Andy and Elfie walked through the VIP area with a hostess, looking for a table, when Andy spotted Cadell’s head above the crowd, moving through the throng like he was swimming with his head above the water.
She waved, and Cadell changed course to intercept them.
When he got to her, Andy started, “Hey, I’m sorry about that—”
Cadell wrapped his arms around her, hugging her. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Close encounter with some cousins.” Past his side, Andy saw Elfie wave as she walked into the crowd.
“Did they say something to you?” he asked, his voice a little too loud even for the crowd and the music.
“No, no. I don’t think they saw me. Elfie and I hid in the ladies’ room.” As they passed groups of people on couches, the same people still had lines of cocaine on their table. Andy hoped they were the same lines and they weren’t imbibing yet more coke. She asked Cadell, “Can we leave? I just want to go home.”
The hostess tapped Andy on the shoulder. “I should have a seat for you guys in a minute.”
She nodded to the hostess.
“I just got done,” Cadell said, leaning back to look at Andy. “Let’s just sit for a few moments. We don’t have to dance if you don’t want to.”
Andy stared at her hands twisting in front of her chest. Around them in the darkness, couples and groups laughed and talked, snuggled and made out, and drank and snorted coke. “This doesn’t seem the best atmosphere.”
Cadell looked around, and his eyes found the table with the white stripes of cocaine on it.
“Hey?” Cadell called to the hostess who had led Andy and Elfie into the VIP area. He pointed toward the far corner of the room. “Can we get a table back there?”
The woman glanced at the empty table way back over by the VIP section’s small dance floor. “Of course, sir. Right this way.”
Andy followed Cadell and the hostess through the tables.
Once they were seated diagonally from each other on two long couches, a waste of space, Andy said, “We shouldn’t be around things like that. We shouldn’t be around people like that.”
“That was cocaine, not heroin.”
She rolled her eyes. “I recognize cocaine when I see it, and heroin can be ingested via intranasal delivery.”
“Snorting heroin doesn’t produce nearly the euphoria that injecting it does.” His gaze wandered away from her, became dreamy. “When you go IV, there’s this bliss, this amazing release of everything that is wrong with your life, and you sail.” His gaze cut back to her. “I can’t talk about that. That’s something I should not do.”
Andy watched him, horrified. The craving had almost overtaken him. “No, you shouldn’t talk about it.”
“I’m okay.” He sucked in a deep breath and looked around the room like he had just realized that they were in a nightclub.
“I didn’t realize that you missed it that much. I know a tremendous amount about drugs and how they affect the body. I can draw the enzymatic pathways that the liver uses to detoxify opioids, but I don’t know what it feels like. I didn’t know why people would crave it.”
One side of his mouth rose, and his eyes focused on her. He was seeing her again. “That’s why it’s hard to quit.”
“It must be terribly hard for you.”
He smiled at her, a slow, growing smile that warmed her inside. “Let’s have a drink.”
“Oh, I couldn’t.”
“I’ll just have one more,” he said. “I’ll drive. I only had half of that glass of wine with supper, and,” he gestured to his tall, muscular body and what must be an enormous liver, “I can handle one more and be okay. I’ll be far under the legal limit, and I’m fine.”
“What if you have more than that?” she asked.
“If I have two more, then we’ll leave the car in the valet parking for the night and call a cab to take us home.”
“Promise?” she asked, almost shaking.
“Absolutely.” He leaned in, and Andy did likewise to hear him over the thumping music. “I may have been an addict. I may have nearly killed myself several times. I may have done a thousand stupid things, but I have never driven while high or drunk. Not even a little. If I have two drinks in an evening or one hit of anything, I don’t get behind the wheel, no matter what I think I can do. Even a heroin addict has lines he won’t cross. That one is mine.”
“That’s admirable,” she said.
“I’ve been alone in this world for a long time,” he said, leaning back, resting his long arms on the couch back, and signaling the waitress. “I’m not going to take anyone away from someone else.”
The waitress arrived, holding a tablet.
Cadell said to her, “I’ll have a scotch, neat, whatever you think is interesting on the top shelf. Andy, what do you want?”
Again, rats. “I don’t know.”
He asked her, “You like pineapple, melon, and raspberry?”
That sounded delicious, like the lassis that her mother made. “Oh, yes. Very much.”
He turned his head back to the waitress. “And she’ll have a Sex On The Beach—”
Andy about crawled over the back of the couch. “What did you say to her?”
Cadell finished his sentence, “—and make it kind of light.”
The waitress wandered back into the crowd.
“It’s the name of a drink,” he told Andy.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “You said that I wanted—”
“It’s the name of a drink.” He was chuckling now, but he was biting his lip so that it seemed like he was trying to repress it, even though he was grinning behind where his teeth grabbed his lip. “Try it. You’ll never know if you like Sex On The Beach until you’ve tried it.”
“I imagine that this drink was named entirely so that people could make that kind of joke,” she grumbled.
He laughed. “Probably. After that, you could try a Long, Slow Screw Against A Wall.”
“Seriously, I don’t think you should be saying things like that to me.”
“Why not?”
Because I might say yes.
That wine must still be affecting her. She must be feeling it now that the adrenaline from seeing her cousins had receded. She would never have thought such a thing otherwise. She wouldn’t say yes. She was not that kind of girl.
Right?
Cadell continued, “They’re just the names of drinks. You could also get a Pierced Navel, Bend Over Shirley, or Suck, Bang, and Blow.”
Those names!
He was still grinning like a baboon.
