Chapter 7
THE JET LANDS IN A clearing far from the castle in the sky. Confused, Dez sees nothing at first but a stand of tall spruce trees. Then, through the snowy boughs, she makes out an A-frame chalet.
“What’s that?” she asks Rafe.
“Your stop.”
The cabin looks cozy, almost enchanting, smoke curling from a log chimney and frosted windows lit from within. A place where Dez can envision lying down, closing her eyes, and seeking a shred of peace.
“I thought you said student housing was in the towers we passed back there?” She points down the mountain.
“I did.”
Dez is bleary from the whiskey, from her smashed heart and sleepless night. It’s one in the morning, and she needs to rest before class tomorrow if she’s going to function.
“So, what are we doing up here? Whose house is that?”
“That’s Villains,” Rafe says. “It’s the worst bar on campus.” He tosses his head. “It’s the only bar on campus. We’re going to toast your arrival.”
“Thanks, but I’m about to crash—”
“I wasn’t asking.” Rafe says this in a tone she hasn’t heard before, with an authority that makes Dez look up, into the depths of his blue eyes.
For a moment she feels held there, by this man not asking but telling her what she’s going to do.
And she knows he’s not really in charge of her, that she can go to bed whenever she damn well pleases, and it has nothing to do with him.
But his voice, that double-edged charisma in his eyes, it sends a spark of heat through her core.
It pulls her like a magnet, and it makes her want to obey.
“I—”
“Everyone’s inside,” he says in a low voice, smiling like he’s reading her mind. Like he knows she wants to give in. “You’d better come and meet them.”
“Fuck off,” Dez says, but she’s already rising from her seat, making her way to the bathroom at the front of the jet.
If she’s going to meet the other film students tonight, she needs to at least fix her hair. She hasn’t looked in a mirror in a while, and she’s afraid of what she might see.
She locks the door, flips on the light in the tiny chamber, and lets her fears come true.
In the mirror, she looks … older, paler, haunted.
All of which tracks but none of which makes her eager to meet the crew she’s about to spend two years with.
She’s embarrassed to have spent this time with Rafe looking like such hell.
She pinches her cheeks, bites her lips to bring up some color.
She uses her pinky to fix her center part, then pulls back her long hair into a low ponytail.
She meets her eyes and hardly recognizes them.
Is she crazy to have come here? Or is she about to start the rest of her life?
Rafe raps on the door. “Let’s go. Everyone’s already too drunk to give a shit about your Dairy Barn uniform.”
Fuck. Dez hadn’t even gotten to her beastly clothes.
The apron’s gone but she’s still wearing her work shirt and pants.
She’s still got an eyeball in her mother’s prescription bottle.
She tries “styling” the hideous beige oxford shirt four different ways—buttoned, unbuttoned, tucked, knotted, before surrendering to the reality that nothing will make a difference, that she is a visual cataclysm, that if the people in that bar aren’t yet too drunk to laugh at her, Dez will have to beat them to a state of inebriation where at least she doesn’t care.
She checks her phone. Still no service.
“You look fine,” Rafe says, impatient, when she opens the door. But also? She notices him looking. At her neck, newly bare now that her hair’s pulled back. At her lips, flushed and swollen from the pressure of her teeth.
“One drink,” she warns.
Rafe smiles, like he knows something she doesn’t. Which he does, since she knows absolutely nothing about what she’s walking into.
Stepping off the jet, Dez plants her Doc Martens in a foot of fresh fallen snow.
Snow. She almost feels herself laugh. She’s never felt snow before.
Only seen it from a distance, dusting the peaks of Dante’s View in winter.
She bends and grabs a fistful, sucking in her breath at the sensation.
She holds it in her hand and marvels at its sparkling crystals.
She is so far away from home.
“First time?” Rafe asks.
Dez drops the snow and rights herself. She’s not going to tell Rafe how significant this moment is for her. How she didn’t know her skin could burn from cold. She dries her hand on her pants. “Let’s go.”
There’s a kind of quiet Dez has never heard before, snow-muffled and serene, as they trudge through deep drifts toward the bar.
A strangely bright full moon lights their path.
Nearing the chalet, Dez starts to hear sounds of a party carry toward them on the wind, bass pumping, peals of laughter, unhinged shrieks.
