Chapter 25 #2
“Okay, so, like, that’s because you’re doing it wrong,” Alana says, still moving her hips. “You don’t find Tamor. Tamor finds you. He’s, like, a vibe-reader. He can tell who needs him. It’s honestly one of his better qualities.”
“A vibe-reader,” Billie repeats.
“Yeah. So, like, just relax. Be in the space. He’ll come to us.” She spins, catches one of the marble men by the shoulder, and winks at Billie. “Dance, babe. You look like you’re at a funeral.”
And then she’s gone again, absorbed back into the crowd like neon ink into dark water.
Billie turns to me. Her expression is somewhere between I want to scream and she might actually be right and that makes me want to scream more.
I consider the situation. We’re in a nightclub.
We can’t force a man we’ve never met to appear.
Alana, for all her chaos and stolen cocktails, has spent a lifetime navigating this world.
She knows things about its rhythms that we don’t.
She knows that sometimes you have to stop chasing the thing and let it come to you.
It’s not unlike painting, actually. You can’t force the right color. You have to let your hand find it.
“Maybe she’s not wrong about everything,” I say.
Billie looks at me. “You’re taking her side?”
“I’m taking the side of— we’re here. We can’t leave. The music is very loud and I’m wearing a shirt that glows in the dark. We might as well enjoy the absurdity, no?”
Something shifts in her face. The tension in her jaw loosens, just a fraction. She looks at the dance floor— this heaving, pulsing organism of bodies and light— and I see her weighing it. The responsible thing against the alive thing.
“Come on,” I say, and I hold out my hand. “Dance with me.”
She looks at my hand. Then at me. Then at the dance floor. Then back at my hand.
“Fine,” she says. “But if we die in here, I’m blaming you.”
“Trato hecho.” Deal made.
The dance floor swallows us whole.
The first song is pure chaos— fast, pounding, relentless.
There is no way to dance to it with any dignity.
So we don’t try. We jump. We bounce. Billie throws her arms up and the green neon top slips off her shoulder and she doesn’t fix it and she’s laughing— actually laughing— and the sound of it is completely lost in the music but I can see it in the way her face breaks open, the way her whole body shakes with it.
I haven’t seen her laugh like this. Not freely. Not without catching herself halfway through and pulling it back, as if joy is something she’s been rationing.
I’m a big man. I’m not built for dance floors.
My shoulders take up too much space, my arms are too long, and I have the natural rhythm of someone raised on flamenco but currently trapped in a techno hellscape.
But none of that matters, because Billie is grinning at me like I’m the funniest thing she’s ever seen, and I would look foolish in every club on this continent if it meant she kept looking at me like that.
We spin. She does some kind of move that I think is supposed to be a robot but looks more like a person experiencing mild electrical shock, and I do it back, and she doubles over laughing, and for a few minutes we are just two people being ridiculous in a room full of strangers, and it is the best I have felt in longer than I can say.
Then the DJ does something.
The transition is subtle at first— a lowering of the tempo, a deepening of the bass, a melody threading through the chaos like a voice in the dark.
The strobe lights slow. The UV wash shifts to something warmer, deeper, a purple-blue glow that softens every edge in the room.
The song that emerges is still electronic but it’s different.
It’s unhurried. It rolls like water. It breathes.
Around us, the crowd adjusts. Bodies that were jumping are now swaying. Hands that were raised are now finding waists, shoulders, the backs of necks.
Billie stops bouncing. She’s standing in front of me, breathing hard from the jumping, her cheeks flushed, those painted glow streaks slightly smeared. The green neon top is still hanging off one shoulder. Her eyes are bright and wide and looking directly into mine.
The music pulls.
I don’t decide to step closer. My body just— does it. Like gravity. Like the most natural thing in the world. I step in, and she doesn’t step back, and then there’s barely any space between us at all.
My hand finds her waist. Not the way it would in a formal dance, not stiff or performative. It settles there like it’s been looking for that exact spot her whole life. My whole life. Through the thin fabric of her top, I can feel the warmth of her skin, the slight rise and fall of her breathing.
