Page 56 of The Someday Daughter
“I want to dance,” Mick says, his hips shimmying with the words. Cleo takes another big gulp of her beer and nods, pointing through the crowd toward a stage where three women are performing under pink lights.
I watch her mouth move to the wordslet’s go, and when they part the crowd away from the bar Silas looks at me.
“Dance?” he says, and when I reply he can’t hear me. So he ducks very close, his cheek right next to mine and my lips at his ear. His hair brushes my temple.
“I said I don’t.”
Silas pulls back to find my eyes.
“You don’t dance?” he says, and I shake my head. He smiles, and when he leans his mouth close to my ear I feel him breathe every word. “Not that type of person?”
Things can just be what they are, I hear him say. His voice soft in the tree house, his bare feet in the night air next to mine.You could change, and feel differently.
I want to feel differently. I want to claw out of the cage of myself.
“Maybe we could just try,” Silas says, and when someone squeezes into the bar beside me his arm comes around my back, pulling me gently toward him and out of the way. I think of his arms around me at the hotel this afternoon, holding me so tightly that I couldn’t unravel.
“Maybe,” I say. Silas smiles: easy, crooked, honest. He takes my hand to lead me toward the stage and I try to remember what this is: functional, way-finding, a way to keep me from getting lost. Mick held my hand in the street and Cleo’s constantly grabbing me. I don’t think about how different this feels, or the tether that snaps when Silas lets go.
He turns to face me in the center of the teeming crowd and I think I get it, why people like this. That there are so many of us we get to feel anonymous. That I can see Cleo and Mick nearby but only in fits and flashes, not enough to make them out or form a judgment or discern whether they belong. They just do.
The song changes and in the breath of silence Silas takes a sip of his beer, licks the foam from his lip. He has hair stuck to his cheekbone and as the woman onstage starts singing again I reach for it, someone outside myself just like everyone else in this room.I brush it away, and Silas looks at me in the red-and-orange dark. My hand falls and he catches it, his thumb moving over the fingernail marks on the soft underside of my arm. They’re red and angry but they’re small and I know he can’t see them in here. I know he finds them by memory.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell him.
“I know,” he says. And then he moves closer to me—by necessity maybe, the crowd pressing in as the song gets louder. His hand is still on my arm and he lifts it around him, dropping my wrist across his shoulder so I’m holding him in the pulsing dark. Our faces are very, very close. Silas looks at the floor and I look over the arch of his neck and when he starts moving to the music my body goes with his.
Mick is five feet away, kissing a tall man in a cowboy hat with big hands wrapped around Mick’s waist. They part and Mick’s head tilts back, a laugh moving through him. Cleo dances next to them with both arms in the air, screaming along with the song.
I close my eyes, feel Silas put a tentative hand on the middle of my back. Think,What am I doing?
And then, for once, I let myself get away with not having a good answer.
Ethan calls when we’re walking back to the hotel, at nearly one o’clock in the morning. Nearly two where he is. I’m so stunned to see his name glowing up at me in the middle of Broadway I nearly don’t answer in time.
“Hello?” I say, and Silas glances back from where he’s walking with Mick. Cleo has her arm hooked through mine, and when she sees the way Silas is looking at me she says loudly, “Who’s that?”
Her head’s right next to the phone pressed into my ear. Ethan says, “Audrey?”
“Yeah.” I pull my arm out of Cleo’s and take a few steps away from her. We just left the bar and Cleo’s pink-cheeked and bubbly; when I let go of her she wedges herself between Mick and Silas instead. Mick spent most of the night making out with His Tall Cowboy™ and Cleo’s had more to drink than I could quite keep track of. Silas puts a steadying arm around her waist, and when he looks at me again I look away first.
“Who was that?” Ethan says. Broadway is still loud and I have to press a hand over my other ear to hear him.
“Cleo,” I say. “She’s the photography intern.”
There’s a pause, and I swear I can hear Ethan thinking. I know him so well it feels skeletal, like we share the same bones. “You sound different,” he says finally.
A man trips backward through the open door of the bar ahead of me, and I sidestep to avoid him. “Different how?”
“Breezy,” he says, and I feel my face screw into itself. “Maybe inebriated.”
“I had a beer and a half.”
Another pause. I draw a loud breath just to hear something on the line between us.
“Where?”
“With the interns.”
