Chapter 7 #4
The way his Adam’s apple moves when he swallows makes my head spin.
I freeze on the dance floor in my white wings digging into my spine because Mila is dancing against me.
Mara is screaming along to the chorus on my other side, and the room goes underwater the way the room went underwater at the last party here, and the only thing in the world that isn’t underwater is the seven feet of air between his eyes and mine.
The music keeps going.
Mila keeps dancing. Gianna keeps dancing. Mara is now in a circle with three girls I don’t know.
Six seconds.
Maybe seven.
He looks away first.
He says something to the person on his left — Percy, I think, but I can’t quite tell because the room is still underwater. He sets his cup down on the kitchen counter and walks toward the back door. He goes through it, and the door closes behind him.
I stand on the dance floor with my heart in my throat.
He’s running.
Again.
Stanley and Benson both notice. They’re looking at the back door. Then they look over at me. Then they’re looking at each other. Stanley says something. Benson nods. Then they’re back watching me, and my heart drops.
Oh, shit. They know.
I look away first.
Mila grabs my arm. “Melly.”
“I need air,” I shout at her.
Her face does the small fast read it does when she’s known me for nine years and doesn’t need an explanation. She nods. “Go.”
I don’t go out the back. I head for the front door. The front is jammed with people. A drunk guy in a banana costume is at the door telling a group of trick-or-treaters that we’re all out of candy.
“Sorry, kids. Happy Halloween.”
Three heads turn to look at me as I approach. The cold air from the open door slaps me in the face fast.
Nope.
Too cold for thin nylons.
I turn around.
I need a bathroom.
The downstairs bathroom has a line of six girls leaning against the wall waiting to use it. I don’t have the patience for this.
Gianna catches me by the elbow. “There’s one upstairs that’s off-limits to the rest of the party.”
I grin at her. “Thank you.”
I take the stairs quickly before any of the six girls can suspect there’s another bathroom they don’t know about.
The upstairs is dark and quiet. The bedroom doors are shut along the hallway, all of them, like a hotel.
There is one open door on the left. I sigh in relief.
The bathroom. I walk in and shut the door behind me.
The noise of the party drops by a register — the bass still there in the floor under my feet, the muffled lyrics of whatever just started downstairs, but everything else falling away.
I look at myself in the mirror. My halo is leaning hard to the left. My cheeks are flushed from the dancing and the alcohol. But the six seconds of eye contact and watching him run outside has me crawling out of my skin.
I unzip my bodysuit and figure out, with some difficulty, how to pee in this impossible costume. Wings off, bodysuit all the way down, nylons down, and somehow tangled. For the five seconds, I think about Blue.
He is insufferable. That’s what he is.
I thought two years would mean something would change.
This just feels like high school all over again.
I’m not trying to go back there.
I pull the costume back on.
I try to zip it.
It catches.
It catches half an inch above where my zipper started, and it won’t go up or down, and I mutter a swear word at it and try again, and it sticks again. I hold it shut with my fingers and tell myself I will find Mila downstairs and have her do it.
I step out of the bathroom into the dim hallway. I turn to walk toward the stairs.
And Blue is at the end of the hall. My stomach plummets.
He has stopped in his tracks.
He’s standing maybe ten feet from me at the top of the staircase with one hand on the banister, like he was about to come up and saw me coming out of the bathroom and froze with one foot still on the top step.
He’s staring at me.
His eyes are dark. They are very dark — the kind of dark his eyes get when he has been drinking but not enough to be drunk, when his guard has come down half a notch but not all the way.
I hate that I know what they look like when he’s clearheaded.
I hate that I know what they look like when he is drunk.
I hate that I know the difference. I hate that I know his eyes at all.
His eyes tell a story of whatever he is going through with just one look.
Right now, they are a storm.
I’ll never forget when he told me his father — the one he doesn’t know, the one who left when Blue was two — named him Blue because he was born with eyes the color of his mother’s, and his mother wanted to name him Sky, but his father had said no, that’s a girl’s name, his name is Blue.
The asshole didn’t even stick around to see how good a son he has.
I couldn’t imagine being named by a man whose face you don’t remember.
I stare back at him, mortified, because I’m holding my costume together with my hand.
He looks down at my hands.
I shiver.
His eyes come back up to mine.
I’m not going to deal with this right now, so I take a step.
His voice stops me. “Are you okay?”
I look up at him.
The truth is no, I am not okay. The truth is I have just broken up with a boyfriend I should have broken up with two years ago, and the only reason I finally did it was because I made four seconds of eye contact with you on a sidewalk on Tuesday. Aren’t I so pathetic?
I swallow that down and nod.
“Yeah,” I say, with a small smile that I have practiced for exactly this kind of moment. “I just need help with this zipper.”
He looks down at it.
My heart is in my throat.
I peep out, “Do you mind? I’d rather not go downstairs with everyone seeing, and Mila took my phone.”
He looks at me.
I add, “It’s not like you haven’t seen me naked before.”
As soon as it is out of my mouth, I think I’m about to drop dead. Heat rushes to my face. I did not just say that.
I blink. “Sorry. You know what? I’ll find Mila —”
“Melly.”
He reaches out to me. His hand is in the air between us, not touching me, just — there. “I don’t mind.”
I freeze, and then I shuffle back to him. Two steps. Three. My nylons are quiet against the carpet. My heart is in my throat.
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
I turn my back to him.
I hold my hair off the back of my neck.
I don’t breathe.
His hands come up.
The first touch is the worst — the moment his knuckles brush the bare skin between my shoulder blades as he gathers the two sides of the zipper together.
Just the faint pressure of two fingers and a thumb.
I feel it everywhere. I feel it in my stomach, in the soft place at the small of my back where his hands used to rest when he was kissing me, and in my throat.
He zips me up. The zipper has to be coaxed past the place where it caught, and he does it carefully. I feel it catching, so I turn my head and inhale.
“Is it stuck?”
He twists his body to the side, pulling at the costume. It’s already snug around the bust, so I inhale again to give the fabric more room. He yanks it down, and then he pulls it back up. It catches again, and this time I feel the fabric slack.
I turn around and his mouth is in the shape of an O as he holds the zipper between his fingers in the air. My eyes widen as I stare at the zipper that is no longer attached to my costume. That did not just happen.
We’re both stunned and have no idea what to do.
My mouth falls open, and a bewildered laugh leaves my throat.