Love & Gelato(45)

Ren nudged me. “Want to sing karaoke with me? We could pick something in Italian, and I could pretend I don’t speak Italian either. It would be hilarious. How about . . . ?”

He trailed off because Mimi and Marco were making their way toward us. Mimi was wearing a miniscule skirt and her hair was pulled back in a long, loose braid. Not a stray Medusa hair in sight. I shot a look at Ren. Did he like her legs too?

Okay, yeah, he did. Someone needed to teach him the art of discretion.

“Hi, guys,” Marco yelled. He had exactly one volume. “Lina!” He came at me with his arms outstretched, but I ducked. “Too fast for me, I guess.”

“Are you going to try to pick me up every time you see me?”

“Yes.” He turned and picked up Elena. “Ask Elena.”

“Marco, basta! Put me down or I’ll feed you to a pack of wild dogs.”

“That’s a new one.” Marco grinned at me. “She’s kind of creative with her threats.”

Mimi was yelling to be heard over the music. “Ren, why didn’t you call me back? I didn’t know if you were going to be here or not.”

I couldn’t hear his response, but she smiled at him and then started playing with the buttons on his shirt, which shouldn’t have bugged me, but kind of did. Just because she was into him didn’t mean she had to spread her Swedish PDA all over the place.

“Lina?”

I slowly turned around. Please let it be . . . “Thomas!”

He was wearing a royal-blue T-shirt that said BANNED FROM AMSTERDAM and somehow looked even better than I remembered. If that was possible. I forgot all about Mimi’s button playing.

“Elena said you’d be here. I tried to call Ren to—”

“Hello, stalker.” Ren suddenly side checked him, sending him stumbling.

“Ren, what the hell?” he said, straightening up.

“I had like ten missed calls from you.”

“All you had to do was answer one. ”

Ren shrugged. “Sorry, man. I’ve been busy.”

Mimi sidled up next to Ren, staring at me like she had no idea who I was.

“Hi, Mimi,” I said.

“Hey.” She squinted.

“I’m Lina. We met the other night at Elena’s?”

“I remember.”

Elena launched herself into the middle of our weirdly tense little circle. “Ragazzi, no more talking! I want to dance.”

“Do you dance?” Thomas asked me.

“Not really.”

“Me neither. We could just hang out. We could go walk around by the Arno or something. I know this cool place that—”

“No way!” Ren grabbed my hand. “Thomas, you can’t rob her of this experience. She’s at Space. She wants to get her dance on.”

“I don’t have that much dance to get on,” I protested.

“Sure you do.” He lowered his voice. “And come on. This is where it all started, right?”

I nodded, then looked at Thomas. “I’d better stay. I would hate to miss the chance to embarrass myself.”

“Worst case you just bust out your Dirty Dancing moves. Nobody puts baby in the corner, right?”

“I’m telling you, you know way too much about that movie.”

“Ragazzi!” Elena yelled. “I mean it, let’s go!”

We followed her through a narrow doorway, Thomas resting his hand on the small of my back and causing all sorts of ecstatic feelings, and then we were all shoving our way up a ramp into a large room. For a second I couldn’t see anything solid—everything was flailing. Then a spotlight washed over us and OMG.

We were in a gigantic room with a ceiling that was at least twenty-five feet high, and it was crawling with people, like an anthill, only with designer clothes. There were a bunch of platforms set up throughout the floor, so some people were standing like five feet above everyone else. And they were all dancing. And I don’t mean The Shopping Cart or The Sprinkler or any of the other moves that always seemed to dominate the proms back home. They were really dancing. Like having-sex-on-the-dance-floor dancing.

Mom, what have you gotten me into?

“Welcome to Space,” Ren yelled into my ear. “This is the most crowded I’ve ever seen it. Probably because it’s tourist season.”

“Guys, follow me!” Marco put his arms in front of him like a diver, then started cutting through the crowd, all of us trailing behind.

“Ciao, bella,” a man hissed in my ear. I yanked my head away. Everyone I brushed past was sweaty. This place was kind of gross.

Finally we were in a little pocket of space somewhere in the middle of the floor and everyone started dancing. Immediately. I guess no one else needed a little warm-up period before they got their groove on?

My palms started sweating. Time for some positive self-talk. Lina, you are a confident woman and you’ve totally got this. Why don’t you try out a sexy version of the Running Man? Or the Hokey Pokey? Just quit standing still. You look ridiculous. And then I made the fatal mistake of looking at Mimi, which made things about a million times worse. She had her arms up over her head and she looked awesome. Like cool-sexy-European awesome. I wanted to crawl into a hole.

“You’ve got this,” Ren yelled, giving me a thumbs-up.