“I absolutely would.”
We throw back the shots. For the first time since stepping back into this city, I let my shoulders relax.
* * *
The alley is packed, a solid wall of sweaty bodies pressed together. It’s gotta be a hundred degrees, and I’m glad I’m in these cutoffs. This is the vibe I need—dark, loose, and fucked up. It’s how we all get by here.
On some makeshift stage, a rapper’s yelling about being hungry and never saying sorry, and the crowd goes nuts like they’ve lived every single word.
Lou grabs my wrist and pulls me deeper into the crowd. “Come on,” he yells over the beat. “You didn’t come back to stand near the exit.”
Someone bumps into me and doesn’t say sorry. I laugh.
Lou is already dancing, dramatic and precise even when he pretends not to be. His shoulders roll. His hips snap on beat. A guy in a tank top stares a little too long.
Lou notices. “Absolutely not,” he mouths at me, grinning.
I shove him playfully. “Go.”
He spins, backs into the guy deliberately, then glances over his shoulder at me like,watch this.
A girl with glitter smeared under her eyes presses a black lollipop into my hand. “Five,” she yells over the music. “For the pretty one.”
I take it.Why not.
The rapper switches tracks to something faster now, angrier.
Lou slides back to me, breathless. “Okay, that one was straight but confused.”
“You’re a menace.”
“Correct.”
I start to unwrap the lollipop. Lou swats my hand away. “Absolutely not,” he says. “Anything but that stuff. You have a career.”
I raise a brow. “I’m not fragile.”
“No,” he says, grabbing two beers from a cooler someone’s carrying through the crowd. “But I love you too much to let you get dragged by that shit.”
I roll my eyes, pocket the lollipop and take the beer.
I watch someone climb halfway up a fire escape and hang there, screaming the lyrics back down into the alley like a confession.
The music shifts again and without thinking, I move. Just hips and sweat and rhythm.
Lou whoops. “That’s it!” he yells. “She’s back!”
I shove him again but I’m grinning. For a second, I forget about everything else. Forget about clean studios and white walls and mirrors that show every flaw. Here, no one is lookingfor perfect lines. They just want to feel something, and that’s all I want tonight.To feel something instead of the steel-hearted girl I’ve been pretending to be.
The beat switches again and Lou grabs my hands and spins me under his arm, exaggerated and dramatic like we’re onstage instead of standing in the street covered in spilled beer.
“Give me hips!” he yells.
“I am giving you hips!”
“Not your precious ballet hips! Give me the alleyway hips!”
I laugh and let go. I let my body move wrong, messy and off-count.
