by Alyssa Cole
“I tried a thimbleful of the Romatowski moonshine,” I finally managed. “It’s...potent.”
“I can imagine,” he said. His hand was still on my back. Every muscle in my body froze at the realization, and with the hope that if I didn’t move, he would stay there. “I’ll have a beer, Larry.” He looked at me, his eyes crinkled at the corners from his smile. “It’s brewed right here on campus. This last batch tastes way better than the first few. Or the time a rat fell into one of the vats and no one noticed.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, scrubbing at my tongue. “I’m hoping moonshine tastes stronger than it is.”
“No. It’s really strong,” Larry said with pride.
“Aren’t you supposed to be preventing people from getting plastered?” I asked.
He shrugged. “People who aren’t my friends.”
“Let’s go take a walk around the room,” Edwin said. His fingertips pressed into my lower back for a millisecond, and all the fire that had burned in my belly from the moonshine reignited.
It’s going to be a long night.
“There’s Danielle!” I hurried away from him and the tactile pleasure he provided, taking a sip of my ginger ale before it could slosh over the edge. “You look amazing,” I said as I got close enough to her that I wouldn’t have to shout over the music. She wore a black scoop-neck dress with a flared skirt, cinched at the waist with a white belt. Her panda hat was still there and even though I was accepting of her quirk, I couldn’t help but stare at it a bit longer than I should have.
“Thanks,” she said. She gave Edwin a little wave with the hand that wasn’t holding a beer, and smoothly segued in to meet his high five.
Edwin stood next to me and we all turned so we were facing the crowd. Some people had been there for a while, and Larry’s moonshine—or just a desire to let loose—was driving them to the dance floor.
We spent much too long making fun of our teachers’ dance moves, and then Danielle started making up background stories for people about what they’d done during the post-Flare years. “That woman lived in a cave with a bear,” she said, pointing to Professor Grafton. “She didn’t know the bear was there, but she needed to take shelter somewhere and he offered to let her stay, as long as she did his bidding. Eventually she killed the bear and made bear jerky out of him. When she finally emerged from the cave, she was strong from eating his flesh and warm from wearing his skin, and ready to start a new life.”
My gaze immediately flew to her hat. When Edwin did the same, our eyes met, but Danielle was too busy smiling to herself.
A man and a woman jogged off the dance floor holding hands, both breathing heavily. “Are you guys having fun?” the woman asked, wiping the sweat from her temples. “I’m Candy, a manager here. This is our first big event, so if you can think of anything that can be done better, just let me know.”
“The party is great!” I said. “I work at maintenance, and at the farm.”
Candy and her dance partner exchanged a look, and he leaned closer to her. “I wonder if she’s stuck working with that prick,” he said. “Or maybe he already harassed them into changing his job again. Maybe he’s a dean by now.”
She rolled her eyes. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Assholes always climb up the ladder faster than nice, normal people.”
I wanted to ask if they were talking about Devon, but something stopped me. Maybe it was what I would do with the knowledge if they said yes. That would mean he’d bent the truth—lied—again. There was a sharp jolt in my stomach that had nothing to do with the liquid fire I’d swallowed earlier. My feet had carried me to Devon’s room earlier, but they’d been acting under direct order from the part of my brain that still felt something for him, something that was in the gray area between love and betrayal.
Candy turned to Edwin, Danielle and me and made a shooing motion. “Go on and dance, guys!”
The hip-hop–infused pop song that we were all nodding to tapered off, and a faster-paced rhythm started, a salsa-inflected one backed by a booming bass line, maracas and the occasional blip of a police siren. Reggaeton, or the music that had taught me that my hips seemed to be missing a joint that allowed for pivoting in a certain way.
Edwin threw his head back and laughed as the first strains of the song pounded through the room. “I haven’t heard this song in a long time.” He lifted his beer in the air and began moving his waist in a way that shouldn’t have been allowed, lest every woman in the room be drawn in by the hypnotic motion. His hips had not one but several extra pivot points, and I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the fluid motion. I knew he wasn’t trying to be sexual—he was just dancing—but the heat flared from my ears to my cheeks and spread southward as I imagined what other uses his magic hip thrusts could serve.
“Have you been hiding the fact that you were a backup dancer in the Step Up movies?” I asked, and he laughed.
He took the last swig of his beer and tossed it into a recycling can, all without missing a beat. “Look, I’m not one for generalizations but...yo soy Boricua.” He imbued the words with extra weight, as if explaining something to a child. “I’m from Williamsburg, and I’m not talking about the part of the neighborhood where you get artisanal coffee. I could meringue before I could walk. I was bachata-ing like an old man while other kids were learning ‘I’m a little teapot.’ If the right salsa song comes on, I could spin you across the room and back before you knew what happened. And if you think I would only be a backup dancer in one of those movies, then I obviously need to practice.” He held out his hand.
Oh shit. I found Edwin attractive when he was doing regular things like talking, hammering stuff and breathing. He’d never been this brazenly cocky before, even when he had reason to, and damn if I didn’t like it. Not enough to humiliate myself by dancing with him, though. I tried to back away, only to be met with the wall at my back.
