And then, unable to stop herself, she leaned in too close, again—entirely too close, this time—to say it directly into his ear.
“You know everyone in this room wants to fuck you now, right?”
When he didn’t respond, when he didn’t move a muscle, she pulled back. He turned to stare straight at her, eyes dark in the dim light of the bar.
“Do you?”
Of course I do, she thought. No one asked that question, in that way, if they didn’t already know the answer.
“It’s not fair,” she murmured instead. “It hasn’t been fair since the beginning.”
“What isn’t?”
“Um. Mae?”
With a blink, Mae turned at Alexei’s voice. He stood behind Ben’s chair across from them, coat zipped, pale cheeks pink. He gave them a small wave.
“I was just, uh. Saying goodbye.”
“Of course,” Mae said smoothly, picking up her glass to take a healthy gulp before realizing it was already empty. Alexei could only handle about an hour of Moonie’s karaoke, or any activity, really, that involved potential sensory overload. She always loved him a little bit more, each time he decided to leave an event. She loved a person with boundaries. Perhaps there were limitless ways Mae should strive to be more like Alexei. “It was great to see you.”
“See you at home.” Ben lifted Alexei’s hand for a kiss of Alexei’s knuckles before Alexei waved to the rest of the table on his way out.
“I’m going to get another drink,” Mae announced. “Anyone need anything?”
The five minutes alone, away from the heat of Dell’s body, helped. A little, anyway. When she returned to the table, she vowed to keep her mouth away from Dell’s ear, her eyes on her friends. Exhaustion started to set in: a long drive followed by sleeping in a house that wasn’t your own, the physical labor of moving things around the storage unit, the emotional whiplash of this whole night.
But then…another stranger sang another song Mae used to love.
And like always, a night at Moonie’s began to take on an insular, outside-of-time-and-space quality, where nothing else quite mattered other than singing until your throat was raw. Dell never joined the dance floor, during the songs when the rest of the table was inspired to dance, but even he visibly, slowly loosened as the night progressed, opening his mouth to sing along on almost every song. Mae tried to not be impressed with it, how many songs he apparently knew by heart, but it was hopeless. And when she thought about him sitting on his porch with his guitar, she wasn’t truly surprised. The depth of ways Dell could make her attracted to him knew no bounds.
And she tried to be good, keep the leaning of her body toward his to a minimum, but he started changing the rules. Started being the one to lean into her, listing his random observations of the night into her ear, the bristle of his beard brushing her neck. He laughed more than she’d perhaps ever seen him laugh. When he leaned in again just after midnight to say, his naturally scratchy voice scratchier than she’d ever heard it, “I think I have to turn in soon, Mae,” she just about fainted with relief.
“Yeah,” she said, even though the rest of the table was currently fully engaged on the dance floor with no signs of slowing down. “We can go.”
They had both stood, started to pull on their jackets, when Kiki said Dell’s name again.
Mae looked up at him in surprise.
“Oh shit,” he said, eyes just as surprised, before he let out a startled laugh. “I forgot I put another song in.”
The portion of the crowd that was lucid enough to remember Dell’s first performance was already chanting his name. Cheeks turning crimson, he draped his coat back across his chair.
Mae sank back into her own, defeated. She had barely survived his first song, and her defenses by now were practically nonexistent. This…was not good.
But yet, when Dell took the mic with a half-nervous smile and the words “Teenage Dirtbag” displayed on the screen behind him, a laugh managed to burst out of Mae’s lungs.
“I mean,” Vik rushed back to her side to say, breathless, “therange.”
“I know,” Mae agreed, still laughing. “I know.”
The vibe could not have been any different from “Baby Can I Hold You,” yet Dell attacked “Teenage Dirtbag” with the same intensity and absolute capability that he had shown hours earlier. Except…goofier, as fitting the song and the hour of night, and Mae could barely process this version of the song. The high, nasally vocals of the original were replaced with the deep raggedness of Dell’s, and particularly when he certifiably yelled out the chorus, it was as if pop-punk had been smashed together with metal. It was utterly perplexing and hypnotizing and Moonie’s could not get enough of it.
He looked at her this time.
He looked at her a lot.
A sensation creeped over her skin, one she typically only found at live shows: when she could feel every single breathing atom of a song, each chord progression a miracle.
