The Breakaway(2)
“Are you sure this is right?” someone asked as Marissa stopped in front of a dingy metal door and knocked three times. When a slot in the door’s center opened, Marissa gave a password and collected everyone’s IDs and vaccination cards. When the documents had been inspected, the door swung open, and Abby followed her friends into the thumping, crowded darkness. The music was deafening, the bass so loud that Abby could feel it vibrating through her fillings. Girls in bodysuits and booty shorts with trays of shots around their necks threaded their way through the crowd, twisting like contortionists to serve customers lounging on the couches. The dance floor was packed with people, dancing and hollering along to the music.
Abby was throwing her arms in the air with the rest of the bridesmaids, gyrating happily and singing along to a remix of Cher’s “Believe,” when she noticed a guy standing in the corner, staring at her. He wore dark jeans and a short-sleeved tee shirt. His thick brown hair fell over his forehead just so, and his pale skin looked almost luminous in the club lights.
Abby turned away. She kept dancing, but her gaze kept landing on him, taking in a new detail each time—his full lips, his thick, straight eyebrows. She knew she was staring, but she gave herself permission. Looking at this guy was like looking at a two-thousand-dollar gown on the Nieman-Marcus website: a gorgeous thing she could appreciate, while knowing she would never take it home. And home was a hundred miles away, which made the likelihood of bumping into this handsome stranger at a dog park or a coffee shop unlikely. Abby could stare to her heart’s content.
Except, strange but true, it seemed like the guy was looking right back at her. Looking at her and smiling.
Abby watched as he detached himself from the wall and moved through the mass of dancers, until he’d arrived to stand right in front of her.
Bridesmaid? he mouthed, pointing at her chest. Abby nodded, and he leaned in close, saying something she assumed was his name. She felt the warmth of his breath on her neck, and he smelled delicious, musky and spicy and sweet.
Abby shouted her name at him, which was all the conversation the music would allow—a good thing, because his next question would have probably been Where are you from, and at some point he’d follow up with What do you do, and Abby would have to choose between lying or stumbling through an explanation about the gig jobs she took to pay her bills. It was embarrassing to be her age, to have made so many false starts and still not be any closer to figuring out what she planned on doing with her one wild and precious life. She reminded herself that her indecision, while unseemly, wasn’t actively harming anything or anyone.
Somehow, she and the guy had drifted away from the rest of the bridesmaids until they were dancing as a couple (Marissa, the only member of the bridal party who’d noticed this development, gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up, which Abby hoped the guy hadn’t noticed). He was close enough for her to feel the heat of his body. His scent made her mouth water; made her want to press her lips against him and taste the skin of his throat. After two songs, he started to touch her—reaching for her hand, letting his hand rest on her hip, always looking at her, eyebrows raised, waiting for her nod. Abby could feel herself flushing with each brush of his fingers, her skepticism—Me? This guy’s into me? Really?—warring with her desire.
After another three songs, he took her hand and inclined his head toward the corner. Abby let him lead her into the shadows, thinking Do with me what you will. She knew this was borderline scandalous behavior. She also knew that the guy might think she was acceptable, kissable, sleep-with-able, at two in the morning in a dark bar, with loud music and limited options and God only knew how many drinks inside of him, but that he might find her less impressive when he was sober. And there was Mark, back in Philadelphia. They’d been on only two dates since they’d found each other again, but maybe Marissa was right. Maybe there was potential for something serious.
Abby knew all that. But this guy smelled so good, and his hands were so warm, and Philadelphia had never felt farther away. As soon as they’d made it to the corner, Abby stood on her tiptoes, and the guy bent his head and reached down to cup the back of her neck and bring his mouth down against hers. The first brush of his lips was gentle, respectful, a careful taste. Abby was the one to deepen the kiss, the one to slip just the tip of her tongue into his mouth, shivering as she’d felt, more than heard, his groan.
He brought his mouth down to her ear. “Come home with me.” Abby felt her body flush as the words vibrated through her. Immediately, she nodded. It had been years since she’d kissed a stranger in a bar, and she had almost never gone home with a guy she’d just met. But, somehow, this felt inevitable, like it was the only choice she could possibly make.
When they were outside, the silence rang in her ears. Without the crush of the crowd or the DJ providing a distraction, now that the guy could really see her, Abby felt awkward and unsure.
“It’s Abby, right?” he asked, after he’d used his phone to summon a car. “I’m Sebastian,” he said, which saved her from asking, and let her appreciate his exceptionally resonant and deep voice. He had a birthmark, like a single dark freckle, right in the center of his throat, and she couldn’t stop thinking about kissing him right there.
She gathered enough sense to text Marissa that she was leaving. She used her phone to take a snapshot of his driver’s license, which she sent to Lizzie, her best friend back in Philadelphia. “So if you kill me and cut me into pieces they’ll know where to start the search,” Abby said.