‘I said I’m fine. Drop it, ya walloper.’
‘You’re a shite liar.’ He clinks his glass against my drink. ‘But I’ll pretend I believe you. Cheers.’
Nevin’s at the bar and fucking steamin’. He’s laughing too loud and too long. Everything about him is performance. The music shifts to something a little slower. Strings threaded through the bass. The sort of music that crawls into your bones.
Ava rises from her stool, finds a gap on the floor, and starts to dance.
All the oxygen vacates my lungs.
She’s not putting on a show – she’s unravelling. There’s a low-slung roll of her hips that sets my blood on fire. She reaches into the dark, her limbs tracing the beat as if she’s trying to drag it inside her. Her lids drop, her mouth goes soft, and for thirty seconds, she’s completely undone. She’s someone else. Someone free.
There she is. Not the ghost that piece of shite parades around.
Her.
Then she opens her eyes and looks directly at me.
The room contracts. The bass, the bodies, the noise, all of it falls away. It’s only her and me – and the pull between us that shouldn’t exist.
She keeps moving. A shoulder drops. Fingers brush her collarbone. Her hips grind loose and fluid, nothing remotely classical about it. Everything south of my navel turns to iron. The denim is biting in, and I’m choking the life out of my lager.
She knows I’m watching. But she doesn’t stop.
This is dangerous, Marzipan.
I’m straining against my jeans in a way that is not right. This isn’t what she needs, and it’s definitely not what I should be feeling. She’s a friend.
But the current arcing across that dance floor doesn’t care about logic or loyalty. It doesn’t ask permission. Right now, we exist in a bubble. Her eyes on mine. The distance between us charged with a hunger that’s about to level every boundary we’ve got left.
I can’t look away.
She arches her spine and lets her hand slide down her belly. I track every shift of her body with a precision I usually reserve for reading defensive lines. Fuck me. I want to feel her move like that. On me. Around me. Under me. And I’m keeping my eyes wide open. I’m not missing a single fucking second of this.
She’s taking up space, hip roll by hip roll. And God help me, I want to be each inch of the ground she claims.
I want her. Not hypothetically. I want her. All of her. Want her laugh in my ear and her weight against my chest and her mouth on mine and a hundred other things I’ve no right to crave. I’m thick and raging behind my fly, the denim biting into me, and I shift my stance, grateful for the shadows, grateful she can’t see what she’s doing to me from across the dance floor.
But she must know. She must know what she’s doing to me.
I’d burn the world down to keep her dancing, if it meant she could move through space this free. Not possession – protection of her freedom. She deserves to exist like this, untouched and unbroken.
Out of fucking nowhere, that cunt Nevin materialises next to her. His fingers close around her elbow. Her body stiffens, then she goes boneless and lets him lead her away.
My weight shifts, heels ready to leave the floor, but Connor’s hand catches my shoulder. He doesn’t budge, just puts his frame into the hold.
‘Steady,’ he mutters, his voice hard enough to cut through the noise. ‘Don’t be daft. Not here.’
I stay put, but the air in my throat feels like shredded glass.
Connor’s right. I can’t follow. She’s not mine. I’d only be making it worse for her.
Nevin drags her away from the dance floor, away from the music, away from whatever happened between us. His thumb presses into the soft flesh of her arm as he marches her through the crowd towards a corner booth.
The last thing I see is his hold on her, pulling her past the swaying bodies with all the care of a man moving cargo.
Ava doesn’t fight it. She’s learned not to.
And that fucking breaks me.
