Sebastian, I know you’re an animal!”
“Mae West was a movie star in the thirties,” Mae said instead. “She wrote plays and tons of her own lines, and she was a forty-year-old sex symbol, and she had a boyfriend who was thirty years younger than she was.”
Seb looked appalled. “She had a boyfriend who was ten?”
“Um, no,” Mae said, and laughed. “I think she got the boyfriend when she was in her sixties. Anyway, she was awesome! Salvador Dali made a sofa shaped to look like her mouth.”
“A really tiny sofa?” Seb asked.
Mae glanced up at him and saw him grinning to himself, and realized he’d been quietly making fun of her the whole time.
She was no good at being a ministering angel anyway, and no matter how tired she felt, she wanted a dance. She put her glass down, jumped up from the gravestone, and grabbed his hand.
“You’re good enough at flirting when you’re a yard away from me. Let’s see how you do on a dance floor.”
Mae led him inside and up toward the balcony bar, which was usually the best bet if you wanted a bit of space to move around in.
“This is going okay, isn’t it?” Seb asked at the top of the stairs.
“We’ll see,” Mae said, amused. Then they reached the balcony bar and she felt her smile snatched away, easily as if it was a stolen purse.
Nick was standing against the wall, half-lit by shimmering scarlet lights and half in shadow. He pushed himself off the wall and headed straight for them.
“Where have you been?” he demanded, and Mae found herself suddenly enraged.
“Where have I been?” she echoed, and dropped Seb’s hand as she clenched hers into a fist. “What are you even doing here? Why are you
Nick looked down at her, face still, and the urge to hit him was as overwhelming as it was ridiculous.
“Jamie’s upset,” he said.
It was no answer at all, but it made Mae’s questions not matter. She stopped paying attention to either of them as she scanned the room for her brother.
He wasn’t hard to spot.
He was the only one in the balcony bar who was dancing. People were staring at him because he was leaping around the place far too energetically, doing spins and staggering mid-turn, flailing his arms. He was so thin, and his hair was sticking up in so many directions. He looked like a stick figure having a fit.
“Has Jamie been drinking?”
“Not that much,” Nick said.
“Not that much for you,” Mae asked dangerously, “or not that much for someone half your size who has been known to sing a song and fall over after a sherry at Christmas?”
“He said it would make him feel better!” Nick snapped. “How was I supposed to know it wouldn’t?”
Mae opened her mouth to respond, when Seb’s voice cut through the music, turning her head because it was so deliberately quiet and controlled.
“Maybe we should go get Jamie now? You two can argue later.”
“Don’t be an idiot!” she said sharply, and Seb looked surprised. Mae took a deep breath. “If I take him away now, he’ll be completely humiliated in the morning.”
She turned on her heel and headed for the dance floor.
The soles of her boots were sticking to the floor a little, so she was aware of a peeling sensation with every step. It slowed her down a fraction, long enough so that by the time she reached Jamie, she’d remembered to put on a smile.
“Hey,” she said, loud above the seriously ill-advised funk music, and Jamie spun around.
He stood there staring at her, looking bewildered and a little wary, and she caught his hands in hers and stepped in to him. His eyes widened.
“Hey there,” she said again, and began to play the game. “So where did you learn to dance?”
Jamie laughed and hiccupped in the middle of the laugh, then started to dance with her.
“I learned to dance on a battlefield,” he told her. “I was the only soldier who knew how to avoid the minefields with style.”
Mae laughed and Jamie spun her, and when he faltered she spun back to him by herself, sliding her arms around his neck and smiling at him until he smiled back. The smile lit up his flushed face, and suddenly it was just the two of them playing the game, under chandeliers in an empty house or under scarlet lights in a dance club. It didn’t matter.
Jamie put his foot forward and Mae drew hers back, legs moving in sync, back and forth, him and her united against the world.
“How about you, where did you learn to dance?” Jamie remembered to yell at her, breathless.
“I was in a Spanish convent when the sound of the maracas by my window made me jump out to join the dancers,” Mae said. “Landed in the sisters’ cabbage patch already running. Never looked back.”
She twisted when Jamie did and caught his elbow in her palm when he stumbled. Now a couple of people were joining them on the dance floor with the advent of a new song. This wasn’t a spectacle anymore, just a dance, and
