“I don’t dance,” I said. The vodka had stripped my words down to the bare bones. “I liked watching you.”
“Jackson is very good.”
“You’re better.”
“Mmm, now I know what you were doing instead of dancing,” she said with a small smile. “Are you having a good time?”
“I am now.” I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.
She held my gaze for a moment, then laid her head against my chest.
“I’m having a good time too,” she said. “Maybe a better time than I should.”
“I know.”
“I’m supposed to be working on me.”
“I know,” I said again. “I can see my finish line from here. I should keep going but…”
“But what?” she asked against my heart.
“I don’t want to kiss you drunk, but I want to kiss you.”
Her breath caught and she raised her head to look at me, her lips parted. It took everything I had not to kiss her anyway, but it felt wrong; with vodka on my breath and my thoughts clouded and dizzy. I’d kissed a hundred women drunk or tipsy, but something stopped me with this woman.
She deserves more.
“You want to kiss me?” she asked.
I tilted her chin up with a loose fist, and my thumb brushed the skin just beneath her lower lip. My mouth was clumsy with the alcohol, but the booze had freed my emotions that I’d kept on lockdown, always, and I was helpless against her beauty to keep them in.
“I think about you,” I said. “A lot.”
“I think about you, too,” she whispered, and I smelled the sweetness of Maraschino cherries on her breath. “And Olivia.”
Instantly, my arms held her tighter at those words. “You do?”
She nodded. “And I know it’s fast, but I feel like,” she swallowed. “I don’t know what I feel. Like I’m supposed to be getting myself together and not getting swept up in all the things I usually get swept up in. I keep saying I need to work on me, but I’m doing everything right and I still feel like something’s missing.” Her eyes were impossibly blue as they gazed up at mine. “Is it you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But maybe it could be.
I held her and turned a slow circle, possibilities whispering in my ear.
“What do you want, Darlene?”
“I think I want you to kiss me, too. No, I know I do. More than anything, actually.”
Hearing her say the words conjured something deep in me. Not sex or lust. What I wanted with her went beyond that. And deeper, somehow.
“But Sawyer, there’s something I have to tell you.”
“Anything.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
Her beautiful face morphed into anguish, and then the song ended. “In the Mood”—the quintessential swing song—came on and the crowd filled the floor in a mad rush.
The heat and depth between us vanished and it felt like I’d been thrust up from somewhere hot and dark, into bright, cold light.