Chapter 15 Chapter 15

Chapter 15 Chapter 15


The Switch Dance was Silver Ridge's worst-kept tradition.

Every year at the Valentine's Masquerade, at ten-thirty precisely, the DJ cut the current song and played a specific opening note, deep, slow, deliberate and the lights dropped to near-dark. For one song, masks on, you danced with whoever the movement of the crowd placed in your arms. No choosing, no arrangements. The dark took care of it.

Officially it was a school tradition dating back two decades.

Unofficially it was forty-five seconds of consequence-free proximity that everyone spent the first half of the evening quietly anticipating.

I had danced with Leo at last year's Switch Dance. He had stepped on my foot twice and apologized with such genuine horror both times that I had laughed until my mask slipped. The year before, a junior whose name I had never learned had held me at the precise, respectful distance of someone who was terrified of making contact, which had been its own kind of comedy.

This year I was standing near the center of the floor when the note dropped.

The lights fell and the crowd moved.

It was like being caught in a current, the room's momentum carrying people in and out of each other's spaces, laughter and the rustle of fabric and the specific warm disorientation of a space that had lost its architecture. Someone caught my left hand and spun me, I went with it, the silk of the dress moving with me, turning outward and then I was caught.

Two hands at my waist, not gentle nor polite. The hands had decided where I was going and moved me there without asking, which was either rude or certain and felt, in the dark, like the second thing.

The smell reached me before anything else.

Cedarwood and cold air and that other thing underneath, the thing with no name that registered in the back of my throat and made me acutely, immediately aware of exactly whose hands were at my waist before I had turned far enough to confirm it.

I turned.

Dark jacket. Mask pushed up. Those eyes, even in the near-dark, doing the thing they always did , direct and unhurried and already three steps ahead of wherever I was.

Jax.

My hands were on his chest before I had decided to put them there. The lapel of his jacket under my palms, the warmth of him coming through the fabric, the specific solid reality of standing this close to someone whose effect on my body I had been cataloguing and denying for three weeks.

He didn't say anything.

He moved us into the dance with slow and deliberate effects, the music finding its full shape around us and I let him lead because there was no version of this moment in which I was in charge of anything.

His right hand pressed at the small of my back. Not the automatic, possessive placement that Liam used. Something else, something that sat at the boundary between guidance and intention and felt like a question being asked through the palm of a hand.

I could feel my own pulse in my throat.

The gold heart necklace was warm between us.

"Nice night," he said. Low. For me only to hear.

"Don't ruin it," I said.

I felt something move through his chest under my hands. The almost-laugh. The one that never fully became sound.

We moved. The music had a slow, rolling gravity to it, it pressed people into the space between each other and made the dark feel like permission. Around us, other pairs existed in their own world. Masks and perfume and the amber glow from the edges of the room that reached toward us and didn't quite make it.

Just dark. Just him. Just the cedarwood and the press of his hand and the silk of my dress catching the last edge of light when we turned.

"The dress," he said, after a moment.

"What about it."

"I told you to wear something that was actually you."

"I know," I said.

"This is you."

The two words sat differently than a compliment. Not you look beautiful, it was not a performance or display. This is you. Like he was identifying something he had been waiting to see confirmed.

My fingers pressed slightly against his chest without my permission.

"You're still dating my best friend," I said. My voice came out steadier than I deserved.

"I know," he said.

"Then stop—"

"Talking?" He turned us slightly. His face was close. The dark made proximity absolute , there was no buffer of a room's social architecture out here, no distance to retreat to. "Or being honest?"

"Both," I said.

"Can't do both." His hand shifted at my back, barely, just a fraction and the movement sent something electric up my spine that I felt in my hands and my jaw and the back of my knees. "Pick one."

I said nothing.

The music built toward something, that specific gathering of sound that meant the end of the song was two minutes away. The clock above the DJ booth was visible from where we stood, its face pale in the dark.

Eleven fifty-eight.

Chloe was somewhere in this room. Glowing in her champagne dress, counting toward midnight, building toward the moment she had planned with the careful hopeful precision of what she believed she had earned it.

"Hey." Jax's voice dropped lower. Right at my ear. The closeness was a problem I was no longer pretending wasn't a problem. "Look at me."

I looked at him.

His eyes in the dark were steady and direct and had the specific quality of someone who was about to say something they had been deciding to say for a long time.

"Liam is in the east garden," he said. "Right now. Back door, past the catering table. He's been there for twelve minutes."

I went very still.

"He's not alone," Jax said.

The music moved around us. The clock read eleven fifty-nine.

I felt the drop in my stomach, the familiar cold press of a truth I already knew arriving in a form I couldn't file away or pocket or put under things I am not examining. Not tonight. Not here. Not with his hands at my waist and the clock counting and Chloe somewhere behind me believing in midnight.

"Why are you telling me now?" I said.

"Because you need to make a choice." His voice was very quiet. Very level. His eyes didn't move from mine. "You can walk out there. Through the east doors. You'll see exactly what I'm telling you. And you'll have the evidence you've been carrying for three weeks finally confirmed in front of witnesses." His thumb moved, just once, against the silk at my back. "Or you can stay."

The word sat between us.

Stay.

The clock above the DJ booth ticked to midnight.

The music reached its full height.

I was looking at his face, the controlled, certain, reading face that had been taking me apart since the first day in the dining hall and something in my chest was doing something I had no organized response to.

"Jax—"

"Chloe's plan," he said softly. "Midnight. First kiss." His eyes dropped, just for one second, to my mouth. Then back. "She told you. You helped her plan it." A pause. "The question is whether you're going to let it happen."

The lights they came up slowly the DJ's signal that the Switch Dance was ending, the room reassembling itself, masks being adjusted, laughter filling back in from the edges.

The warmth of him, close and real and smelling like cedarwood and something I was done pretending I didn't notice.

And then, cutting through the music and the returning light and the forty-five seconds of dark that had rearranged something permanently in my chest.

"Sienna?"

Chloe's voice. Warm, slightly confused, scanning.

Looking for me.

Looking for him.

I pulled back from Jax's hands. One step. The cold air of the gap between us arrived immediately, sharp and necessary and completely inadequate.

His eyes held mine.

The question still sitting between us, unanswered.

Stay. Or go.

"Sienna!" Chloe was closer now. Her champagne dress moving through the crowd, her face open and bright and still belie
ving in the midnight she had planned.

I looked at Jax.

His expression gave me nothing and everything at the same time.

I opened my mouth.