He leans in so I can hear him. “If I had a beard,” he shouts, “this never would’ve happened.”
“You could be in the ghost-face mask from Scream and this would still happen,” I say.
He turns in to me, his mouth nearly touching my ear, the spicy ginger and bready tang of beer hitting the back of my nose. “Are you jealous?” he teases.
I push up onto tiptoes, bracing a hand against his shoulder, tipsy enough to play along but not drunk enough to be honest: “It’d just be nice to earn my own glow sticks once in a while.”
He touches my waist. Heat unfurls over me, skull to toes. Automatically, I lean into the touch, and his fingers curl around my hip as he ducks his head again. “The bachelorette party’s still by the bar. I’m happy to introduce you.”
“And miss this song? Not enough glow sticks in the world.” I turn in to him, and my heart thumps, quick and sharp, at the way his dark eyes dilate, the way the corner of his mouth tips up in a wry smile.
Looking at his mouth, I forget what we were just talking about. I swallow a thorny knot and touch the scratchy corner of his jaw. “Beard’s almost back.”
His hand circles my wrist lightly, an electric frisson leaping from him to me. “Petra hated it too,” he says, his voice a buzz, half heard through the music.
My stomach gives a decisive downward jolt. “I don’t hate it,” I say. “It’s grown on me.”
The corner of his mouth ticks higher and his thumb runs along the side of my wrist. “So I should keep it?”
I clear my throat. “That’s up to you.”
“And I’m asking you,” he parries, his smile slightly mischievous but his gaze dark and heavy enough to pinion me to the spot.
The moment feels like a held breath, or a soap bubble, something that can’t last, that has to break one way or another.
And then it does. The song ends, and Julia barrels back toward us, baby bangs stuck to her forehead and mascara ringed around her eyes. “Who’s up for a shot?” she asks, and Miles steps back from me.
“I’ll get them,” he volunteers, and breaks away through the tightly packed crowd, casting one last glance over his shoulder, a hazy look that makes me feel like a Christmas present he’s one sleep from unwrapping.
“Are you and Miles sleeping together?” Ashleigh asks at the bao bun food truck on our lunch break on Monday.
I’d just taken a sip of lemonade and reached out to accept my receipt from the cashier, and I barely manage to avert my face before spit-taking.
“Ashleigh!” I chide, pulling her away from the counter.
“What?” she says. “That guy’s, like, sixty. I don’t think we’re going to surprise him.” She adds thoughtfully, “Unless of course he’s also sleeping with Miles.”
“I’m not sleeping with Miles,” I tell her.
“Okay, fine. I must’ve misread the signals.” Her tone makes it clear she doesn’t believe it.
The cashier calls our respective receipt numbers, and we grab our food from the counter, then walk toward the picnic tables on the grassy knoll overlooking the public beach.
“One time,” I admit. “Something happened, once.”
A smile spreads across Ashleigh’s pink-painted lips. “I knew it. Tell me everything.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” I say.
“That bad?”
“No,” I say a little too emphatically. At her smug grin, I add, “I just mean, I’m not even sure how it happened.”
“Well, you’re still ahead of me, because I don’t even know what happened.”
“We just made out a little bit,” I say.
“In what context,” she says.
“At home,” I say. “We were watching a movie and, I don’t know, it just happened.”
“What were you watching?” she asks.
“Does it matter?” I say.
“It sets the scene,” she says. “Honestly, Daphne, have you never had a close friend before?”
The last conversation I had with Sadie drifts through my mind like acrid smoke. But strangely, I also feel a slight lift in my stomach at Ashleigh’s implication that that’s what we’re becoming: close friends. “Not in a while, no,” I tell her.
She grabs my elbow. “You know it’s not like my social well is overflowing these days either. I just meant, it’s supposed to be fun to rehash all this, not embarrassing. This is a judgment-free space. We’re twenty yards from the library, for god’s sake. Yesterday I had to ask a guy to stop leading wild pigeons inside with a breadcrumb trail.”
“Again?” I say.
“Not Larry,” she replies. “Different guy.”
“Well, I didn’t have to entice Miles with breadcrumbs,” I say.
