Page 100 of Go Luck Yourself
I go along with it, barely, the words feeling heavy on my tongue. “Irish dancing? What do you think?”
He grins. That asshole. Grins like that’ll make everything okay.
It doesn’t.
It definitely doesnot.
Nope.
Shit.
“I can teach you,” he tells me.
“Can you? Finn and Siobhán seemed to think otherwise.”
“They would na know talent if it kicked them in the shin.”
“Which you probably did, according to their estimation of your talent.”
He smirks. “Ah, go on, have your fun slagging me off.”
My eyes widen. “What-ing you off?”
“Slagging. Like—eh—taking the piss. Having a laugh.” His smile is insufferable, sharp and manic. “What did you think it meant, boyo?”
I think it means you’re messing with me again.
I wait for even the barest gloss of self-preservation to crackle in my chest. Like any amount ofI shouldn’t let him off the hook so easily,and I’d be out of the tent so fast.
But nothing comes.
Now that I’m giving myself permission to be selfish, that apparently also means I’ve lost all common sense.
“Sure.” My voice is clipped. “Teach me to do an Irish dance. God, this’ll be good.”
He locks his hand on the back of my elbow. His cologne is a drug and so is how angry I am, how exhausted from that shit with my mom, how confused because he still feels like a soft place to land.
Loch steers me into the crowd, not quite dragging me like he did a bit ago, and I hate how much I like him taking charge.
On the stage, a band draws a riotous song from their instrumentsand dances as forcefully as the people below, sweaty and grinning. There doesn’t seem to be a designated dance floor, just a free-for-all of fun, and Loch stops us a few paces within the crowd, the sheer, unadulteratedforceof the joy around us nearly knocking me off my feet.
Some of the people closest to the stage are wearing traditional Irish dance outfits, decorated emerald vests and bodices over frilled skirts and leggings, though they don’t seem to be performing, merely enjoying the song like everyone else. Most people are trying some moves, laughing when they land a step, laughing more when they falter. Legs kick and hands spiral in the air and a group of four people merges, parts, reshaping across the floor in a fluid ebb like the song is physically guiding them into geometric designs.
Loch comes up alongside me, the hard plane of his chest down the length of my arm. I get halfway to facing him and stop so he’s beyond my eyesight.
The song transitions to a new one, still uproariously fast and saturated with happiness. The crowd cheers and more people pour inside to dance until there’s enough bodies packed in here that the two of us won’t be targeted for sucking too much.
He adjusts his hold on me until I face him.
The music blares around us, its potency a cocoon.
Loch walks into me, forcing me backwards, and I’m hit with such a vivid overlay of the way he pressed around me last night that I trip. But he grabs my other arm and holds me steady, and we’re two stones in a sea of dancing and kicking. The crowd’s joy and laughter thuds against our stationary bubble, relentless, determined for us to feel this joy, for us to laugh too.
My hands come up, fisted against his chest, the tempo of his heart going so fast my knuckles rattle. I think we should be dancing, or moving, or doingsomething,but when my gaze connects with his, there’s only one thing I want to do and I’m not sure it’s something we should do with reporters lurking around.
But his eyes intensely darken on me, and yeah, yes, I would kiss him in public. I’d kiss him anywhere. I’m stretched bubble thin for him.
I move in closer, chin angling up, but the moment I do, Ifeelmy own stupidity, pushing too far in a drive of need, not reason. None of this has been driven by reason, and I hear everything he said to me in the parking lot paired alongside my internal monologue from last night when I chose to kiss him over doing my duty, a Greatest Hits rebound of my screw-ups the past two days.
