Then, quietly—the same voice he used at the whiskey display, low and deliberate, every word placed like it was considered:
"Your name."
Not a question. A request shaped like a statement, which I have gathered is simply how he speaks.
Like information is something he receives rather than retrieves.
I stare at him.
Don't give him that. Names are—names are a thread. You pull on a name, and suddenly there's a whole person attached to it, and you cannot afford a whole person right now. You cannot afford the version of yourself that wants what his scent keeps promising.
Also you have eleven minutes.
I lean in instead.
One more. Just one more, because I'm slightly drunk and deeply stupid and he made me feel, for one forty-five-minute window in the middle of what has otherwise been an extraordinarily difficult year, like I was the most interesting person in the room rather than the most indebted. Because his hands cupped my face like I was something careful-worthy and his scent made my entire nervous system go quiet for the first time in recent memory.
Because I'm a dreamer, and dreamers always take the last kiss.
My lips brush his, soft and brief and nothing like the earlier collision—that was reckless, this is deliberate. A period. A bookmark. Something that says I was here, this happened, and deep down, I'm not sorry.
"Thank you," I whisper against his mouth, "for making me feel alive tonight."
I turn.
And I run.
Or—I attempt to run, which immediately becomes a physical altercation between my legs and approximately fifteen pounds of emerald silk that has absolutely no interest in cooperating with emergency egress.
Elowen.
Elören and her 'cascading underskirt' and her 'you'll look like you've stepped out of a Bridgeton ballroom, Mila, stop making that face.' I look incredible, I am fully aware I look incredible, and this dress is also actively trying to kill me, and both of those things are true simultaneously.
I hike the skirts up with both fists and aim for the back corridor.
The main hall is filling with the shuffling anticipation of the announcement gathering, the Lucky Clover Society doing whatever ceremonial production they do when they're about to change someone's life with a check and a pack introduction—I know, because Elowen made me read the event materials three times, because Elowen is the organized one in this friendship and I am the one who shows up and improvises and prays.
The back passage is stone. Cold, old stone with centuries of winter pressed into the walls and the kind of silence that makes your footsteps sound like announcements. The decorative lighting doesn't follow me here—just bare utility bulbs near the floor, casting everything in a low amber that turns my emerald skirts dark and makes my shimmer mark—gold and green sparkles, Elowen's addition, applied with a brush and an opinion—glow faintly like something out of the very fairytale I keep telling myself I don't believe in.
Stop glowing. This is not the moment for atmospheric lighting effects.
The back stairs curve downward in old swept stone. I'm negotiating the second step, both hands full of silk, moving at a speed that is aggressive for formal wear and entirely necessary for survival, when I hear it.
A sound. Small and bright and metallic—the particular ring of gold on the ancient floor.
I stop.
Look down.
The coin is sitting on the fourth step, gleaming up at me with the smug self-possession of an object that knows its own significance. Four-leaf clover pressed into the face, Irish lettering around the rim, the warm gold of it catching the low light. Elowen's coin. The one she pressed into my palm yesterday morning in Bloom & Brier with both her hands wrapped around mine, and that expression she gets—serious and soft at the sametime, the one that means she's not joking, the one that means she really means this:
"It's been in my family for years. Real luck, Mila. The uncomfortable, life-rearranging kind. Take it."
Elowen.
Who believes in things before they happen, who designs floral installations for events she could never afford to attend, who has been my best friend for six years and understands, precisely, how many times I've almost given up on the dream and how many times she's talked me back from the ledge of 'maybe I should just take the steady job and stop hoping.'
Her lucky coin.