Edwin advanced, eyes flashing with mirth. “Is Little Miss Rock Star afraid of the dance floor?”
No, I’m afraid of you and your piston-fueled hips. I could belt out a song in front of anyone, but dancing made me feel naked. Everyone else on the dance floor looked so free, even if they weren’t great dancers. Arms were being flung with abandon, and hips were being shaken. I could feel all the parts of me that were supposed to be loose stiffen at the thought of putting myself out there for everyone, Edwin especially, to see. The heavy dance beat was perfect four-four time, but my limbs wouldn’t even respond to my pleas for a simple two-step.
“Why don’t you dance with Danielle?” But when I looked to my side, she was gone, probably already foreseeing that I would try to pawn the dance off on her. I grasped at my last straw, even though it wasn’t something I was excited about. “One of my floor mates wants to meet you, and she’s hot. The girl with the braids under the disco ball. You can ask her.”
He looked over at Niesha, who was dancing with her strawberry-blond friend and laughing. She was highlighted by a rain of silver sparkles of light reflecting off the ball above her. Her moves were graceful and confident—everything I wasn’t feeling at the moment.
Edwin turned back to me and raised a brow. “I already have a hot girl in front of me. Why should I walk all the way across the dance floor?” His words shocked me enough that I stopped tensing against the wall, and he took advantage of the opportunity to pull me into the crowd.
He nestled us safely at the center of the crowd, where we were shielded from onlookers by a ring of partiers. One hand held mine, and his other rested on my hip. My body went hot at his touch, and I knew he could feel it. He began a simple two-step, although nothing about the way his hips flexed was simple. “Just follow me. If you let me lead, it’ll be painless.”
Oh my God. Why were we in a room full of people?
“Just relax, Mags. Yeah, like that. You see the way I’m moving?” Was he kiddi
ng me with that question? It was taking everything I had to look into his face. “I can only do that because I’m relaxed. Now, just swing your hips side to side...yeah, that’s it.”
He was trying to be helpful, but his coddling explanation rubbed against the flint of my competitiveness. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to dance, and it wasn’t that I didn’t like it. I just didn’t want to be seen while doing it. I moved awkwardly in his embrace, hating myself for not just letting loose. He didn’t seem to mind my stiffness, but I was humiliated. The next song that came on was a popular meringue song that had been played at every school dance for as long as I could remember. Enough that I knew the words, or a reasonable facsimile of them.
“Suavamente, besame,” I sang along with the song, and with the singing came the release of tension in my body. Edwin sensed it, pulling me closer. Both of his hands slid to my waist and rested there, exerting the slightest pressure to direct me as we moved.
“Just move with me,” he said in my ear, the low tone in his voice making me want to do exactly that. We were close enough that our bodies molded to each other, the expanse of his chest and stomach pressing into mine, making me thankful I’d gone with the padded bra that night. He slid a leg between mine, and with that and his hands I was forced to follow the movements of his body; my feet moved in time with his and my hips followed the same path, my pelvis chasing the circles and shifts his made to the best of my ability.
He made a sound of encouragement, but I was barely thinking about the dance anymore. It was hard to be stressed about keeping time when his muscular thigh was nudging against sensitive areas as we danced. The slide of his jeans against mine had the sensitive skin of my inner thighs buzzing with feeling and transmitting that pleasure up the seams of my pants and toward the junction that was growing embarrassingly damp. I wondered if he could feel my heart beating wildly and whether he would care that it wasn’t the cardio that was driving up my heart rate, but being pressed up against him.
It didn’t matter whether anyone thought I was moving the wrong way, because everything about moving with Edwin felt right. How he laughed and cracked flirty jokes as he spun me and pulled me close again. The way he sometimes threw in a particularly emphatic hip thrust that I knew was simply part of the dance but that elicited a responding pulse in my core every time.
By the end of a three-song set, we were both sweaty and tired but smiling like fools. “I haven’t danced like that in a minute,” he said as we stepped out of the now-stifling room to get some air.
We made our way out of the Student Center and sat on one of the picnic tables out front, taking a table that wasn’t occupied by others also escaping the funk.
“That was fun,” I said, feeling happiness bubbling at the back of my words and pushing them up to a higher register. “We used to have dance parties at home, but I don’t think I’ve ever moved like that.”
“There were always parties in my neighborhood,” he said. “Probably too many.” He chuckled in the way people did when remembering their misadventures. “They threw a party for me the last time I was home, over that Christmas break before the Flare. My mom and Claudio.” He sat down on the bench and I sat down next to him. I leaned into him just a bit; people often needed that extra bit of support when launching into memories like this. I might have been sheltered, but even I knew that.
“Was it a Christmas party?” I asked.
“New Year’s. They rented a hall and invited all our friends, and all my cousins and other family members. There were so many of us.” He paused, and not by choice. He cleared his throat after a minute. “Mom was trying to hook me up with some girl who was visiting from PR, but I spent most of the time dancing with her and my brother. There was always a circle around us, and not because of me. Those two had so much life. They were magnetic.”
