She closes her eyes and the music moves through her, everything sleepy and slow, and she is clutching the warm cotton of the man’s shoulder. Together they are awash in light and sound and a straining, delicate sadness. Out there running just to be on the run. As the music trails away, Yolanda grips the back of the man’s shirt. She doesn’t want to be let go.
Then the man bends his face to the side of her neck and kisses her. The kiss is truly the most erotic kiss she’s ever received. The surprise of it sends a wave of sensation down her spine.
“Thank you,” the man says, with a funny little bow. Yolanda makes her way back to the table of women. She shakes her head to clear the haze.
“You got kissed,” Monica says in a stage whisper, refilling her glass. “By a goblin!”
Not a goblin, Yolanda wants to say, but she can’t bring herself to form words. She wants only to focus on the feeling of his lips at her neck.
The band starts up again, and the conversation moves back to work gossip: some other flirtation, the bad attitude of a man down the hall, the arrest of a state representative’s teenage son for hosting a raucous party. A couple has been seated at Anthony’s table across the room, and Anthony himself is nowhere, bones in a grave in the Las Penas cemetery. A couple times she glances over her shoulder to where the man is sitting with his own cluster of friends. He winks.
Back in the Capitol garage, Yolanda walks Monica to her car. Her boss is more or less steady on her feet.
“Are you okay to drive?” Yolanda asks. The effects of her own sips of margarita have long faded.
“Yeah,” says Monica, looking at the time on her phone.
“You’re sure?” Yolanda is eager to be alone and on her own way home. She wants to think about the dance, about that kiss. She gives Monica an appraising look, and Monica’s car, too, a black BMW with a prism dangling from the rearview mirror. “Hey,” she says. “You have a crack in your windshield. My son can fix it. He’s an expert.”
Monica studies the bull’s-eye. “I’d love that. That thing drives me nuts.”
Driving, Yolanda scans the radio stations, trying to find those old songs, to find anything that matches her mood, but the country station is playing new songs full of bluster and patriotism, and she turns it off. In the silence of her hour’s drive north, she carries the glow of that kiss, holding it as a kind of talisman against seizures.
As she pulls into her driveway, something sharp twists above her heart. It hurts, the knowledge that life can still hold moments like these. Out of nowhere, a dance, a visitation, a kiss. This is the world she’s leaving.
Perhaps because Lizette hasn’t been in touch, and because Angel is feeling overlooked and sad, when Ryan texts asking if he can come by again, she lets him. She could use the distraction, she figures, could use his dumb, dog-like admiration.
It’s Saturday afternoon, and her grandmother is running errands in town. Her dad has hitched a ride with her “to hang out with a friend.” From his vagueness on the topic, Angel suspects it’s a date. What kind of woman would consent to go out with her unemployed, live-at-home, license-suspended father is beyond Angel, but apparently it’s the same kind of woman who would be up for a Saturday afternoon date while his mother stops by the Center Market.
Ryan told her he’d be there at two thirty, and, indeed, he pulls up at 2:28 exactly. Only when she lets him into the house does Angel realize they haven’t been alone together since that fateful night. She suspects he’s thinking the same thing, because he looks even more slouched than usual, standing in the kitchen, biting his dry lip, his pale arms sticking out of his Beatles T-shirt. He picks at his thumbnail. “Where’s Connor?”
“He’s still napping, so.”
“Oh,” says Ryan, disappointed, but just then Connor whimpers sleepily from the bedroom.