In the lounge-club hybrid, the smoke hangs thick in the air. Mara weaves sinuously through the crowd, the lights illuminating her body in flashes; the curves and lines of her in black and metal and punishingly high-heeled boots.
Her arm is hooked in Jamie’s and Stella flanks her as I walk behind, looking for Leo. The place is packed, but amidst the grinding and thrusting, we find a table. I sit on a low sofa, legs sprawled, but Mara doesn’t join me.
“What time is it?” she asks.
“We have a half-hour before he’s supposed to be here.”
“This is the random internet person?” Stella looks sceptical. I don’t blame her.
“Jamie found him,” I say absently. It’s nearly impossible to care about anything with Mara in that dress.
She catches the look on my face and interprets it correctly, judging by the spike in her heartbeat. “I want to dance.”
I would join her, but someone needs to wait for this person I now loathe to show up. And besides, “I prefer to watch,” I say.
Jamie smirks. ”I bet you do.” He holds out his hand to Mara, adding an old-timey bow. “I was king of the bar mitzvah circuit. I’ll dance with you.”
Mara takes his hand and Stella sits beside me. A waitress-hostess-person comes round in a white bandage dress, leaving literally nothing to the imagination, and gives me a long look.
“Can I get you anything?“ she asks, not breaking eye contact, and ignoring Stella completely.
“Glenlivet, I say, looking to Stella. “You?”
She hesitates, looking a bit lost. “Um, I’ll have wine I guess?”
The waitress raises an eyebrow. “What kind?”
“Riesling,” I say for her. “It’s sweet,” I say to Stella. “You might like it.” Somebody must.
The waitress lingers for another moment but when I don’t return her gaze, leaves.
“Thanks,” Stella says, and looks out at the writhing floor. "So when is this guy supposed to show up?”
“He said midnight.”
She looks at her phone. “He’s late.”
He is, but it’s hard to care. The waitress comes back with our drinks and I hand her a hundred. Stella sips hers but mine is untouched.
I can’t stop looking at Mara, and I’m not the only one. She and Jamie move in complete synchronicity, as if they know each other’s thoughts.
“Wow,” Stella says. “Jamie wasn’t kidding.”
“He wasn’t.”
“Do you dance?” she asks me.
“I can.”
"So why aren’t you up there?”
I look back to Mara again, her eyes closed, inhabiting the music. “Because it’s true, what I said before,” I tell Stella. “I prefer to watch.”
She pauses for a moment. Then, ”Do you ever get jealous?”
“Why would I?”
“I don’t know,” Stella says, as Jamie’s arm hooks Mara’s waist, pulls their bodies together. “They're…pretty close.”
“There’s nothing to be jealous of,” I say. “They’re friends.”
“You sure about that?”
This time, I do turn to look at Stella. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
She shakes her head, glances down into her glass, but her pulse beats faster—I can hear it beneath the bass line.
“If there was something to be jealous of, I suppose I would be. But Mara doesn’t want to be with anyone else.”
Stella puts down her glass, and I hear her heart stutter. She swallows hard. “We’re not like them, you know.” When I meet her eyes they’re wide, intent. “You see that, right?”
I do see it. I do know. It doesn’t matter.
I say none of this out loud.
“You don’t need to wait with me,” I tell Stella. “Go dance.”
“You sure?”
“I am.”
She looks a bit reluctant to leave, at first, but I encourage her on and she soon falls into perfect rhythm with everyone else.
Most heads in the club are turned to watch Jamie, and now Stella–they’re classically beautiful, pleasingly pretty. But it’s as if their eyes almost skip over Mara; you can’t stare at the sun too long without getting hurt.
I can, though, and do. There’s a wild, blissful expression on her face—she looks otherworldly. Untouchable. And indeed, as close as she and Jamie are, there’s always at least a hair’s breadth of space between them.
I lean back, legs stretched out in front of me, feeling the ghost of Mara’s lips on my neck, from before. Glitter flutters from the ceiling, sticking to her skin. She shines.
Hearing her heartbeat, her breath, her sound in the midst of the thrumming music, if it can be called that, calls to mind an echo of a memory of the first time I heard her voice. It was in that club with Kent in Miami and I was dying of boredom and misery until her voice brought me to life. Woke me up. I could scarcely believe that she was real, but she was always more real than anything, than anyone. She makes me real. Without her, I’m not convinced I’d exist.
She opens her eyes for a second and flashes me a smile, my smile, the one she reserves only for me. I want to taste it. Feel it against my chest. See that smile from above me.
Immediately I feel the pressure of too many eyes on her bare skin and I stand and move toward her, cutting a line of stillness through the bodies. When I reach her I tilt my head down until my lips are at her ear. Contact.
“Come,” I say, my voice low.
She doesn’t ask where. She doesn’t ask why. She doesn’t need to—she knows what I want. And I can hear in her heart, in her pulse, in her breath, in her music, that she wants it too.
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