Atmosphere(41)

At first, Joan had not known where to look. But now, whether it was the drinks or watching Donna and Lydia put dollars in the strippers’ G-strings, something in her was settling. Her body was becoming softer, her muscles liquid, her belly warm.

And she began to watch.

She watched the way they moved. The way they curved and flowed.

Just watching them, Joan liked her own body more. As she saw Duke tip a topless waitress, Joan made so much more sense to herself for one crystal-clear moment. Of course men were uninteresting to her. They were fundamentally uninteresting.

We are interesting.

Joan’s eye drifted onstage to a woman to her right, who called herself Raven, no doubt a reference to her dark curly hair.

Raven rolled her hips in front of Joan and Joan knew she was staring but could not stop. Joan watched Raven as she took her bikini top off. She felt a rush of something as she saw Raven topless. Joan kept watching as Raven smiled at her and began to play to her, writhing in front of her.

The world clicked into place for Joan then: why men were so obsessed with women’s bodies, why they made so many mistakes just to get closer to one.

“Here,” Donna said.

“What?”

Joan looked over to see that Donna was handing her a dollar bill. “Put it in her bikini to tip her!” Donna shouted. “It’s fun!”

“Oh.” Joan took the dollar bill and looked back at Raven. There was something so gentle about Raven’s smile. So peaceful it was dangerous.

“Hi,” Raven said as she turned her hip toward Joan. Joan leaned over and slipped the dollar into the string of her bikini. Her skin was so soft. How could Joan get her skin that soft? How could Joan move within her body the way Raven did? How could Joan be just like her? Had Joan ever held that much power in her whole life?

As Joan looked around, everyone was starting to leave. So she got up and nodded at Raven and waved goodbye. It took her a second to remember how to put one foot in front of the other. How to pretend to be normal.

How to act like she hadn’t just found something everyone else had discovered long ago.

When her eyes hit the neon signs of Bourbon Street, Joan could feel the lightness in her head that would feel heavy tomorrow. She knew she should call it a night. But instead, she said, “Where’s Vanessa?”

“She went back to the hotel after, like, two minutes in there,” Lydia said.

“Oh,” Joan said. “I should head back, too.”

“Do you want me to walk back with you?” Griff asked.

Joan looked at him. He was so handsome. And kind. And patient.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

“At least let me put you in a cab,” he said.

The next thing Joan knew, they were walking arm in arm away from the crowd.

When they were out of sight of the others, Griff took her hand for a moment. Joan loved the warmth of his skin on hers, the feeling of another hand entangled with her own. “It’s been a wild night,” he said.

“Yeah. Pretty crazy.”

Griff smiled at her. “You’re drunk.”

“Not really.” But even she didn’t buy it.

He looked at her. His eyes were light brown, so soft. Why couldn’t she love him? Maybe she could. She leaned toward him, giving in—to what she did not know.

But he pulled away from her. “I’ve wanted to kiss you for months now,” he said.

Joan opened her eyes.

“But not when you’re drunk.”

“But I want to,” Joan said. “Right now, I want to. And I may not want to tomorrow.”

Griff smiled, but his eyes were sad. She could see that.

“Then we shouldn’t,” Griff said.

Joan had seen enough movies to know what to do. She grabbed the lapels of his jacket and pulled him toward her, pulled him against her, her body pressed against the brick wall behind her.

He gave in to her then, put his hands on the wall and pushed against her. He kissed her back.

He tasted like rum, and she wanted to gag. The roughness of his chin. The smell of him. She hated it as much as she’d known she would.

She pushed him away—she had to.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “I don’t think we are . . . like this.”

He frowned, but she felt such relief. She had finally said it. He could stop trying to love her now. Because she did not want him. She wanted something, she wanted it so badly. In her bones and her legs. But she did not want him at all.

He backed away a step, and then he laughed to himself in a way that wasn’t funny. “It’s okay,” he said. “I had a feeling this would happen. It’s why I haven’t made a move.”

“I’m sorry, Griff,” she said. “It’s just . . . it’s complicated.”

Griff nodded. “I thought it might be. I thought you might be.”

Joan did not want to know what he meant.

A taxi came down their side of the road. Griff hailed it and opened the door for Joan. He put her in the backseat and gave the driver the name of the hotel.

“Thank you,” Joan said, her hand on the edge of the open window. She was overwhelmed with love for him. Love in the sense that she trusted him, and saw all the good in his heart, and cared about him and wanted only good things to ever happen to him. Love in the sense that she would always be on his side, even if he was wrong, in the sense that he was one of the people on this Earth she believed in. And in that moment, the swelling in her heart was unbearable. Absolutely unbearable.