Chapter 36

“A honky-tonk,” I repeat. I’m sitting on the toilet in Cleo’s hotel bathroom, some kind of frozen eye mask elastic’d around my head. I can barely see her through its eye holes.

“Yes, Audrey.” She’s leaning over the sink, gluing a sparkly blue set of eyelashes in place. When I agreed to go out with the interns I didn’t really know what I was signing up for; when Silas dropped me off at Cleo’s door she took a long look at me and said, “Yep, I’ve got this.”

And now, the ice mask. I don’t ask what it’s for because I know it’s to run interference on the red, puffy catastrophe of my face. There’s a black wrap dress set out on the bed for me, Cleo’s. There’s the news that we are, apparently, going to a honky-tonk.

“I didn’t know that was a real thing,” I say. “I thought it was, like, a joke term.”

Cleo glances at me. She hasn’t once asked what’s wrong or tried to hug me or given me a lingering sympathetic look. She acts like she always does—like I’m irritating her and she’s on the edge of her patience. It feels like a gift.

“You thought ‘honky-tonk’ was a joke term?”

“It’s too corny to be true.”

She sighs, turning back to the mirror. “You know, Audrey, shitting on universally beloved things doesn’t make you cooler than other people. It just hurts their feelings.”

I blink. “Are honky-tonks universally beloved?”

“Yeah,” Cleo says, lowering back onto her heels from where she’s been leaning into the mirror. “Like gas station candy and Disney World and all the other basic shit refined people pretend they’re too good for.”

“I’m not a refined person,” I tell her, and she snorts. Glances at me.

“Maybe not in this exact moment, Captain Underpants.” She gestures at the ice mask, and I pull it off my face.

“Captain Underpants doesn’t even wear an eye mask.”

“Ah,” she says, returning to the mirror. “So you’re familiar with his work.”

My phone buzzes, sitting on the bathroom counter next to Cleo’s makeup bag. We both look at it.

DAD-O: I’m proud of you, mouse

I grab the phone off the counter and Cleo looks away, swallowing. The text makes me hate myself. The fact that I’m someone who needs to be comforted at all, that Dad and Camilla must have talked. What that conversation must have sounded like. And that there’s nothing to be proud of now.

I stare down at my bare feet on the tile floor. The white polish on my second-to-last toe is chipped and I hadn’t even noticed, which makes me feel completely out of control. Cleo draws a breath and I think it’s finally going to happen; she’s going to say something to console me and it’s going to send me right over the edge.

But she just says, “So can I call you ‘mouse’?”

And I laugh—this wet, halfway-to-tears sound—and Cleo smiles, reaching over to flick me in the shoulder.

“Go put that dress on,” she tells me. “We’re outta here in five.”

Broadway is a neon vein in the dark, so loud I think we’re there when we’re still three blocks away. The street is wide and carless and packed with people, shoulder to shoulder like the starting line of a charity 10K or some sort of postapocalyptic pileup. Everyone leaving town—the final, frantic beeline for the evac helicopters.

“What’re we looking for again?”

Mick’s right next to me, but I can hardly hear him. He’s wearing jeans and cowboy boots he bought this afternoon and a white T-shirt so thin and tight that I can see every hard line of his abdomen straight through it.

“Lady June’s,” Cleo shouts. Her cowboy boots are pearlescent, shining red and purple and blue as we pass the lit faces of three-story bars spilling country music into the street. Every building’s windows are open, thick with bodies dancing inside. I can’t hear myself think, and when I glance at Silas I understand that was the point of this.

“Do we know the cross streets?” he asks, and when Cleo shrugs he does, too. His eyes find mine as Cleo forges ahead, and I watch them catch on the dress she gave me—short and tight, though much less so by comparison on this street than it felt back at the hotel. I feel very warm. Silas smiles and tips his head after Cleo.

“Don’t dawdle, now.” Mick wraps an arm around my shoulders, steering me out of a bachelorette party’s line of fire. Their bride is in a white cowboy hat and looks like she’s been crying for a solid hour. “If we lose you, Camilla will kill us.”

