Page 51 of Across His Line

Kylie’s pulling on my hands. “Tess. Come on. It’s the good part.”

So I dance.

But it isn’t the same. I pretend like someone’s watching. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t. I don’t look to find out, because looking would be losing. So I just pretend. I let my hips roll slow with the bass instead of bouncing to it. I let my head fall back and my hair swing loose down my back and around my shoulders. I lift my arms and close my eyes and move like there’s nobody here but me and the music and a boy across the room I can feel without looking at, the way I’ve always been able to feel him.

I dance closer to Kylie. I put my hands on her hips and grind against her, slow and exaggerated, and she shrieks with laughter and throws her arms around my neck and does it right back.

“Who are you tonight?” she yells.

I don’t know. I honestly don’t.

A hand comes down on Kylie’s shoulder.

“Okay,” Nash says. “That’s enough.”

Kylie shrieks again, delighted, and lets him pull her off the dance floor backward by the waist, waving at me over his shoulder.

And I’m alone.

Old me would leave. Old me would feel the empty space where Kylie was and know it for exactly what it is, which is a girl by herself in the middle of a room and get out before anyone noticed.

I stay.

I close my eyes and keep dancing. Just me. The bass in my chest and the heat of all these bodies and my own hair against my neck. I let the song take me, and then the next one, and for those two songs, I’m not doing it for anybody. Not mostly. I’m doing it because it feels good. Because I’m a little drunk and for once in my life, I’m not afraid of a room.

When I open my eyes, he’s looking at me.

He’s still by the washing machine. Nash and Koda are talking around him. He’s got a cup in his hand he isn’t drinking from. And he isn’t talking. He isn’t pretending to do anything else. He’s just standing there, very still, looking straight at me across the whole basement through the lights and the bodies and the noise.

I know his eyes. I always see them and immediately can gauge what he’s thinking. Right now, it isn’t any I know.

The lights go red, and his face goes red with them, and his eyes don’t change. They’re steady. Heavy. Fixed on me like he’s trying to work something out and hasn’t gotten to the end of it yet. And I can’t read it. I can’t read it at all.

I hate not being able to read him. It’s the only advantage I’ve ever had.

I don’t stop dancing. I don’t look away. I hold it. And he holds it. And it goes on for a second too long, then two seconds, then long enough that it stops being a look and starts being something else, something with a pulse in it. My skin goes hot all over, from my scalp to my feet.

Then somebody walks between us. A big guy in a backward hat with a pitcher over his head. And when he’s gone, Rafe is looking at Nash again, and I’m looking at nothing.

I feel the disappointment. It’s sharp and stupid and completely out of nowhere.

Then, somebody comes up behind me. A different boy this time, smaller, with a buzz cut and a sloppy grin, and he starts dancing into my space, close, then closer, his hip bumping mine.

I turn around. I shake my head. Small. Polite.

He holds his hands up and laughs and backs off into the crowd.

And I look over before I can stop myself.

Rafe saw it. I know he did. His eyes are on the spot where the boy just was. His face is completely still. And he does nothing. He doesn’t move away from the washing machine. He doesn’t put his cup down. He doesn’t come across the room the way Nash did for Kylie, the way the old Rafe would have, just to make sure everybody knew whose problem I was.

He watched me handle it. And he let me.

I don’t know why that’s the thing that gets me. Nash crossed a room for me tonight, and I was so grateful I didn’t know where to put it. But Rafe stood still. He saw that I had it, and he stayed where he was, and somehow that feels like being taken seriously in a way I don’t think I ever have been.

I turn back around and close my eyes and keep dancing.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket.