Chapter 19: Chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen

MARA

The gym looked nothing like a gym.

Someone — Dex, probably, with his unlikely commitment to the spirit committee — had done something with string lights and dark fabric that made the ceiling disappear and replaced it with something that felt almost like sky. Round tables, deep blue tablecloths, the gold the committee had wanted showing up in small doses on the centerpieces where it actually worked. Music from somewhere that wasn't a speaker you could see. It was the kind of transformation that made you forgive a school all its ordinary days.

I stood just inside the entrance with Cole's hand in mine and looked at it.

"Okay," I said. "Dex did well."

"Don't tell him that. He'll never recover."

We found Jess and Dex at a table near the edge of the floor, which was exactly where I would have chosen. Jess was in a red dress I'd never seen and she looked startlingly good in it, and she and Dex were already mid-conversation about something that seemed to involve them both disagreeing cheerfully. She looked up when we approached and did a quick, comprehensive scan of me and Cole and our joined hands and said nothing, which was the highest form of approval she offered.

"You came," she said to me.

"You're here with Dex," I said. "You have things to explain."

"Later." She waved a hand. "Sit down. They have good punch."

Dex looked up at Cole with an expression of profound relief. "Finally. She's been winning every argument for forty minutes. I need backup."

"What's the argument," Cole said, sitting beside me.

"Whether the decorations are better or worse with the gold."

"Better," Cole said immediately.

Dex pointed at him. "See."

"It's better in small amounts," I said. "She's right about the tablecloths."

Cole looked at me. "You're supposed to be on my side."

"I'm on the correct side."

Jess raised her punch glass at me. I raised mine back.

The four of us sat and the formal moved around us, the floor filling up, the music shifting into something with an actual beat, the room getting warmer with the crowd. I'd been to exactly one school event in the past two years and I'd spent it near the exit. This was different. This had Jess across the table and Cole's arm resting behind my chair and the specific feeling of being somewhere with people who wanted me there.

I hadn't known how much I'd missed that until right now.

Cole leaned close. "You okay?"

"Yes." I meant it. "Really."

He pressed a brief kiss to my temple and I felt Jess clock it from across the table and heroically not react.

Dex pulled Jess to the dance floor sometime around eight and they went with the energy of two people who had been waiting for an excuse. Cole watched them go and then looked at me with a question in his expression.

"I don't really dance," I said.

"Neither do I."

"You're a football player."

"That's a different kind of coordination."

"You could have just said yes."

"I genuinely don't know how to dance." He said it without embarrassment. "I move around and hope for the best."

I looked at the floor. The song was something slow, the tempo unhurried, and the floor had that mix of people who knew what they were doing and people who were just standing close and swaying and calling it dancing.

"That one's easy," I said.

He stood and held out his hand. "Show me."

I took his hand and he led me to the floor, which was backwards from what he'd said but somehow still felt right. We found a space near the edge and he put his hand at my waist and I put mine at his shoulder and we found the slow back-and-forth of it without discussing it.

He wasn't bad. Better than he'd claimed.

"You've done this before," I said.

"My mom made me take a class in eighth grade. I've been pretending I don't know anything for four years."

I pulled back enough to look at him. "You lied to get me on the dance floor."

"I got you on the dance floor." He said it without remorse. "Does the method matter?"

"Yes, it matters."

"You're here though."

I was here. His hand was warm at my waist and the lights were low and the music was doing what music did in these situations, making everything feel slightly more and slightly slower, and I looked at him and thought about October, about a milk carton and a rattling heater and fifty dollars an hour, about the distance between that and this.

"What," he said, watching my face.

"Nothing. Just thinking."

"About."

"How different this year is from what I planned."

He pulled me slightly closer. "Good different?"

I rested my head against his shoulder. "Yeah. Good different."

We moved through the song and into the next and I lost track of how long we stayed out there. At some point Jess and Dex drifted back near us and we became a loose four on the floor, which felt easier than I'd expected, the kind of easy that comes from good company rather than the absence of difficulty.

Between songs Cole dipped his head close to my ear. "I want to show you something. Come outside for a minute."

I followed him through the side door into the cold, my heels loud on the concrete. The courtyard was empty, strung with lights that ended at the edge of the building, and beyond that the sky was doing something remarkable, clear and cold and entirely starred, the kind of sky the city usually hid behind its own light but occasionally offered on cold December nights like a reminder that it was capable of this.

I looked up.

"There," Cole said quietly, behind me.

I stood in my green dress in the cold and looked at the sky and felt his jacket settle around my shoulders from behind, warm and easy, and his arms came around me loosely and his chin rested against my temple.

"How did you know," I said.

"That you'd want to see the sky?"

"Yeah."

He was quiet for a moment. "I pay attention," he said. "You taught me that."

I looked up at the stars and felt full in a way I didn't have a word for. Not happy exactly. Bigger than happy. Like something had been given back that I hadn't known was missing.

His arms tightened slightly. "Cold?"

"No," I said.

I wasn't cold at all.