Her hand comes up to my shoulder. Her fingers curl into the fabric of my absurd glowing tank top.
We move.
It’s slow. It’s nothing— just a sway, really. Two people shifting their weight in the dark. But the air between us has changed. It’s heavier. It hums. Every point where her body touches mine feels like a conversation that words would only ruin.
She looks up at me. Those bambi eyes. Dios mío, those eyes. They hold the light from the LEDs and turn it into something softer, something that belongs only to her. The gold flecks catch and scatter. I could paint those eyes for a hundred years and never get them right.
Her lips part, just slightly, like she’s going to say something. She doesn’t.
I pull her closer. My other hand finds the small of her back, and she leans in, and her forehead is almost touching my jaw, and I can feel her breath on my collarbone, and the music is everywhere— inside the walls, inside my chest, inside whatever small, irrational space in my brain is currently trying to remind me that this is complicated.
It is complicated. I know it’s complicated.
She’s still figuring things out with Tyler back home.
I know this. I know she carries that relationship like a piece of luggage she hasn’t decided whether to unpack or throw away.
I know she feels guilty about enjoying things when she hasn’t yet resolved the thing she’s supposed to resolve.
I can see it in how she sometimes pulls back mid-laugh, how she checks herself, how she rations her own happiness like it’s a finite resource she’s afraid of running out.
And I know that I was with Alana. That I have a pattern— mujeres que me necesitan— women who need me, who pull me in with their chaos and their beauty and their hunger, and I mistake the intensity of being needed for the warmth of being loved.
I project the idea of the woman I want onto them, without getting to know them, truly, as they are.
I know I do this. I have done it so many times that it should be tattooed on my forearm as a warning: Rodrigo Esperanza does not choose well.
But this— this doesn’t feel like a pattern. This feels like something real. Like something I’ve been waiting for— hoping for— my entire life
Billie shifts, and her cheek brushes my chest, and I feel her exhale, and something in me just— gives way. Like a wall I didn’t know I was building, crumbling all at once. Quiet. Without ceremony. Just gone.
I have known this woman for a matter of weeks. We have been chased across countries. We have been in strange hotels and run from gunfire. I have watched her be kind when kindness made no strategic sense. I have watched her stand up, again and again, after the world told her to sit down.
She doesn’t see it. That's the thing that wrecks me. She doesn’t see what I see.
She thinks she is ordinary. She thinks she is an assistant. She thinks she is the person who fetches coffee and files paperwork, and that she has to try not to be that to be more, when she is already— more.
She’s wrong. She is so spectacularly wrong that I want to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she understands.
But you can’t shake someone into believing in themselves.
I know that. You can only show them, slowly, carefully, by the way you look at them when they’re not trying to be anything at all.
The music swells. Billie tips her head back to look at me, and her eyes are enormous and open, and there's a question in them that she doesn’t ask.
The purple light makes everything feel underwater.
Slow. Suspended. The rest of the club has dissolved into background noise.
There is only this— her hand on my shoulder, my hand on her back, the space between us that has become no space at all.
I want to tell her.
I know it’s too soon. I know the timing is wrong.
I know we are standing in a Budapest techno club wearing glow-in-the-dark costumes while an international arms dealer dances somewhere behind.
I know that back in her real life there is an apartment and a boyfriend and a version of herself she hasn’t quite left behind.
I know all of this.
But my heart— mi corazón terco, my stubborn heart— doesn’t care about timing.
It never has. It cares about what is true, and what is true is that I have never felt this way.
Not with Alana. Not with anyone. Not the women who needed me, not the women I thought I could save.
This is different. This is not me being needed.
This is me being found. By someone who doesn’t even realize she’s been searching.
Her fingers tighten on my shoulder. The music breathes. The lights pulse.
I lean down. My lips are close to her ear— close enough that she’ll hear me over the music, over the bass, over everything.
“Billie,” I say.
She looks up.
And I know— I know the way I know when a painting is done, when the last brushstroke is exactly right, when there’s nothing left to add or take away— I know that what I’m about to say will change everything.
I’m about to tell her that I can’t only be her friend. I’m about to tell her— that I love her.