Thank You for Listening(64)

The gauntlet had been thrown. He tucked his knees to the side, giving her room to pass, and extended his hand. Taking it, she levered herself to standing. She didn’t immediately move past, but paused before him. At her stillness, his head came up and she looked down to meet his eyes, hand still in his. A timeless configuration, a Lady and her knight-errant. A timeless connection, clear and comfortable and right. An understanding of their respective place in this eternal dance, instinctively knowing when to lead and when to follow.

She moved to the dance floor and his eyes never left hers, not for a second.

She started dancing.

It should have been awkward. She was so out of practice. A well-preserved vintage car garaged for too long, its battery drained. But the music was a key slipped into the ignition and, to her surprise, the engine turned over. She began to move. The avidity in Nick’s eyes burned off whatever insecurity remained and the butterflies finally settled. She had no idea why he was so into her, but he was, and it was freeing. Freeing from something. For something.

She moved deeper into herself, her moves becoming small, intimate, private. In these matters, while other women might be overt, she’d always found that covert operations yielded the best results. Give him just enough to guess the rest. Make a man use his imagination and he couldn’t help but be curious. They didn’t need the explicit version. What they wanted was Pictionary. And she knew how to draw.

When the server returned with an ice bucket of champagne and placed it on the table in front of Nick, he shifted to see around her, to keep watching Sewanee, and had she ever felt more powerful? Had she?

The cast of his eyes shifted. From watching to thinking. A secret tugged at his lips. With the thumb of his right hand, he spun the ring on his middle finger.

The song didn’t end so much as become something else, back to unrecognizable noise.

She stopped moving. She stood there, people stepping around her as if she were a spilled drink.

Nick’s silent grin reeled her to him. As she drifted off the dance floor a strobe light began throbbing. She watched it fracture him. He grew larger in pulses as she came closer. She could only imagine what she looked like, coming toward him in fits, skipping ahead. Instead of swinging his knees to the side, this time he simply parted them. So she slipped between them, the outside of her legs kissing the inside of his. His hands stayed on his thighs. She saw them clench the fabric.

Once again, they looked at each other.

He had the sweetest look on his face when he said something she couldn’t hear over the music.

So she yelled, “What?”

He laughed. Shook his head. Yelled back, chagrined, “I said I miss talking to you!”

She laughed, bowing her head, dropping her hands to his shoulders to steady herself. Chuckling, he reached up, cupped the back of her neck. His fingers slid through the fine hair there and his cheek slid along hers until his mouth was back at her ear. “Would you like some champagne?”

Her cheek still touching his, she turned to his ear and said, simply, “No.” Then she took his lobe into her mouth.

In response, he gathered her hair and squeezed.

She stepped back, took his hands as she straightened, and pulled him up. As she led him away from the table, she noticed a group of young women loitering at the periphery of the dance floor. They looked unmoored. Dinghies left to bob in a rising tide. Their dresses too short, heels too high, hair too glossy. One kept shifting her weight, already regretting her choice of footwear; another, with the shortest dress of all, kept tugging it down, drawing more attention to the very things she was trying to hide. The sharks were beginning to circle.

She dropped Nick’s hand and stepped over to them. She pointed at their table, at the nearly full bottle of vodka, at the unopened champagne. She caught the server’s eye and gestured at the girls, then back at the table. She nodded. The girls’ mouths dropped open. One pulled her into a hug. Another jumped up and down, hands to her chest, nearly collapsing when her ankle buckled.

They exited the club, but on their way to the elevator, Nick suddenly took her hand and guided her into a vestibule, through double glass doors, and outside. The blast of cold, snow-scented air hit Sewanee like an adrenaline shot and she gasped, but it was instantly muffled by Nick’s hands taking her face, his mouth taking hers, his body backing her up until her ass hit an icy wall. She melted into it as his body melted into hers.

She remembered they were on a public walkway when she heard the unmistakable hoots of a pack of boys. Nick broke the kiss, his hands moving from her face to the wall behind her, fencing her in. She dropped her head into his chest as he located the offenders, growled good-naturedly, “Feck off, yeah?”

The cackling faded and Sewanee chuckled into his shirt. She looked back up and past his shoulder. Billowy clouds of breath carried her words: “You have to see this.”

He turned his head. “My God.” He rolled off her, leaned back against the wall so they were side by side, facing the Strip, right above the small lake where the gondolas were kept. There was a bridge and the replica of St. Mark’s tower, the campanile. The lights of the Mirage and Treasure Island on the other side of Las Vegas Boulevard. Snow continued to fall over it all, though more gently than before.

She shivered and Nick snaked an arm behind her back, dragging her over to settle against his front. He swept her hair off her neck and, softly as snow, kissed her exposed skin. His fingers brushed her collarbone and the crevice below it. The sound she made was entirely new to her. “I don’t understand,” he murmured. “I don’t understand how this happened. How everything with you is magic.”