Page 52 of Best Woman
My least favorite part of winter in New York is how hot it always is inside. I dressed for the twenty-degree February weather, but now I’m overheated in the boiling-hot basement we’re all shoved into.
I’ve lost Kyle and River in the throng, but onstage, Daytona is giving go-go realness, shaking her ass and whipping her hair as a monotonous techno track blossoms into Madonna’s “Ray of Light.” I can’t help but start to wiggle myself out of the funk I’ve been in all night—all winter, if I’m being honest.
My only dance move is classic white girl, running my hands up my torso and lifting them over my head, tossing my hair side to side.
I’ve been growing out my bangs, and they stick awkwardly to my sweaty forehead, but I allow myself not to care for the moment and give over to the music.
Or at least to the ketamine River and I did in the bathroom twenty minutes ago.
I’m so used to being in my head and all I want is to let go and be in my body, every imperfect inch of it.
I sing along at the top of my lungs, but even Madonna isn’t enough to keep me from noticing her weaving through the bodies toward me.
The lights overhead bathe Kim in blue as she reaches me.
It’s that point in the night—morning, really—when you don’t want to look at anyone too hard because we’ve all sweated most of our makeup off and everyone’s pupils are a bit too dilated, but Kim looks as unruffled as ever in a black T-shirt, tight black jeans.
Wow, she looks incredible. I’m nowhere near as put together, but I am wearing a pair of Proenza Schouler boots River pilfered from Hannah G’s closet in the days following her cancellation—a series of eleven-year-old-tweets with a veritable orgy of slurs that had absolutely not been sent anonymously by a disgruntled stylist who had been pushed out of one too many sprinter vans, thank you very much!
The boots are black and heavy and my mom would hate them. I wear them almost every day.
I slow my awkward gyrating down a bit as she reaches me, but don’t stop swaying entirely because honestly the room is spinning a little, and Kim nods her head to the beat as her eyes sweep over me.
That’s a good sign, I don’t think she’d dance during a confrontation.
We just stand there dancing for a moment, which is very surreal but also kind of sexy. It’s working for me.
“I’m still sorry,” I shout over the music.
“I know,” she shouts back, and for a moment I think that’s it, which would be fine.
But she moves closer, lets the crowd around us push us up against each other so we’re really dancing together.
I remember what it felt like to be under her, over her.
I remember her arm around my waist. I remember her staring off into the moonlight on a golf course in Florida.
She ducks down to place her mouth against my ear. “I missed you,” she says, breath hotter than the swampy air around us.
“I missed you too,” I tell her, tentative.
With the storm of her anger and my thorny defensiveness feeling very far away, I let myself follow the impulse to rest my head into the crook of her shoulder, breathing into her neck.
She smells like cigarettes and sage. Tentatively, I wrap my arms around her.
It can’t be that easy. Although, I suppose, none of this was easy.
“Is this…are we…”
“I don’t know,” she says, hands wrapping around my waist. Mine twine behind her neck. “Let’s find out.”
It’s too hot in here. Sweat is trickling down my neck. My feet are aching in a pop star’s stolen boots. But I’m holding the whole world in my arms.
And I feel like I just got home …