“You made it,” he says with a smile I can’t see.
“I did.” I start edging my way around the tables, trying not to snag the delicate fabric of my dress on their sharp corners. It’s harder than it looks when you’ve drunk half a flask of tequila.
Ever so faintly, I hear the chords of a slow song starting up in the cafeteria. I like that we can hear the music back here—in our place; that it’s like we’re at the dance together, if only for a little while. It feels magical.
Hosea is walking toward me. “You look . . . ,” he starts in a low voice, but he doesn’t finish. He shakes his head as if he can’t find the words and I give him a shy smile because he’s looking at me.
So intently that my skin warms, as if I can feel his gaze lighting on different parts of me, sliding from the curve of my neck to the slight dip in my waist. Now I know what Sara-Kate felt like earlier and I was silly for being jealous. This is more than worth the wait.
He pulls me to him and his fingers find the open back of my dress, send shivers through me as he rubs the small of my back in slow, gentle circles.
We kiss. Slowly. With my arms wrapped around his neck and his hands sitting low on my hips. I tangle my fingers in his hair as our mouths find each other in the dark. We step to the faint strains of the music, swaying so slowly, our bodies are hardly moving at all.
I look at his chest as we pull away, start to rest my head there as we dance. I jerk back at the last minute. Hosea stops for a second, looks at me, confused.
“My makeup,” I say, touching my carefully done face. “It’ll get on your shirt.”
“Oh.” He lets out a breath and then nods. “Right.”
I want him to tell me he doesn’t care, to put my head there anyway because that’s how you dance when you’re with someone you really like. Someone special. I want him to tell me he doesn’t care if he gets caught, that maybe it’s time Ellie figured out what’s going on between us.
But then his hands move away from me, move to his collar, where he begins unbuttoning his shirt. He shrugs out of it, lays it on the table to his right. His eyes never look away from me, not even as his fingers move down to his belt. I slip a dress strap over my shoulder. Then the other. The satin drops to the floor and pools around my feet.
“Theo,” he says, reaching out to touch a lock of hair by my ear. His eyes crinkle with warmth.
And as we stand there, nearly naked and staring at each other, I want to say so many things to him.
Please don’t stop liking me, no matter what happens.
Please break up with Ellie.
Please always look at me this way.
“You’re so perfect.” He kisses my neck and I breathe.
Hosea breaks away to peel off his undershirt, to wipe down the black top of an empty table behind me. Then he turns and lifts me by the hips and sets me on the edge, nearly in one motion. His hands trail down my neck, my breasts, the flat plane of my stomach. His lips follow.
The table digs hard lines into the backs of my thighs, but it’s the best kind of pain. He straightens up again to kiss my lips and I wrap my arms around his neck. Pull him into me, until he’s nearly crushing me. Wrap my legs around his waist. I need him to be as close as possible. I need to never forget this night. I need—
“Theo,” he says, even softer this time. His fingers hook around the waistband of my underwear, tug them over my hips.
I melt at the sound of my name because it means something when he says it.
“Theo, I—”
But I never get to hear what he was going to say.
Hosea’s words are cut short by the commotion at the front of the room. Interrupted by the door bursting open and agitated voices that should be familiar to me but are unrecognizable in the moment of confusion. Unrecognizable until the light is flipped on and I match the voices to their faces.
Klein.
And Ellie, standing next to him with her mouth hanging open because Hosea and I are still intertwined. I’m practically naked, and Hosea is wearing only boxers. We freeze, melded together like a clandestine version of that sculpture The Kiss.
The scene doesn’t last long. Our reaction may be delayed, but once it kicks in we jump apart like we don’t know each other. Klein’s face is painted with a self-satisfied smirk and Ellie’s mouth is still wide open. Catching flies, Phil’s mother would say.
“Told you,” Klein says.
My face burns with the heat of a thousand fires as I pull up my underwear, then cross my arms over my bare chest. I slide down from the table and desperately search the area for my dress. Thinking maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if I died right here on this floor.
Hosea shrugs back into his button-down, not bothering with the dusty undershirt. He steps into his pants, leaving the belt undone. I watch him from the floor. He’s looking at the front of the room.
“How the fuck did you—” he begins, but Klein cuts him off.
“I showed you this place myself, dude,” he says, his voice so fucking smug, I want to kill him almost as much as I want to disappear from this earth right now. “You think I didn’t know where to look for you? After you were both being so shady and disappeared at the same time?” Klein pauses. “You think Lark didn’t figure it out that day she saw you in the bathroom, Legs? She said you were flaunting that clove like you wanted people to think you were his fucking girlfriend.”
My stomach turns and when I look at Hosea his face is nearly as pale as his shirt. I’m afraid to stand up and face Ellie. Terrified. She’s been quiet just long enough to formulate what to say to make me want to crawl into a hole, to figure out how she’s going to get back at me. Maybe even how she’s going to hit me.
The corner of my dress sticks out from the lab table across the aisle. I know they’ll see me, but I have to get to it, so I keep one hand over my chest as I make a mad dash. Something rips on my dress as I yank it toward me, but I don’t care. I hide behind another table as I get dressed in record time. I’m out of their sight, yet I’ve never felt more conspicuous. Sick and exposed, like someone threw me onstage in front of a full house before I’d learned the choreography.
But I can’t let Hosea go through this alone, so I run a dusty hand through my hair and stand up as Klein begins talking. Again.
“Look, I’m sorry you had to see this, but I felt like it was my responsibility to show you,” Klein says to Ellie as he rubs her back in an exaggerated fashion. “We’re friends and you should know what’s going on right under your—”
“Get the fuck away from me,” Ellie says in one of the scariest voices I’ve ever heard. Low. No, guttural. Crawling up from the back of her throat like every single word is a challenge.
I look down at the floor, at the bottom of my dress, where the fabric ripped. Away from the taunting eyes of Klein, from the worry sketched across Hosea’s face. When I look up again it’s only because I hear Ellie crying.
Tears stream down both sides of her face as she looks at us, back and forth like if she stares hard enough this will all undo itself before her eyes. And it’s a weird thought, but she looks pretty as she cries. Vulnerable and sort of . . . soft.
She turns her swollen eyes on Hosea and keeps them there. “Why would you do this? Do you not care about me at all?”
“Ellie—” Hosea starts, his face still white under the buzzing fluorescents.