Once she and Jos were outside the hotel, the music, which had already been quite loud from the lobby, nearly made her take a step back with the volume blasting out the open bus door. With a mix of amusement and dismay, Ryann realized that the lights were programmed, in a sense, to dance along with the music. Pulsing flashes of light followed the beat of the tune.

Jos, seeing her hesitate, grabbed her arm and nearly yanked her off her heels and toward the accordion bus door and up the little stairs.

“Jos!” Several people shouted when they saw her. Then, “Ryann!” when she appeared behind her. The crowd inside was surprisingly dense, and she wondered if there would be room for the two of them. She recognized Jai’s other sisters, of course, and Erin and Darcy, but no one else. Then, almost as if the crowd heard her thoughts, they parted for her and Jos, scooting to the edges of the bus. The mass of bodies had been an optical illusion. Maybe twenty people were in here, total, and despite this, the bus still had quite a lot of room once they moved out of her way.

Stuart jostled several people and pulled her into his arms just as the bus started moving again. She couldn’t help the little squeak that escaped her lips, startled, and he brayed with laughter, right into her ear. The music drowned out much of what he said to her, but she heard, “Hot!” and “Maddie!” and “Soon!” and she decided that meant that she looked hot and that they were picking up Maddie soon. She let him help direct her toward the middle of the swaying crowd, but she was still occasionally obliged to grab one of the looping hand straps dangling from the ceiling to stop herself from going down.

“This is insane!” she screamed over the music.

Stuart laughed, giving her a big thumbs-up. Whether that meant he heard her and agreed or was responding to her tone, she couldn’t tell. They finally made it to the back of the bus, and he bent down in front of an open cooler. When he stood up, he turned around with a bright-pink plastic champagne flute. She took it, grateful, draining it at once. He laughed again, though she could barely hear him, and handed her a second. This one she sipped and tried, unsuccessfully, to dance along to the music as the bus crept along the street. It was driving at a ridiculously slow pace, but it was still hard to stand in her heels with the swaying movement. She wished then that she’d been firm in insisting on her boots back at the hotel room, but it was too late to worry about that now. Hopefully, this bus was only the transportation to wherever they were headed, not the destination.