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From an unseen corner, the chords from Eliot’s lute twined through the room again. The figure in the mist started to dance, slowly but without a sequence. With his head thrown back, he became a vapor, writhing and disorderly.
As the stranger twisted, skin and sinew flashed. The brackets of his shoulder blades cut through the miasma, and the ridges of his forearms flexed, candlelight burnishing every contracting part of him. Smooth grids of flesh tightened and released, pulling taut and then yielding with each turn.
The guests fell silent. I fell into a different sort of trap, one that overwhelmed me with restlessness. I had never moved that way or witnessed anyone do so.
What did it require, what sacrifice did the body make, to become such a limitless thing? Was it possible for a body to bend so far off its hinges that it snapped free and flew away?
It must take stamina to carry on like that, with little pause to draw breath, to suck in a lungful of it. Yet he made it look effortless, as if oxygen were an afterthought.
I wondered what it would take to deplete him of air. To push his limits until he wiped himself out and collapsed, panting and spent.
The line of his jaw flickered in and out of sight. I swallowed, my tongue suddenly parched, thirst overwhelming my palate.
To my shame, I wasn’t in the minority. The revelers stared hard at him, their expressions reminiscent of corn kernels ready to pop.
Every mortal with a beating heart, a pair of eyes, and a set of genitals savored the whipcord view. Males leaned forward, one of them knocking over his tankard in the process. Females watched in a daze, as though they’d been glamoured by dark magic. Someone sighed, and another person draped a finger across their neckline, as if the room’s temperature had spiked.
The dancer’s abdominals stretched and constricted, ropes of cobbled flesh glossed in perspiration. For an instant, those muscles finally siphoned air. They expanded and deflated, heavily and hotly, as a fine sheen of moisture coated his sternum.
Beneath my skirts, my knees pressed together. They clasped until it hurt, trapping an inexplicable rush of humidity.
Other physical things occurred under my dress. Confusing things that stunned and horrified me. The cleft between my legs warmed, blood gushing to the apex of my thighs, and a curious but gentle ache filled the intimate seam.
In protest, I bit my lower lip. In desperation, I shifted in my seat.
Thankfully, the mortifying tension in my core receded, even if the heat sweltering my inner folds didn’t. I snatched my chalice and guzzled water, my throat pumping and the liquid cooling my insides. Carefully, I set down the vessel.
For Season’s sake, what had come over me? Once upon a time, I used to be an excitable girl, back when I was too young to know the difference between passion and prudence. That is, until I paid the price for it.
So never again.
The dark figure stopped, as did the music.
This gave me the chance to remember I detested him out of loyalty to Eliot. My friend, who could not see past enchantment to choose his paramours wisely.
That rake. The wrong choice.
In the dome’s rays, the male pressed a finger to his lips.Hush, he might have said.
One of the servants must have been cued, because they threw him a small globe. When the figure caught the ball, another round of music started, with Eliot’s lute and the pan flutist joining forces, along with someone pounding a drum. To their rhythm, the stranger sent the globe careening down his arm.
Then both arms swayed, cording together and sliding apart in rapid waves, casting an intricate path for the ball to trace. From palm to palm, elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder.
He tossed the sphere sideways behind him. When the opposite hand captured it, one ball became two. As he juggled them, the pair multiplied into three balls. Then four, then five, then six. The male pitched them in wayward directions, around his waist, in loops above his head. All this while dancing and rolling across the ground.
He caught the spheres with the tops of his bare toes, in the nape of his neck, in the dip of his lower back. He used his whole body.
It ended too soon. One by one, as they landed in his hands, he tossed out his props for the guests to catch.
And when the room settled down, the specter flicked his wrist, producing a thin candle. He blew on it, igniting the wick, the flame popping out of nowhere. The fog and his dexterous fingers must have kept us from noticing some pair of flint and steel, because there was no way he could have—
The revelers gasped. The male vaulted into a series of single-handed flips across the hall while carrying the burning taper with him. His biceps and abdomen flexed as he broke through the mist, his body lashing like a rope.
Coming straight toward me.
My heart galloped. I veered, my back ramming into the chair.
Tankards toppled from the table and clattered to the floor. Dishes slid to the banquet’s edge, in danger of crashing.