Cultural conditioning finally won out. “Oh, no,” she said. “I would never.”
“Then it looks like I had better order a Blue Balls for myself.”
She laughed at that. “But you said that you wouldn’t have another drink.”
“Obviously, I’ll have to get it to go.”
When the Sex On The Beach drink arrived, it was served in a curvy glass and tasted fruity and tart at the same time, like raspberry and lemons in melon juice. “It’s really good!”
“I’m glad you like Sex On The Beach,” he said.
She rolled her eyes and sipped.
They talked some more, shouting over the music, mostly about the music being played. Cadell tried to explain the theories behind house electronica to Andy, but she kept missing words and had to yell to ask him to repeat.
Finally, after she’d had enough of The Fruity Drink With The Unfortunate Name, Andy moved over to sit beside Cadell rather than catty-corner to him.
He bent his head and whispered in her ear, explaining what the musicians were trying to do with each section, the references to classical and modern music that he heard.
She listened while she sipped her drink, becoming a little sleepy despite the thumping music.
Cadell stretched his arm over the back of the couch and tucked her against his side, whispering words and humming music. Her close call with her cousins drifted away from her mind, and she listened.
“This complements Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the Summer section,” he said. When he hummed that along with the chorus, the two pieces of music did indeed sync up, and his voice thrummed against her neck and shivered over her skin. “Baroque music is very rhythmic. People danced to it. It practically has a pulse. It complements rock music, but I think this piece is a variation on Vivaldi’s theme.”
“That’s amazing.” She sipped her drink, carefully placing her lips over the straw, and Cadell’s arm curved around her shoulder.
When she glanced up, he was watching where her mouth held the straw, but his gaze snapped back up to her eyes.
He wasn’t laughing now. Indeed, his dark eyes were as serious as Andy had ever seen them. He was looking at her like he was on the verge of anger, and his fingers tightened on her shoulder.
He cleared his throat and asked, “Do you want to dance?”
Oh, I couldn’t, rose unbidden to her lips, but she bit it back.
She absolutely couldn’t dance in the Western style with a man holding her close to his body, not while wearing this tight dress and practically nothing on her legs, not in the dark with wild music pounding through the air and no one around to watch her to make sure that everyone behaved themselves.
She couldn’t speak at that moment, not with his arm around her and her body curving softly into his, so she nodded.
Cadell took her drink out of her fingers, set it on the low table in front of them, and held out his hand, his huge palm and fingers extended toward her. When she touched his warm flesh, he pulled her to stand.
Andy bobbled in her heels as she threaded between the tables and couches to walk out to the dance floor, following Cadell.
Dancing was a mistake.
On the dance floor over on the other end of the upstairs VIP lounge area, under the pulsing lights that confused her, Andy felt Cadell’s arms around her and his body in front of hers. The wine and the Fruity Drink That Must Not Be Named must have been spinning her head because every time his fingertips dragged across her shoulder or his hand wrapped around the back of her neck, her legs weakened. He stood in front of her, his hips and legs moving to the music and drawing her attention. She kept trying to look away from the sinuous, subtle movements of his body, his muscular form bending and swaying.
“Relax,” he said. “Just feel the music. Move with me.”
By the end of just one song, her breath was light in her chest, and her body was keenly aware of every move that Cadell made, of his long legs and slim, muscular frame, his broad shoulders and the silken pieces of hair escaping his ponytail.
The song segued into a slower number because of course it did, and Cadell’s hands alighted on her shoulders and brushed down to her upper arms.
She didn’t want to do this.
No, that wasn’t true.
She wanted to not want to do this.
She actually wanted it very much.
She wanted to feel his arms around her and his body pressed against hers.
Every time he touched her, she craved more of his hands on her skin.
Every time he licked his lips, she remembered that deep kiss in the on-call room with him.
She remembered that, on most nights, they sat at the kitchen table in the wee hours of the morning when she came home from working at the hospital—emotionally wrung out from telling small children to hold on, that they would feel better soon, and then they could run and play—a small part of her wanted to reach over to take his hand, to hold his fingers across the table like they had during their pretend date in the atrium.
She wanted him to hold out another lemon Danish to her, offering it to her, offering her what she wanted so she could take it.
And she wanted to touch him.
His hand curled around the back of her neck, and he drew her close.
His cream shirt was silky under her fingertips, and she ran her hands over the rounds of his pecs and to the back of his neck.
Against her soft flesh, even through both their clothes, his body felt like he was made out of steel cords, wrapped around each other and coiled tightly like springs.
She tried to dance the way that she had seen people dance when she had been in high school at the few dances that she had attended. Back then, they had wrapped their arms around each other and shuffled from side to side, but Cadell wasn’t doing that. His body undulated against hers, slow and sure movements, and her body responded and learned to dance his way.
Or it might have been the Sand In Bad Places Drink.
Whatever.
Dancing seemed easy with him. His breath whispered over her shoulder and arm, and she closed her eyes to feel him and the music. They swayed together, moving closely.
His hand moved down her spine to her lower back, where he stopped.
The dancing must be getting to her. She was losing her breath, breathing too heavily as their bodies moved.
Cadell’s breathing had changed, too.
He ran his knuckles down her jaw, and then he wove his fingers into her hair on the back of her head. Andy was a short girl. She often felt shrimpy, but with his arms around her, one of his huge hands spread over her lower back near her sacrum and the other deep in her hair, she felt tiny, overpowered, but protected by him.
Cadell bent and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay.” Her whisper was barely a breath. “Yes.”