Chapter 13 #3
“Party,” in fact, might be a stretch. What they in fact join is more a resting place for people’s bags and coats than anything else, a couple of wallflowers rotating in and out to keep an eye on things.
Everyone else is out on the dance floor, and swinging back to the table occasionally to say hello, catch their breath, or check their phones.
Sam wishes Joey a happy birthday when they blow by, intending to buy them the requisite twenty-first birthday shot, but they are deeply entwined with Luce and obviously intending to remain so.
Luce, for her part, looks both delighted and mortified, which Sam thinks is fairly adorable; she is, however, still his little sister, and he can’t say he’s interested in seeing her put her tongue in someone’s mouth.
He averts his eyes and retreats into the nearest corner, surveying the crowd with mild, self-effacing despair.
It always makes him feel prematurely middle-aged, hitting this point in the night; everyone else seems to have some sort of internal wiring for fun that, for Sam, was never hooked up.
He thinks sometimes it’s why he went through that strange little bout of teenage dishonesty; some sense that his fundamental nature was ill-suited to the adolescent experience, and he’d have to get creative if he wanted to fill in the gaps.
No matter what he does or how hard he tries, at some point in any evening out, he always ends up here: a little bored, and a little unsure what people see in the experience, and wondering whether he’s made enough of an appearance to leave without being seen as an asshole.
He’s just decided he’s past that critical point when Jake approaches him again, this time holding two shot glasses, and says, “Hey. Do you want to dance?”
“Oh,” Sam says, startled. He hadn’t been anticipating this, mostly because: “I feel like I told you my position on dancing some years ago? ‘Terrible at it, public humiliation, I’d rather die,’ etcetera?”
“I thought maybe you’d grown and matured,” Jake says, in a voice that strikes Sam as a little too innocent.
“Really?”
“No,” Jake says, grinning at him, “that’s what the shot’s for.
Here.” He pushes it into Sam’s hand, then clinks his own against it and says, “Cheers!” Sam has no choice but to toss it back; he realizes as he swallows that it’s a Lemon Drop and makes an unhappy face at Jake, whose grin deepens.
“Yes, yes, it’s a disgusting shot, I know—but I thought in honor of my own twenty-first, and also because nothing seems as horrible after you drink a Lemon Drop, since at least that’s over.
Come on—I am a professional dance teacher these days, you know. It’s on my resume and everything.”
Sam’s mouth twists, but his body betrays him, listing forward slightly towards the tempting thought of being pressed close to Jake.
Jake’s smile shrinks but doesn’t vanish, as his eyes flick up and down Sam’s body. His voice is warm when he says, “Sam. It’s only dancing.”
“Easy for you to say,” Sam starts, in the automatic patter of their old argument, and then snaps his mouth shut.
The rest of his piece here would have involved detailing Jake’s lifetime of dance training, all the ways in which he’d never have to worry about knowing how to move, what looked good and what stupid, where his feet and hands were supposed to go.
But that argument doesn’t hold water anymore. Jake would have had to relearn all that—the process all the more grueling, probably, for how absolute and effortless his physicality had been before—in the aftermath of the accident.
“Is it?” is all Jake says now, the corners of his mouth quirking as though it’s a joke.
But a shadow passes over his face all the same, and it’s that, more than anything, that makes Sam say, “God, you know what? Fine. You’re right. It can’t be worse than the Lemon Drop.”
Jake beams at him, and takes his hand, and drags him out to the dance floor, where Sam intends to stay for exactly one song.
One song is enough to be a good sport, but hopefully not quite long enough for any of his staff to notice him embarrassing himself and take videos on their phones.
He’s stiff and nervous as he follows Jake to a gap in the crowd, and Jake must notice, because he laughs and says, “Relax. There’s no firing squad.
” He uses the hand that’s not on his cane to position Sam, little taps and touches directing him.
When Jake leans close and murmurs, “Seriously, loosen your muscles, for the love of God. You can’t move if you’re doing an impression of a wooden board,” his breath is hot against the shell of Sam’s ear.
It makes Sam shiver, some of the tension seeming to escape with the motion, because after a second Jake runs a hand over Sam’s arm and says, “Good, that’s better.
Now try to stop thinking about it; just move with me.
Your body knows how to do this, you know. You are a human being.” And then—
—well, somewhere in the sweating, sliding, subsuming haze of the next hour, Sam has a thought.
It’s just about the only real thought he has while Jake’s grinding against him, or guiding him through a particular motion with expressive, clever hands, or pressed so close to him they might as well just get naked and have done with it.
Most of what’s filtering through his brain are filthy images, filthier images, images so filthy Sam’s surprised at himself for even thinking them, and single-word assessments of the situation such as “mmm,” and “good,” and “hot.” Normally, in a situation like this, he’d be awkward, worried about how he looked or whether he was taking too many liberties, misreading the signals, or otherwise making the other person uncomfortable.
But somehow, with Jake’s breath hot in his ear under the strobe lights, none of that seems to matter anymore.
And through it all, the one piece of higher-level thinking that manages to hold on is: Oh my God, is this how it’s supposed to feel?
Sam almost can’t believe it, although the minute it occurs to him, he’s sure that it’s true.
No wonder people love to go to clubs, to dance all night, to push themselves to their physical limits in pursuit of more time out, if this is how it feels for them—this feels good.
This feels so good that Sam abruptly can’t remember how he lived without it.
Jake must be feeling good, too; he still moves like a dancer, but he’s looser now than he was when they were teenagers, when he was in regular practice for classical ballet.
As in seemingly every other arena of his life, he moves with and around the cane as though it’s an extension of himself, balancing his weight on it more or less as he needs to, occasionally using it to nudge someone stepping too close out of their space.
The songs slide from one to another and Jake slides closer to him as they do, and as the time passes Sam notices that occasionally he, too, is bearing some of Jake’s weight, that Jake is sometimes leaning against him or using his shoulders as a balance point.
He doesn’t look or seem tired, and, just as when they were younger, he’s still much more controlled and intentional in his movements than Sam, on and off the dance floor.
Jake could step away, finagle an end to this encounter if he wanted.
It becomes clearer and clearer that he doesn’t want to, until it’s so obvious that absolutely no one could be confused.
By the time they reach the end of the hour, they’re more or less fused together, panting and laughing and nearly spent; Jake’s hard against him, impressively and also entirely unmissably, and Sam’s sure Jake can tell he is, too.
There’s something almost funny about it, in a dangerous, unsettlingly hot way—this is how they might have behaved together at high school dances, if either one of them had been willing to have the difficult conversation they were avoiding then.
Jake turns and smiles up at him, eyes half-closed, his face lit in the blue and red strobe of the lights. It occurs to Sam, a little late, to consider the difficult conversation they’re avoiding this time around, and what this one might be costing them.
“Aaaaand that’s a set break,” the DJ announces from the stage.
“Back in ten. Use the bathroom! Get a drink! Call your mother, some of you, and ask her to remind you to respect yourself! Not you, though. Yeah, you there, in the—yeah. You need to respect yourself less, my dude; you’re freaking me out. ”
As the DJ continues to argue with the young man wearing only a Speedo and a cowboy hat and gyrating so wildly he has upended several drinks, the music switches over to what’s clearly someone’s personal playlist. Sam and Jake, in mutual entertained agreement, duck off the dance floor while everyone is distracted by the absurdity, and slip out the doors before they can be separated by the crowd.