Seduction of the Mind

The Floor and the Fire

The pub was one of those places that had decided aging was a virtue. Dark wood that remembered older conversations, brass taps polished by a thousand impatient hands, a jukebox in the corner that never quite worked but never quite died. After work, it filled the way a tired lung fills—slowly at first, then all at once.

Ethan sat wedged into a leather booth with John and three of their old colleagues from the hospital days. Pints stood sweating on cardboard coasters, leaving pale halos like evaporating moons. Someone had already ordered a second round and a basket of chips that disappeared as fast as the jokes.

They talked the way men did when they were trying to prove they weren’t thinking of anything that could hurt them: work, numbers, the market. One of them—Cal, dark-suited and over-caffeinated—was deep into a sermon about dividends, dollar-cost averaging, and how, if you weren’t in at least two index funds, you were essentially setting your retirement on fire.

“Real estate,” another guy said, picking salt off his thumb. “You can touch it. You can fix it. Stocks are ghosts.”

“Everything’s a ghost,” John muttered, raising his pint. “Cheers to that.”

Glasses clinked. The jukebox thudded into a new track, bass crawling through the floorboards. On the far side of the room, the dance floor—a rectangle of light between two pool tables—caught bodies like a net. Early evening crowds didn’t dance much, but there were always a few who couldn’t wait for darkness to give permission.

“Alright,” John said after the laughter thinned, leaning closer so his words wouldn’t travel. “How’s Helena?”

Ethan took a long drink before answering, letting bitterness and cold dull the edge of the name. He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, then let it fall. “What do you think?”

John’s mouth slanted. “That bad.”

“Worse,” Ethan said, and meant it.

John’s gaze softened—the kind of kindness men are allowed in public, brief and disguised. He tapped the table with two fingers, as if counting out beats he didn’t like. Then he leaned in, kept his voice low and conspiratorial.

“Look,” he said. “I’m not going to give you a lecture about vows or the soul or any of that stuff. You’ve bled for this marriage. Maybe”—he hesitated, then pushed through—“maybe a little fling would knock something loose. Reset the machine.”

Ethan shook his head. It wasn’t dramatic, more like a man acknowledging weather. He stared into the amber of his pint as if there might be a map in it. “That’s not a solution.”

“Oh, I agree,” John said easily. “It’s a distraction. I’m just suggesting a well-timed distraction can be medicinal.”

The table heard the last word and latched onto it with a chorus of groans and laughter. “Doctor’s orders!” Cal crowed. Someone else thumped the table. Ethan let the noise roll over him and away.

“Hey,” one of the guys said, squinting toward the dance floor. “Speaking of medicine… that’ll raise a pulse.”

It took a second for the others to register. Heads turned one by one, like sunflowers tracking light. Ethan turned last.

Two women were dancing in the center of the square. Not the drunk shuffle of strangers, not the coy sway of people trying to be seen—something closer to its own language. The shorter one had close-cropped hair, a white T-shirt tied at the waist, bare arms gleaming under the lights. The taller one… his chest hitched.

Vivienne.

Jeans. A loose black top that moved like water when she turned. Hair loose, a dark spill across her shoulders. No chain tonight—or if it was there, it hid in shadow. Her face was tilted toward the other woman the way flowers tilt toward heat.

They didn’t dance the way people perform for an audience. They danced like gravity had shifted between them. The shorter woman’s hands mapped Vivienne’s waist, then slid up her back; Vivienne’s fingers landed at the other’s hips, sure of their territory. They were smiling in that unguarded way that collapses distance—smiling with mouths and eyes and a kind of relief.

The bass thumped. Bodies around them blurred into scenery. The two of them were the thing on stage.

Ethan realized he was holding his breath. He didn’t know if she’d seen him—no, he was almost sure she hadn’t. There was a narrowness to her focus, a softness at the edges of it, like the rest of the room had been turned down on a dimmer. The shorter woman said something into Vivienne’s ear; Vivienne laughed, low and clean, and the sound punched a small, precise hole through his ribs.

Then it changed—their dance folding into something slower, the geometry of their bodies shifting until they were chest to chest. The shorter woman’s palm skimmed Vivienne’s side; Vivienne tipped her head back a fraction, an invitation that wasn’t theatrical so much as inevitable. The kiss began almost shy, then deepened—open-mouthed, patient, a conversation without grammar. The other woman’s hand slid up to the curve of Vivienne’s neck; Vivienne’s fingers tightened at her partner’s waist, knuckles white for a heartbeat, then relaxed.

It wasn’t obscene. It wasn’t even particularly showy. It was simply… absorbed. Two people falling into a space where the rest of the room didn’t exist.

