“Why?” Hal takes the tumbler that Tio—the barkeeper—offers.
“They’re here for the pleasure of money and art—names don’t matter.”
“I wish that were true.” He downs half his drink, and the ice clinks hard against the glass.
Leaning nearer to him, I say, “I’ll call you anything you want tonight.”
He studies me, eyes lingering on my mouth as I smile around my cigar. So long I feel a jerk of panic that he sees through my disguise. “Sir,” he murmurs, close enough I notice the strangely spicy smell of his dark cigarette. “You already know who I am.”
“True.” My heart pounds and I can’t decide if I want him flirting with me because he knows what I am or because he doesn’t. “I’m O.”
“Oh,” Hal King says, shaping his mouth around it. He pops his tongue so a ring of smoke escapes.
I laugh, forgetting to modulate my voice, but Hal doesn’t seem to notice how girlish it is. As Rose and the piano pick up, I stand and weave my way toward the dance floor. A girl named Patrice holds out her hand and I catch it. I spin her into the crowd and we leap into the fast fox-trot. She grins and I mirror it, teasingly keeping our hips apart.
Every time I glance toward the bar, Hal is watching me.
At song’s end, I kiss Patrice at the corner of her mouth, and Hal is there, standing beside the parquet dance floor with a tumbler in each hand. “Join me,” he says, and I do, throwing my arm around his shoulders. His free hand snakes around my waist and blood rushes my ears.
I’ve never been so lost in laughing and alcohol and hot, delicious conversation! Hal and I take over a table, and he tells me stories about his late father, about his mother and uncle who married her a mere month past the elder Mr. King’s death. Hal laments into his drink, and I moan and cry protest at the right moments, leaning in to cuss a wild streak about his obviously treacherous uncle. I whisper to him that my father’s said everyone expects Hal’s uncle to run in the next year’s election, and with Mrs. King’s support he’ll get in. Hissing, Hal slumps back into the booth. I gasp at his disheveled beauty and tell him I choose to come here because here I can be whoever I wish, not the person my parents expect.
“We can do anything here, Hal,” I say, and he immediately looks at my mouth.
“Brother,” he murmurs, “you make me believe it.”
I can’t breathe, but Tio yells out last call. Like Cinderella I leap up. “I’ve got to go!”
Hal catches my wrist. “Come back tomorrow.”
Two nights in a row is a thing I’ve never done. It’s too likely Daddy will notice I’m gone, too dangerous to think a cab driver would remember me.
But I say, “Tomorrow.”
Our second night together is more lavish and desperate than the first. Hal arranges a private booth and our own bottle of sixteen-year-old whiskey. Between her sets, Rose joins us, purring lyrics into my ear to make me blush because Hal loves it so. “It makes you seem like a sixteen-year-old virgin,” he says, caressing one long, bare finger down my jaw. “Do you even have a beard yet, O?”
I want to press my face to his and whisper my secret. “You’ve not so much beard yourself, my prince,” I say.
He barks a laugh. “King,” he corrects.
“But your father was the king, so. My prince.”
Rose interrupts, “You’re both such pups!” and she kisses us full on the mouths, one after the other.
As she kisses Hal, his knee presses into mine under the table. It thrills me into knocking my tumbler too hard against the wood as I suddenly set it down.
When Rose leaves for her next song, I slide along the round booth and say to Hal, whose eyes are bright and lips swollen, “Let’s get out of here.”
“And go where?” He shoots the last of his whiskey.
I only smile and hand him his soft black gloves.
Outside it’s filthy dark and a wet, cold wind cuts under my collar. I dash across the street, loving how easy it is to run with no skirt to fight, no delicate slippers that will ruin in rain. Hal comes after, ducking with me between an old boardinghouse and a shut-down corner pub. The damp street cobbles glint like strings of black pearls in the moonlight. There’s a slim public garden tucked on the other side of the block, which I discovered last month when I stumbled out of a cab that dropped me off in the wrong place.
I push through the creaky gate into layers of fallen leaves. A satyr fountain stands silent on the small lawn, spilling no water from its pursed mouth.
“O, this is gorgeous,” Hal says in a hushed tone. “It’s like the whole city vanished outside.”
Emboldened by the moon, the full, madness-approving moon, I grab his hand and turn him under my arm into a waltz. It’s no easy feat from my shorter stature, but he smiles and falls into the woman’s steps, hand firm on my shoulder.
We dance around the satyr, to the music of the wind and the rhythm of the blood in my ears.
“O,” he whispers as we slow.
I put my hands on his face and kiss him. At first it’s only a hard press of lips, his cold nose shocking beside mine. Then Hal grabs the lapels of my jacket. He drags me onto my toes and opens his mouth under mine.
It is more than a kiss. I spill out of myself, and the garden spins in dizzy circles. I strip my gloves off and dig my fingers into his hair. As he kisses me, I can feel the muscles of his jaw stretch and contract beneath my thumbs.
A moan grows out of my throat as he runs his mouth down my neck, and his hands sink to my hips. One finger flips aside my jacket and hooks around the belt on my hips.
I tear away.
The violent shove trips me and I land on the cold, frosty grass, panting. I’m a girl! I cover my burning mouth. One more inch and he’d know it, too. Shaking, I stare up at him. Against the moon, Hal is a dark ghost.
“O?” he whispers, crouching before me.
“Hal.” I reach out and touch his bottom lip with a bare finger. My gloves are discarded somewhere like so many dead leaves.
“You’ve never been kissed before,” he guesses, his voice low and full of something I don’t understand.
I snatch back my hand. “Was it so bad?”
But Hal smiles. “No, kitten, it made me feel like I’d never been kissed before, either.”
My fingers hover over my own mouth, and as he watches me the garden opens up. I can see the entire galaxy of stars, of lives and loves, of families and cities and graveyards, of forests and foreign mountains, the oceans and plains.
And here is Halden King in the center of it all. My center.
No one but my brother notices the shift in my daylight melancholy. Instead of merely being distracted, I’m afflicted by smiles at inappropriate moments, prone to fewer snide observations, and given to sighing happily when Daddy plays a new ragtime record after supper Sunday night. The music is so delightful, my memories of Hal so consuming, I pull Lars to his feet to dance with me. My serious brother manages to enjoy himself, afterward chasing me to my bedroom. He follows me inside and bars the door with his body.
“Phe, what has gotten into you?”
I flit about, unclipping my hair and smiling over my shoulder, wishing I could tell him. Instead I say, “Life, brother! My life is wonderful.”
He narrows his eyes, but I see the very moment he decides he’d rather have me happy even if I keep the reason for it a secret. The understanding lifts his eyebrows just a tick. My brother shakes his head, sits on my bed with his legs stretched out over the quilt, and asks me to read to him from whatever novel I’ve lately been enjoying most. It’s a love story, of course, filled with passionate declarations and racing to stop boats from leaving the docks and tragic betrayal.