A police car with siren flashing rushed by, momentarily distracting us. It was still a rare sight, like a unicorn galloping across campus, and everyone looked after it silently until the sound faded.
“Maybe they were magnetic because of you,” I said when the sound had faded. “Two magnets that have the same polarity can’t stick together on their own. Mykhail taught me that. They need something between them to hold them together.”
He looked at me. His expression was drawn, but there were no tears in his eyes. “I think they’d be happy I was dancing again,” was all he said. But he kept looking at me in the weird way he’d fallen into the habit of doing—right until the girl a table over started puking. None of her friends held her hair, and I felt sorry for her.
“Freaking moonshine,” I muttered. I wondered what it meant that Edwin had chosen me for his first dance partner, but shut that door of my ego quickly. Right now it was good to know that, metaphorically, if I was the one yakking, he would hold my hair, no questions asked. That would have to be enough for now.
Chapter Fifteen
The last weeks of September and first week of October were...pretty awesome. At the farm job, Devon and I were still in compost hell, but the work got easier and less vomit-inducing as students and staff alike began to get the hang of composting and not just throwing their garbage away mindlessly. The fact that I would stop mid-conversation to loudly shame people in the dining hall probably helped spread the word. Or perhaps it was the cute and amazingly rendered posters Danielle drew and hung at each trash can station. I held only a middling interest in comic books and that world, but even I was captivated by her work. She had to keep replacing posters as people stole them to hang in their dorm rooms. She took it all in stride, as she did with seemingly everything.
“If I can contribute to every inch of these ugly dorm walls being covered, it would be my pleasure,” she’d said with an exaggerated shudder.
At my maintenance job, the tool belt Edwin had bequeathed to me gave me the confidence to push to do some real work besides reading at my desk, and Joe finally assigned me to a job replacing the floors in a faculty house that had been destroyed by the bursting and thawing of pipes over the last couple of years. I wasn’t surprised he’d assigned me to the same team as Edwin and Felix, in addition to three other people I knew in passing, but I was shocked at how fun it was. I was no stranger to the kind of work we were doing, but doing the same things with my parents had been stressful. My dad was chill—as long as you did everything exactly the way he wanted it. I appreciated the results of his perfectionism, but helping him achieve it was another thing entirely. People often thought Gabriel had inherited his exactitude from my mom, but underneath her prodding she was easygoing. It was Dad who lured you in with that twinkle in his eye and then disowned you for not placing nails exactly two inches apart down the entire length of a two-by-four.
Working with Edwin was different. He would tell me how he wanted the floorboards laid out, show me once and then go about his business. He didn’t hover, simply trusted me to get the job done. Perhaps more than he should have, since I had to rip up a board or two, but making mistakes without disappointing him meant I could focus on what I did wrong and how not to repeat the mistake instead of fuming over being yelled at. And on the job, with his fellow contractors, he was in his element. He’d never been shy, but my family was hard to outshine, as I knew all too well. Here, he was the lead contractor, and he took his leadership responsibilities seriously, including making sure his team had fun while they worked.
“Larry, you just flashed me more ass than I’ve seen in a year. While I appreciate it, maybe try a belt tomorrow?” With the project almost wrapped up, everyone was in a playful mood.
I laughed as I hammered away, ignoring the way my ears homed in on his words like satellites picking up transmissions. I stopped myself before I wondered aloud exactly whose ass he’d seen in the last year. It was none of my business.
“Come on, Edwin, don’t play like you’re some innocent.” Dina was a mom of twins who’d worked at the scho
ol before the Flare and had come back when the school reopened. Her kids were finishing up a high school program, but they had spots reserved for them, thanks to their mom. “I’ve seen the way half the women here look at you. I’m sure it’s not for want of a willing partner that you’ve gone so long without. If you’re even telling the truth.”
She put her hammer down to retie the bandanna she wore to hold her hair back. She rocked a different color every day, depending on her mood. Today’s was bright red.
Edwin smiled as the rest of our crew joined in on the ribbing, but there were no telltale crinkles at the corners of his eyes and he kicked over a box of nails in an uncharacteristically ungainly move, sending the little metal divots flying. “Shit.” He shook his head and bent to scoop them up, and I headed over to help.
“I got it,” he said, not looking up at me.
“Don’t tell me you’re a virgin, man,” Larry said, seeking good-natured revenge for the crack about his crack.
I froze. The thought had never occurred to me. I’d worked him up to be some sex god in my mind, but what if he was in the same boat as me? Maybe he’d just been embarrassed when I’d thrown myself at him.
The husky laugh he let out at Larry’s words disabused me of that notion. There was some knowledge amplified by the rough timbre of his voice that couldn’t be faked. I remembered how his hips had moved in sync with mine as we’d danced—I’d thought of that way too much lately.
“There’s nothing wrong with being a virgin,” Edwin said. That let me know for sure that he wasn’t one. I felt my cheeks heat up and dropped the nails I’d collected into his hand without saying a word. I knew he was saying those words for my benefit, and a humiliation I hadn’t felt in weeks reared its annoying head. “People experience things at different times, when it’s right for them.”
His words were met by confusion, except by me, the person they were meant for.
