“She likes you. You mean something to her. Last night was so important, everyone’s gathering, Elvira’s pulled out her boards, all so they can celebrate one of their own, and where the fuck are you?”

“I had something come—”

“Don’t give me any of your shit.” He shook his head sharply. “I don’t buy it.”

I shut my mouth again.

“Mac has a heart of gold.” “Mac” being what the guys called Lottie, seeing as her last name was McAlister, at least for the next few weeks. “What the woman doesn’t have is the patience of a saint. So you blew it last night, Hattie. Fuckin’ huge.”

With this statement, suddenly, breathing felt alien to me.

Axl walked my way.

He got close.

He stared down his nose at me.

And breathing was a memory.

“And you dance for me,” he said quietly, but not a sweet quiet, an angry one, “begging me to kiss you like I mean it. I wait over an hour for you in the parking lot after, and you run away. You dance for a room full of people, but it’s all about me, then you run away from me.”

God.

I’d done that.

After the opening night of the Revue, I’d delayed as long as I could before I’d gone out.

Partly because the girls and guys were all meeting at an after-hours bar to celebrate, and I intended to do a flyby, but the longer I delayed getting there, the less time I’d have to spend there before I could say I was tired and leave.

Mostly, though, it was because I worried, after I looked at Axl when the dance was done, that he’d be waiting for me.

And he was.

Right outside the door.

And I’d run from him.

I hadn’t even allowed myself to think about it since.

But now that he brought it up…

Humiliating.

“The girls tell me you’re shy,” he said. “They tell me I gotta put in the effort. I do, and time and again, you make a goddamn fool of me.”

Oh no!

I didn’t want him to feel like a fool.

“Ax—”

“So yeah, Hattie, last night, hurting Lottie, you fuckin’,” he got nearly nose to nose with me, so close, I could see thin threads of midnight striking through the steel of his eyes, “blew it.”

And with that, he moved away, walked around me to the door, and he slammed it behind him.

I didn’t even turn to look at it.

I stared at “After.”

He was right.

That was me.

After my failed audition for the Chicago Academy for the Arts.

Mom had been there, and of course Dad, both of them together, even though she’d moved out and got her own apartment at least a year before.

I’d been fourteen.