She feels preemptively intimidated, but also so fucking cold by now that she’s desperate to get inside.
She curses her shitty ankle socks as sheaths of ice form inside her boots, sending frigid shock waves to her toes.
She squints at Rafe, annoyed that he seems entirely comfortable in his thin suit jacket.
By the time he holds open the back door of the bar and gestures Dez inside, she needs that drink to stop her teeth from chattering.
Clutching her arms around her chest, she follows him through an empty service kitchen, down a narrow hallway of bathrooms and storage closets, and then, finally, into the dark chasm of the bar.
The heat and mayhem of a riotous party engulf her, sweeping her up with a kinetic whoosh.
“Sympathy for the Devil” blasts from speakers around the room.
The lights are dim, but the energy is so vividly hedonistic, everything seems to glow.
It feels like someone pressed fast-forward on the scene.
People crush against her, overwhelming all her senses.
A man’s fur coat brushes her bare arms. So soft, what is it made of?
Rabbit? She inhales a strange, intoxicating perfume—a sweetness she can almost taste, like something blooming deep in the woods.
She locks eyes with a laughing woman wearing shoulder pads and a Joan Jett shag cut who is so alarmingly beautiful, so exotically chic that for a moment, Dez can’t even move.
She doesn’t know what she’d been expecting—a beer-scented dive, tipsy artist types playing pool—but everything in this bar is several light-years faster, brighter, wilder than Dez knows how to process.
The other patrons—her fellow filmmakers—curl into each other in dark green leather booths like they’re inside lava lamps.
They flirt on low white cushions scattered before a woodburning fireplace.
Dez clings to Rafe’s arm, not wanting to get separated from the barest wisp of familiarity he represents.
“Something wrong?” he shouts over his shoulder.
“This is not what I expected,” she calls back.
“Yeah, things don’t really pop off until deeper into the term.” He eyes her, amused, superior. “Let’s get a drink.”
They head for the large ovular bar in the center of the room. It’s so packed, Dez can’t even see a bartender through the throngs of laughing, rowdy, insanely gorgeous people angling for drinks.
Her gaze travels away from the bar, then snags on the banquette table before it, where a woman in stilettos and a black sequined minidress mounts a chair and climbs atop the table.
With a glint in her eyes, she pulls the dress over her head, tossing it over her shoulder so that she’s standing in front of everyone wearing only a black lace thong.
The music changes—“No Ordinary Love” by Sade—and the woman begins a slow and mesmerizing dance on the table. Diamond nipple rings glint on her spectacular breasts as her body rolls. She eye-fucks everyone who happens into her gaze.
And suddenly, she’s eye-fucking Dez.
Dez stills as the stripper walks across the table toward her, bends down, and takes hold of her Dairy Barn lapels.
“Wanna dance?” the woman purrs as all around Dez people pound on the table and cheer.
Dez clears her throat. “I’m good.”
“I don’t think you are, though,” she says in Dez’s ear, sending shivers down her spine. “Don’t be shy. I can show you how.” Up close, the diamonds in her nipples remind Dez of that snow in her hand.
She gulps a breath, glancing at Rafe, who’s watching her with one eyebrow raised.
“No thanks,” Dez tells her, lifting the woman’s long, pointed, purple nails one at a time off her shirt. She steps away, a little dazed. She doesn’t have the money to pay this woman nor the desire to make a first impression on her fellow students by getting a lap dance in her Dairy Barn uniform.
Dez has partied plenty of times but has never really gone wild.
Not like this. Not like Mo could do so easily.
Life has always seemed too precarious for Dez to fully let loose.
It’s not that she doesn’t want to throw back like everyone else in this bar.
It’s that she’s never felt she could afford the luxury.
And she can’t afford it tonight. Not eight hours before her first day of classes at the best opportunity for her future that she has ever been given.
She finds Rafe in line at the bar. He’s laughing. At her expense, obviously.
“Acheron hired a stripper for back-to-school night?” she asks him. “Really sparing no expense.”
Rafe tips his head toward the woman on the table, now gripping the chandelier and casting spells with her hips on someone cooler than Dez.
“No one hired her,” Rafe says. “Esmeralda’s a filmmaker. She does what she wants.” He studies Dez. “Most of us here do.”
“And she wants to … strip?” Dez asks. “In front of her peers?”
“Does it bother you?”