“You won’t lose me,” I say, in the same moment Silas says, “We won’t lose you.”

“Can never be too careful,” Mick says, and I let him take my hand when he reaches for it. It makes me feel less out of place here—physically connected to someone who belongs. The bar lights play across his face and I think of his last name, moonlight, and how Mick really is that way—always shining, even in the dark.

“Glenna here?” Cleo shouts it at the bouncer half-propped on a stool under a sign shaped like cowboy boots. It’s pink and neon, buzzing into the dark, Lady June’s splashed across it.

“Who’s asking?” he says, and when he looks at Mick it’s so careful and so prolonged that I realize he’s checking him out. Mick grins wickedly, and Cleo waves her hand in front of the bouncer’s face.

“Hello? Tell her it’s Cleo Mori.”

“Tell her yourself,” he says, and when he juts his chin over Cleo’s shoulder a short Black woman in a tight denim dress materializes with a stamp in her hand. She hugs Cleo, rocking her back and forth, the entirety of her face split into a smile.

“Hey, you,” Glenna says when they pull apart. She stamps the back of Cleo’s hand, then motions for Mick to stick his out. “Y’all be good in there and don’t make me regret this.”

“We’ll be honorable as a pack of church ladies,” Cleo says, and when Glenna takes my hand she barks out a laugh that’s so huge and unselfconscious it makes me want to stay next to her all night.

“Maybe not that good,” she says, and Cleo’s hand darts out for my wrist.

“My big sister’s best friend,” she shouts, dipping her mouth close to my ear. Her fingers are still locked around my arm, pulling me into the crowd, and I can feel a hand on my back that I sincerely hope belongs to someone I know. It’s mobbed in here, hardly room to breathe. “They cut holes in all my bras when I was in middle school and now we love each other. So it goes.” She presses me against the bar next to her. “Beer?”

“Um, I don’t—” but there’s already a plastic cup of it in my hand, foamy and wet.

“To Nashville!” Cleo screams, loud and yet barely registering. The four of us cheers high in the air, like we’re about to play a soccer game and this is the huddle. “To being fucking hot and young and free!”

When everyone else takes a drink I do, too. It’s fizzy and cold, and it makes me feel like someone else. The stamp on the back of my hand is a cowboy boot with the letters OK inked inside it; I blink at it and decide that maybe I can be, just for now.

“I want to dance,” Mick says, his hips shimmying with the words. Cleo takes another big gulp of her beer and nods, pointing through the crowd toward a stage where three women are performing under pink lights.

I watch her mouth move to the words let’s go, and when they part the crowd away from the bar Silas looks at me.

“Dance?” he says, and when I reply he can’t hear me. So he ducks very close, his cheek right next to mine and my lips at his ear. His hair brushes my temple.

“I said I don’t.”

Silas pulls back to find my eyes.

“You don’t dance?” he says, and I shake my head. He smiles, and when he leans his mouth close to my ear I feel him breathe every word. “Not that type of person?”

Things can just be what they are, I hear him say. His voice soft in the tree house, his bare feet in the night air next to mine. You could change, and feel differently.

I want to feel differently. I want to claw out of the cage of myself.

“Maybe we could just try,” Silas says, and when someone squeezes into the bar beside me his arm comes around my back, pulling me gently toward him and out of the way. I think of his arms around me at the hotel this afternoon, holding me so tightly that I couldn’t unravel.

“Maybe,” I say. Silas smiles: easy, crooked, honest. He takes my hand to lead me toward the stage and I try to remember what this is: functional, way-finding, a way to keep me from getting lost. Mick held my hand in the street and Cleo’s constantly grabbing me. I don’t think about how different this feels, or the tether that snaps when Silas lets go.

He turns to face me in the center of the teeming crowd and I think I get it, why people like this. That there are so many of us we get to feel anonymous. That I can see Cleo and Mick nearby but only in fits and flashes, not enough to make them out or form a judgment or discern whether they belong. They just do.

