Page 27 of The False Flat

I liked these women, but I’d known Deanna for weeks; they’d known her for years. I tried not to let it eat at me.

I ended up wedged between Chad to my left and Elaine to my right, and they were the only people I could hear because of the noise. I wasn’t really paying attention anyway. I clutched my phone, sneaked peeks at the screen, and stress-ate “Nashville Hot” chicken dip.

“Everything okay?” Grant asked, leaning over Elaine so I could hear him.

I’d tried calling Erin back three times, but my call had gone straight to voicemail every single time. And I couldn’t stop thinking about that call, the equivalent to her accidentally lighting me on fire and then running a few blocks away to get a fire extinguisher after telling me to hang tight.

I didn’t tell Grant any of this. Instead, I smiled, nodded, and tucked my phone under my thigh.

“What do you do, Chad?” Grant yelled across me and Elaine (a seven, a perfect, sparkling seven) as caramel apple pie was being delivered to the table. “Are you in finance like Penelope?”

“Attorney,” Chad answered. “Criminal law. You build houses, right?”

“Essentially . . .” Grant trailed off, which was odd because Grant could converse with a tree stump and very likely had.

“What do you do, Elaine?” I tried to cover the awkwardness that might or might not be in the air while also trying to distract myself so I wouldn’t place a fourth call to Erin.

“Oh, I’m a therapist.”

I accidentally frowned. Elaine looked like she was going to say something else, but the lights dimmed, and music started.

“It’s go time!” Keyondra’s skinny-ass White boyfriend, whose real name was Conner, said as he stood up and put a bowler hat on his head. He stuck his arm out to Keyondra, who latched on and rose.

“You guys coming?” Keyondra asked. Mere and her husband, Devon, stood, followed by Grant and Elaine and William, who went to stand by Deanna, hand outstretched.

Deanna looked back at Chad and me. “What about you guys?”

I shook my head.

“Electro-swing night!” Conner interjected. “You gotta come!” His feet were already moving to the mash of vintage swing and the thumping beat of more modern hip-hop. It made me want to move, too, only . . . out of the saloon.

Keyondra dragged Conner away from the table. Mere shrugged, grabbed her husband’s arm, and left too. Grant and Elaine were already on the dance floor. Elaine laughed, touching Grant’s arm as he instructed her on how to slide a few feet to her left.

Chad put his hands on the table as if to lift himself up and out onto the dance floor. “You wanna show ’em what we got?”

“What who has? And how do you know about this?”

“Andy’s into this.” I’d never met Andy. He was one of the lawyers at Chad’s firm. “One night me and the guys got drunk, and Andy made us all learn to shuffle. It’s easy. Follow my lead.” He snapped his head toward the others as I shook my own.

The only way I was getting out on that dance floor was after hundreds of private lessons with a guy on YouTube before I attended an in-person class as a beginner so as to impress my teacher with how quickly I was picking up the dance steps I had supposedly never seen before.

I glanced at the now-crowded dance floor, bodies gyrating together like they were in a blender.

No, I wasn’t going out there. And even if I could dance, Erin could call any minute.

Chad’s crossed-arm pout suggested I was ruining the only fun event of the evening. To his credit, he’d tried, but after his second drink, it was obvious he didn’t want to be here. He joked about the crappy food and the cowboy hats the tourists wore. After the fourth comment, I dug my fingernail into his thigh. He stopped talking, but then he started drinking . . . a lot.

Deanna wouldn’t go without us, so the three of us, me, Chad, and Deanna, watched everyone else. My phone rang once, a wrong number. After biting the caller’s head off because they weren’t Erin, I decided I needed to tuck my phone into my purse and look back at the dance floor. But why wasn’t Erin calling?

Keyondra and Conner were actually pretty good.

Grant came back to his seat. “What’d you think?”

He was looking at me when he asked, but Chad answered, “I think we do it better up north.”

“You must’ve missed me out there then,” William added, so winded he barely got the words out.

“Oh, I think he saw you.” Deanna rubbed her husband’s back. “Why don’t you sit down.”