Something heavy moved through Ethan’s chest, slow as a tide and twice as cold. Jealousy was too simple a word. It felt more like grief wearing venom—like the future he had carefully refused to imagine stepping politely out the door.

He turned back to the booth, the movement small but absolute, as if the act of facing away could unmake what he’d seen. His pint was still there, haloed by condensation. He could feel John watching him even before the hand landed on his shoulder.

“That doesn’t do it for you,” John said softly, no mockery in it this time, just observation, “then a fling won’t help.”

Ethan’s mouth twitched, a near-smile with no warmth. “I told you,” he said, voice level, “that’s not the answer.”

“Maybe the question’s wrong,” John said. He tipped his chin toward Ethan’s glass. “Or maybe you’re too decent for your own good.”

Ethan took another drink because it was something to do. The cold bit his tongue; the bitterness gave his mouth a task. On the dance floor, the song shifted; the crowd swelled. He kept his eyes on the table, on the ring of moisture his glass had left. Water found the groove of the wood and pooled there, a tiny, perfect circle.

“Who is she?” Cal asked, craning to get another look, oblivious to Ethan’s effort at neutrality. “The tall one. I swear I’ve seen her.”

“Probably not,” Ethan said, too quickly.

“Probably yes,” Cal insisted, already spinning a story about a gallery opening, a rooftop party, some imaginary night that made him the kind of man who collected interesting women. The others laughed and pelted him with sarcastic questions. The noise was a blessing; it blurred corners.

John leaned in again, voice pitched for Ethan alone. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Ethan said.

He wasn’t. Not with the old emptiness widening in him—an absence wrenching itself into a shape. Not with the sudden awareness of how thoroughly she had fooled him earlier that afternoon: the pale sweater, the easy smile, the gentle voice talking about hope and a date and the desire for something uncomplicated. The whole conversation had felt like a balm. Now he wondered if it had been anesthesia.

Maybe you imagined it, his mind said, unhelpful, the way minds do when they want to cut you and call it clarity. Maybe all the heat was yours. Maybe she never once stepped across the line—maybe you did, with your wanting. With your eyes. With your hunger for anything that wasn’t cold.

But the memory of the photo flared up—then the empty bubble, the “Oops 😏.” The chain against black leather. The six fused links he could see without looking. The south-facing dead. The cross without a chain in a hotel bin. He was too good a clinician to ignore the map those points were making, even if he hated the picture.

The song on the jukebox flipped again. The laugh track at the table shifted to a debate about whether anyone should ever buy crypto again. John excused himself to the restroom and, as soon as he left, the booth felt emptier in a way that had nothing to do with space.

Ethan allowed himself one glance back toward the dance floor. It was crowded now. He couldn’t pick them out of the cluster of bodies, and part of him was grateful for it. He focused instead on the plaque behind the bar that commemorated some long-ago darts league. People had loved winning here long before he started losing.

“You going to come out with us, Hale?” Cal asked, half standing, half dancing in place, all enthusiasm. “We’re hitting the pool table before the young sharks take it over.”

“I’ll sit this one out,” Ethan said. “My aim’s terrible.”

Cal clapped a (too hard) hand to his shoulder and dragged another guy away, leaving Ethan in an island of brief quiet. He let the noise recede, let the edges of the evening fuzz. For a minute, he tried to imagine an easy thing: going home to a house that didn’t feel like a courtroom, cooking for one without bitterness, sleeping without a fight inside his chest.

A shadow fell across the table. John dropped back into the booth, a fresh pint in hand. He slid it toward Ethan without comment.

“You don’t have to do that,” Ethan said.

“I know,” John said. “But I wanted to.”

They sat in silence for a while—real friendship, the kind that doesn’t fear its own quiet. Eventually, John tipped his chin toward the dance floor again without looking. “You ever think maybe,” he said, “the thing you want is both the danger and the cure?”

Ethan gave him a flat look. “You trying out lines for your midlife crisis?”

“I’m saving the red convertible for mine,” John said. “You can have the philosophy.”

Ethan huffed something that wanted to be a laugh. He took a swallow he didn’t taste.

Across the room, someone whooped.

When he finally rose to go—after the talk had circled back on itself twice and the air felt heavy with the last of the sweat and spilled beer—he didn’t look toward the dance floor again. He didn’t want to know whether they were still there, whether the kiss had become a cab ride, whether the night had opened like a door and welcomed them through it.

Outside, the air was cool enough to sting. Streetlights drew long yellow columns on the pavement; the city breathed in buses and let out taxis. Ethan stood under the awning for a second, hands in his pockets, as if weather might make a decision for him.

“Need a lift?” John asked, appearing at his shoulder like a conscience.

“I’ll walk,” Ethan said.

“Want company?”

“No.” He glanced at John’s concerned face. “But thank you.”