Player(13)

He smirked. “Sam told me to look out for you. Curves for days, red dress, goes by the name of Val. No need to wait in line, sweetheart. Sammy’s got you on the list.”

A tittering laugh escaped me. “You’re kidding.”

He gave me a look. “Well, I’m not psychic, cupcake. These your friends?” He nodded to Amelia, Katherine, and Rin, narrowing his eyes for a second when he reached Court.

“Uh, yes. They’re with me.”

“Just need your IDs,” he said, smiling at me as he unhooked the red velvet rope.

The twenty people in line glared at us like we’d just kicked a litter of puppies. I smiled apologetically. And once we proved our legal age, we were past the ropes and on our way in.

The bouncer followed us, leaning into the door to tell the ticket girl, “They’re on the house.”

A pretty girl with russet hair smiled. “Have a good time.”

We stepped into the club, laughing, Katherine’s arm in mine and Amelia’s hand in my free one. It was too loud to talk, but once we were inside, it didn’t matter.

I had absolutely no words.

The club wasn’t a club at all—it was a grand, gorgeous ballroom. The ceilings were plastered with geometric moldings that sang of the thirties and forties. Edison bulbs hung in clusters all around the room, their glow dim and orange, painting the room—which was a wave of bopping bodies—in golds and shadows. Every surface shone with polished wood and brass. Leather and luxury, velvet and vice. But it wasn’t so elegant or extravagant that the music didn’t feel exactly right, that the bobby socks and saddle shoes didn’t make sense. It all made sense, perfect sense, from the architectural details to the bopping beat. From the bodies jumping and spinning on the dance floor like tops.

We’d stepped back in time.

I watched the bodies as they came together and apart, the raucous joy punctuated occasionally by a set of feet and pettiskirts, flashes of hot pants as girls were flipped. There wasn’t a single face on that dance floor that wasn’t smiling.

Scientific fact: anyone who doesn’t feel absolute bliss watching swing dancers has no soul. Swing dancing is single-handedly the most jubilant act to ever exist. It only exists for joy, nothing else. How many other things in the world can say the same?

Katherine grabbed Amelia’s hand, laughing as she towed Amelia out onto the dance floor. Rin lit up like a floodlight, snagging Court’s hand, and he followed her onto the dance floor with a lovesick smile on his face.

I laughed at the big sap and made to follow them, my smile so big, my cheeks hurt. But then I looked up to the stage, and my feet came to a stop.

My face slipped into a slack, surprised O.

Above the sea of bouncing dancers was the stage, and on that stage stood the jazz band with every member playing his absolute heart out. A pianist behind an upright piano, a guy sitting on a box with an acoustic guitar in his lap, a sax and clarinet player next to a trumpet player and a trombone. Ian behind his drums, carrying the hopping beat with an ease that shouldn’t have been legal.

And in the middle of them all was Sam.

He held his bass with expert ease, his heels bouncing in time with his fingers as he plucked the strings. His hair, black as pitch, was combed back and shining, his lips smiling as he looked down the line at the other musicians like they could have been playing in a garage and not in a ballroom full of several hundred people, almost all of who were dancing. God, he was tall, his gray tweed pants low on his hips, black suspenders over his broad shoulders, his white tailored shirt cuffed up his forearms that fluttered with every move of his fingers.

The instruments, I realized, had been taking turns soloing, and the light shifted to Sam, who took over the stage, the band, the club. The universe.

He spun his instrument around, catching it just in time to stay on beat as he launched into a rowdy solo. At one point, he reached behind him to dingle a ditty on the piano between phrases, and once, he hit the cymbal of Ian’s trap set to punctuate a run. The noise of the crowd rose in a wave. When he really leaned into the solo, he tilted the bass on its side, holding the neck at a forty-five degree angle, and in a balance of perfect physics, he climbed up on its ribs, one foot on the shoulder, one in its waist. And there he stayed, perched on his bass like he was staking a claim, shaking his head to the tune. His fingers worked his way up and down the neck of that instrument like he was making love to it, sliding his fingertip along one string in a long, falling slide in the end. And at the break, he hopped off the bass with a kick of his legs, picking up the beat the second his feet hit the ground at the precise moment the rest of the band joined in.

I was pretty sure every woman in the room lost her drawers to him in that moment.

Katherine materialized by my side, breaking my attention.

“We’re crossing No guys with suspenders off the list,” I said definitively.

“Agreed. Now, let’s dance!”

And then she swept me onto the dance floor.

For the next hour and a half, Amelia and I took turns dancing with Katherine. And when she wasn’t swinging me around, I watched Sam play. If it hadn’t been for him hamming it up every time he was in the spotlight, I wouldn’t have even known he was aware of the crowd. The entire band deferred to him—he was the center of it all even though he was at the bottom of the sound, the foundation of the music.

Once, somehow, he caught sight of me in the ocean of people. It might have been the dress, bright as a stoplight on the edge of the dance floor, but he saw me and flashed the most brilliant, breathtaking smile. Strictly for me, he angled his bass like a guitar, the stand still on the ground, and played it with a flourish and a wink in my direction, picking it back up to spin it around just as the song picked up for the chorus.