Dance Floor with Aria

The DJ knows what he is doing.

The music has been building for the last hour, each song bleeding into the next with the kind of momentum that makes it easy to stop thinking about anything outside the four walls of this room. The floor is packed, the lights low, the air warm with the collective energy of two hundred people who have collectively decided tonight is the night to stop being careful.

Aria finds him.

She appears at his side from somewhere in the crowd and looks up at him with that particular expression she reserves for moments when she has already made a decision and is simply waiting for him to catch up.

Aria: you're just standing here.

Miles: I was watching.

Aria: watching is boring. She takes his hand and pulls him toward the floor without waiting for a response.

They find a spot in the middle of the crowd where the music is loudest and the lighting is most forgiving. She turns to face him and starts moving, easy and unhurried, completely at home in her own body in a way that is genuinely difficult not to stare at. The red dress does not leave a great deal to the imagination in motion and she is fully aware of this.

He puts a hand on her waist and she steps closer than the song strictly requires, tilting her chin up at him with a look that is equal parts innocent and entirely deliberate.

Aria: try to keep up.

Miles: I'm doing fine.

She looks him over once.

Aria: Yeah you are.

They dance. The distance between them closes gradually and naturally the way these things do when nobody is actively preventing it. Her hand finds his shoulder. His hand moves from her waist to the small of her back. The conversation drops away because the music is too loud for talking and neither of them makes any effort to fix that.

At one point she turns around, her back against him, moving with the music in a way that makes it very difficult to think clearly. He puts both hands on her hips without thinking and she does not move away. She tilts her head back against his shoulder, her hair brushing his jaw, and the smell of her perfume does not help matters.

He leans down close to her ear.

Miles: you're going to get us in trouble.

She turns her head just enough to look at him sideways, her lips close enough that it would take almost nothing.

She says it like a promise.

Aria: Good.

They stay like that through another song. The crowd presses around them, everyone in their own world, the lights low enough that the floor feels like its own private universe. It feels contained and reckless at the same time, the kind of moment that exists outside normal rules because everyone in the room has silently agreed to suspend them for one night.

Then he sees her.

Janice.

She is moving through the edge of the crowd toward the side exit, alone, her date nowhere in sight. She is not storming out, not visibly upset. She is just leaving the floor quietly, the way people do when they need a minute, pushing through the side door and disappearing into the corridor beyond.

Miles watches the door close behind her.

Aria is still moving against him, completely unaware, the music still loud, the floor still packed around them.

He has about thirty seconds before the moment passes.