Chapter 22 (post three)

Pre-read note: These sections go together, so I'm posting them together. These is lots of foreshadowing in the last section! I think I'm going to need to add more hints, though, throughout the last couple of sections that I've posted, when I go back and edit this draft anyways.

Chapter twenty-two, sections three and four:

My untrained heart beat faster when he gently zipped up the back of the dress.

“There,” he said as I turned to face him. “Gorgeous.”

His emerald eyes were sparkling. I twisted my hair in my hand as I stepped towards my full-length mirror.

“It was a great find,” I said, looking back at Jake sitting on my bed.

He nodded. “Beautiful.”

I did a twirl and the dress flowed in pink waves around me. I came to a stop facing and Jake, and taking a little bow, sat down beside him laughing. He smiled his huge Jake smile, then took my hand and pulled me up.

“This,” he said, fishing an mp3 player out of his pocket with his free hand, “Calls for a dance.”

He selected a song and it began to play from the tiny speaker on the back of the device. The music drifted through my room, the slow beat catching my hips. Jake placed the mp3 on my bed before turning back to me and tucking his hand on my back. Coming up close to him, we moved together across my bare floors, the sound our breathing matching the music. Me, breathing in his cologne, and him, guiding me through the movements, making me feel as though I was part of something larger than myself. I closed my eyes and placed my cheek against his chest.

*~*~*~*~*

You know that feeling of dancing alone? That moment where your arms are above your head and you’re swinging your hips to the beat only to look up and notice you’re by yourself? Your best friend has some guy all over her and those people who you kind of know have disappeared, and you’re dancing there, surrounded by a hundred people but still all by yourself. You close your eyes again and keep swinging your hips, but now it feels like everyone is watching you, laughing at that poor girl: no friends, can’t get a guy, just dancing alone. Dancing alone is supposed to be empowering, but the more you move the more you feel like an idiot. You wonder if you should just stop, drift back through the crowd to the wall where you’ll be hidden in shadow and no one will be able to see that you’re alone. Yet, who wants to be the person drifting to the back, abandoned and rejected? So you swing your hips and close your eyes and wish that someone will come along, your friends will return or some guy will pull you into his arms. You swing and move and wish until you’re fading and fading, until your arms fall to your side and you stand completely still. You’re the only unmoving thing in a mass of alcohol, short-skirts and lost souls. You’re no longer dancing, and yet you’re still dancing alone.

I started out dancing hand-in-hand. Jake and I moved together in a seamless way that I had never known before but I instantly craved. We became one on that dance-floor, one body that moved gracefully without question. It should have been obvious it would never last, but I never thought twice. I closed my eyes and fell, but eventually, when I opened them again, he would be gone. He would disappear into that mass of sweaty bodies, leave me in the middle of the crowd with no one to turn to. Eventually, I would open my eyes and realize I was dancing alone.