The song changes and in the breath of silence Silas takes a sip of his beer, licks the foam from his lip. He has hair stuck to his cheekbone and as the woman onstage starts singing again I reach for it, someone outside myself just like everyone else in this room. I brush it away, and Silas looks at me in the red-and-orange dark. My hand falls and he catches it, his thumb moving over the fingernail marks on the soft underside of my arm. They’re red and angry but they’re small and I know he can’t see them in here. I know he finds them by memory.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell him.

“I know,” he says. And then he moves closer to me—by necessity maybe, the crowd pressing in as the song gets louder. His hand is still on my arm and he lifts it around him, dropping my wrist across his shoulder so I’m holding him in the pulsing dark. Our faces are very, very close. Silas looks at the floor and I look over the arch of his neck and when he starts moving to the music my body goes with his.

Mick is five feet away, kissing a tall man in a cowboy hat with big hands wrapped around Mick’s waist. They part and Mick’s head tilts back, a laugh moving through him. Cleo dances next to them with both arms in the air, screaming along with the song.

I close my eyes, feel Silas put a tentative hand on the middle of my back. Think, What am I doing?

And then, for once, I let myself get away with not having a good answer.

Ethan calls when we’re walking back to the hotel, at nearly one o’clock in the morning. Nearly two where he is. I’m so stunned to see his name glowing up at me in the middle of Broadway I nearly don’t answer in time.

“Hello?” I say, and Silas glances back from where he’s walking with Mick. Cleo has her arm hooked through mine, and when she sees the way Silas is looking at me she says loudly, “Who’s that?”

Her head’s right next to the phone pressed into my ear. Ethan says, “Audrey?”

“Yeah.” I pull my arm out of Cleo’s and take a few steps away from her. We just left the bar and Cleo’s pink-cheeked and bubbly; when I let go of her she wedges herself between Mick and Silas instead. Mick spent most of the night making out with His Tall Cowboy? and Cleo’s had more to drink than I could quite keep track of. Silas puts a steadying arm around her waist, and when he looks at me again I look away first.

“Who was that?” Ethan says. Broadway is still loud and I have to press a hand over my other ear to hear him.

“Cleo,” I say. “She’s the photography intern.”

There’s a pause, and I swear I can hear Ethan thinking. I know him so well it feels skeletal, like we share the same bones. “You sound different,” he says finally.

A man trips backward through the open door of the bar ahead of me, and I sidestep to avoid him. “Different how?”

“Breezy,” he says, and I feel my face screw into itself. “Maybe inebriated.”

“I had a beer and a half.”

Another pause. I draw a loud breath just to hear something on the line between us.

“Where?”

“With the interns.”

More silence. “I thought you were at dinner with your mom?”

I watch Silas’s heels ahead of me, the even pace of his footsteps. Ethan’s caught me in the lie but I can’t make myself give it to him. “And now,” I say, “it’s one in the morning.”

“I don’t understand,” Ethan says. “We don’t drink. I didn’t think you—I thought. I thought you’d be trying to find another position for the fall.”

There it is. Something sours at the back of my throat and I swallow it down. For a few fleeting moments I’d actually forgotten.

“Tonight?” I say, and I know I sound mad. Know, too, that I’ve never been mad at Ethan. “You thought I’d be doing that tonight?”

“When else?” Ethan says. His voice rises to match mine. “I called because I found something I thought you might be interested in. It’s only lab work but it starts in September and they’re still—”

“Ethan,” I say, and this time when Silas turns to look at me Mick and Cleo do, too. “Please stop trying to fix me.”

“Fix you?” His voice is immediate in my ear, incredulous. “I’m trying to help you, Audrey. This is what we do. If you don’t want my help, just say it.”

It’s the beer, maybe. It’s the way Cleo is looking at me, open-mouthed. It’s that Ethan has reached inside this moment and reminded me of my shame—of who I really am when this night is over. And it’s the fact that I’m so, so excruciatingly sick of myself.

I say, “I don’t want your help.”

Ethan’s quiet for too long. It’s unlike him, to be at a loss for words. I know I’ve fucked up as soon as the words are out, and I know it more when he draws a breath so sharp it’s audible.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll just see you in Miami, then.”