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Nick tried to smile an apology to Kacey as he righted his bottle, but Kacey wasn’t looking at him anymore. Nick followedher gaze, and then he couldn’t look away. A guy and a woman in their twenties were dancing together a few feet in front of him.
It was a swing dance, and these two had to be professionals. They were moving with the sort of control Nick could only dream of, navigating the space around each other so well that each leap, each spin, each step to the right or the left became another word in the story they were telling. The guy was into it, acting and reacting, advancing and responding, but the woman—Nick kept glancing at her feet to make sure she hadn’t left the ground. Her olive skin was glowing, her mouth was open in a delighted laugh, and her eyes were shining as she watched her partner. Nick wasn’t sure he’d ever felt the kind of joy that was radiating from her as she danced.
A few onlookers were impressed enough to applaud when the song ended, and Nick found himself clapping too, wishing he had a better response to give. The woman’s eyes caught Nick’s as she brushed back the dark hair that had fallen in her face, and she grinned. Nick felt as if the sun had come out.
“Wow,” Kacey said. Nick remained frozen in place, watching the dancers get in line at the bar. He vaguely realized Kacey was speaking to him, but couldn’t bring himself to care about what she was saying. “Does that happen a lot?” she asked him. “I mean, I know this isn’t one of those dancing restaurants, but do they get a lot of dancers in here?”
Nick looked at her distractedly. “Dancing restaurants?”
“Yeah, you know, like those diners where the servers have dance breaks.”
“Oh.” He glanced back at the dancers. “No. I’ve never seen her before.”
“But other dancers, though?”
Nick almost started laughing. No, people didn’t usually dance in the middle of the Squeaky Lion, and certainly never like that, and what the hell did it matter? He was sitting amid a noisy,sweaty swamp of people, trying to seduce someone a decade younger than he was so he could forget he was defective. Even if Kacey went home with him, he knew he’d be lucky to feel even a twinge of what had been shining in that dancing woman’s eyes.
“Do you want to get out of here?” he asked.
Kacey paused with her glass in hand and swallowed. “What?”
“We could get in my car and leave. Right now.”
Kacey’s eyes were scanning the tabletop, like he had switched scripts on her and she was searching for the new one. “Can you drive a car?”
Nick sighed. “We could talk about the napkins, and we could talk about dancing restaurants, and you could spend the next hour figuring out if I’m worth it. Or you can leave with me right now, and we can go back to my place.”
He saw the answer in her eyes as clearly as if a switch had been flipped. She couldn’t figure out how to run away and be nice to him at the same time.
“Um.” She reached for her purse. “I’ve got to use the bathroom.”
He laughed. “Should I pretend you’re coming back?”
“No.” Kacey with a K disappeared into the crowd as quickly as possible.
Nick put his head in his hand, massaging his temples with his fingers. One woman didn’t have to ruin the night. He could get a beer. He could sing more karaoke. He could step outside and slam his head into the brick wall.
Someone dropped into the seat across from him; he glanced up, then stared. The dancer had joined him, and her boyfriend was nowhere to be seen.
“Why’d you do that?” she asked cheerfully.
Nick squinted at her. “What?”
She took a sip of something purple out of a glass. “Why’d you do that?” she repeated. “You could’ve just left that girl alone.”
Nick rubbed his eyes. Apparently he was an asshole for giving Kacey an ultimatum, which he’d only done becausethiswoman had made his calculated flirting seem like a waste of time. Beautiful.
“Do you know her?” he tried.
“No.”
“So don’t worry about it.”
She shook her head impatiently, her glossy brown hair sliding across her shoulders. “I mean why’d you sit down with her when you obviously didn’t want to?”
“Of course I did.”
She sat back and watched him, a smile playing at the corners of pink-lipsticked lips. “You’re clearly miserable,” she said. “What’re you doing here?”
