply folded fifty tucked into their hostess’s palm was all it took for her to magically draw Mason’s and Arlie’s names from the red plastic cup.
Among a hearty chorus of catcalls and lascivious hooting, they’d made their way into the closet. As soon as the door closed behind them, they were abruptly plunged into inky darkness.
“Is this weird?” she’d asked.
Afraid that words would fail him as they so often had, Samuel had leaned into her instead, until slowly, in an absence of light as primordial as the beginning of the world, they’d found each other in the dark.
Timidly at first, their lips grazed. Warm, dry and velvety, her breath was honey-sweet and hot on his cheeks. Her scent was a gift to the senses left available to him.
Yielding to a need deeper than thirst, his tongue had slid over hers, demanding more. More of this. More of her.
Then he’d found the softness of her breasts beneath her thin cotton blouse. She had moaned into his mouth when he had thumbed her nipple, hard as a pearl. She had pushed his free hand down to the edge of her skirt and beyond, pressing it against the damp heat of the panties between her thighs.
