“You’re welcome.” And then she actually smiled. She was still so, so close. If she so much as took a deep breath, her breasts—her great breasts—would smoosh right into my chest.

She bit her lip.

I got that topsy turvy feeling again.

“I don’t care what you wear. But I cannot believe you think you’re boring, Professor Bell.”

The way her mouth curved, the glint in her eye when she said Professor Bell.

Take a deep breath, Lily, I thought.

Instead, Kiki’s voice from across the room made her turn her head, take a step away.

“Oh, wow,” Lily said. “I can’t believe Jonny’s actually singing, with Pablo here.” A pause. “He must really like him.” She turned back to me, a look on her face I couldn’t read. “I have to go support him; is that okay?”

“Oh my god, of course.” I pushed off from the bar, and it felt like waking up after a dream. “SWV is way more important than this conversation anyway.”

“Don’t say that.” She put a hand on my chest again, for just a moment. I wondered if she could feel my heart beating under her palm. She looked away. “Jonny does slay ‘Weak,’ though.”

He did. And it was sweet, watching Pablo’s smile as he watched him, back at their table. It felt safer in general, back at the table in front of the strobe lights of the dance floor. Something had shifted at the bar, and I knew it was my fault. The wanting I could never stop myself from feeling had supercharged when Lily stepped too close to me, when she wasn’t just a stranger with a strong voice and a swagger I admired. When she became someone with bittersweet memories, someone who listened to me ramble my nonsense and looked at me with all of her focus. Something had gone downhill when Morrissey came on and my heart, for some reason, decided to bleed all over the floor at her feet, a floor I would never want to look at too closely in the bright light of day.

I didn’t know what I was feeling, honestly. If I was ready to go home and forget all of this, or if I had stumbled into something miraculous.

Either way, it was better here, where it was dark and loud and all I had to focus on was my recall of lyrics from songs I used to love. Where the syllables that fell from my mouth needed to be short and sweet, spoken in a shout into the soft shell of Lily’s ear, and all she needed to answer with in return was a smile.

4

Lily

Well, I was fucked.