river stones. There was nothing to us but us.
“Yes,” I said finally, looking over at his nakedness and letting him look over at mine. “I want you to come with me.”
Ronan
The allure of Delaney’s body, just within sight, just within reach, had been a siren’s call. As I followed her toward the broken neon light of The Jar, the mists cleared and it was all too obvious that I was headed toward a cliff. By that time, it was too late.
I was going to crash into unknown waters. I was going to plunge into unstudied depths. I was going to be stripped of everything I clung to in order to keep myself afloat.
My feet dragged as we neared the front door made opaque with grunge band stickers. Inside the condensation-covered windows I could see a crowd of people. They were packed together like at the Solstice Ball, drinking like at the Solstice Ball, talking and dancing and laughing like at the Solstice Ball. But they couldn’t have been more different.
Designer tuxedos were replaced with beat-up hoodies, velvet dresses with skin-tight jeans, diamonds with glowing plastic chokers. People moved freely with no one there to watch, to judge, to remember how they behaved. There was a wildness that I didn’t understand, and I feared it.
I feared it because I didn’t know my place there, inside that pulsing throng.
Delaney yanked open the front door and it was too late to protest. I was propelled inside as if on a vicious wave, and there was nothing left to do but thrash and kick and struggle to stay above the surface. The air inside the bar was hot and dense and thick, but I felt the icy chill of deep waters in my bones.
Ahead of me Delaney looked completely at home. She moved through the crowd as naturally as a fish through a river’s currents. I marvelled that she somehow managed to make her beautiful evening gown and designer heels seem perfectly at place amongst the beer-filmed floors littered with peanut shells and dancing reflections of the cheap disco ball hanging overhead. I struggled to keep up with her as the paths she carved through the crowd disappeared almost immediately after she passed, as if the bar were accepting her into its beating heart…and rejecting the foreign presence, rejecting me.
It was an odd sensation, there in the deafening noise and pushing and shoving dance floor. I didn’t know what to do with myself. How was I to hold my hands? Was I supposed to be smiling? Frowning? I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb, like everyone there could see I didn’t belong.
Delaney glanced back over her shoulder at me and shouted something. It didn’t feel like the problem was I couldn’t hear her; it felt like the problem was she was suddenly speaking a language I didn’t understand.
“What?” I shouted back at her.
She smiled, an easy, comfortable smile. She stopped and leaned back till her lips brushed my ear.
“You okay?” I heard her as if through a language translation app. I forced my own smile, difficult and awkward and uncomfortable.
“Of course,” I replied.
Delaney reached down and slipped her hand into mine. She then had to manually curl my fingers around her palm. It was like I’d even forgotten how to move my own body. Delaney was about to say something, something I was sure I wouldn’t understand, but then her eyes brightened and she smiled as she noticed someone just behind me.
“Bridget!” she shouted, raising her arm and jumping. “Bridge, Bridge!”
I turned to see a woman I vaguely recognised as a waitress from The White Room jumping and wildly shouting, “Delaney, you bitch!”
I remained frozen on the spot, hard as a stone against the people bumping into my shoulders and tripping on my feet as the woman bullied her way through the crowd. Delaney used her free arm to fiercely hug the woman who practically barrelled into her. I was tugged along like an unwilling child.
“Bridge, this is Ronan,” Delaney shouted. “Ronan, this is Bridget.”
“How’s it going?” Bridget said, smiling just as easily as Delaney had.
I appeared to be the only one who was struggling. It was like they were all in on a secret I wasn’t privy to.
“Hi,” I managed as I searched Bridget’s face.
At The White Room I knew the role I was supposed to play: I was the rich asshole who the waitresses put up with because they knew I would drunkenly leave a ridiculous three-hundred-euro tip before