I Wish

Chapter 41

For a little while, like a complete and total i***t, I decided to take Ivy’s advice and just enjoy myself. After all, she wasn’t kidding when she said that any little girl would go nut’s here. I’d mentioned how beautiful it was before yeah? How wonderful the food was, was definitely brought up? Okay, good. Now, taking a moment for the atmosphere… I’d never understood what someone had meant when they tried to describe places that had an atmosphere. For a start, everyone wore shoes to the party but they only lasted five minutes. There was soft music that changed and evolved as you made your way around the gardens. It was interspersed with clinking, talking and laughing. It seemed to be a popular theme to laugh loudly, and laugh often. We drank, sometimes alcoholic and over half the time not. It was nice to know that we could actually interact without Ivy feeling the need to get me smashed so I don’t think too hard about things.

“What would you do?” she asked me, sitting perched on the edge of her chair and smiling brightly. Eyes glittering like green multifaceted crystals. 

“Huh?” I asked, blinking back into the conversation, because it was easy to just listen to her talk about nothing. Listening to her ramble happily triggered a type of body warming contentment that would be terrifying to speculate on once it wore off.

“If you were suddenly dropped a year before the pandemic hit, and you knew you had X amount of time before everything ended up the way it was now, what would you do?” she clarified brightly. It was quite disheartening to realise that beyond things that were below an abysmally low bar, I did actually know.

“Exactly the same as I did I think, just more, and not taken for granted,” I settled on. Ivy curled both hands under her chin, and tilted her head to look at me curiously.

“More what?” she chirped. Ahh…

“More Maccas runs. More going out with friends after school. More shopping in stores rather than buying things online, and pick-up netball games, and barbecues at the park on weekends, and random conversations with total strangers,” I said, shaking my head at how simple all of these things had seemed before. She nodded, but didn’t say anything. Like she understood the sentiment but not the particulars. About an hour of drinking, talking, and eating the most delicious meal anyone had ever pulled out in my life, they’d set up a dance floor in the center of the tables. 

“Don’t you need an actual floor for it to be a dance floor?” I asked in a daze. Tree’s of some description had been pulled up from the ground with actual magic to build posts, thin and flexible branches stretching to reach each other forming a perfect square. Ivy, the plant and not the person, wound itself around in decoration and I suspected structural support. The end result was a towering partially closed pavilion that opened freely to the sky. 

“Nope, just an allocated space for people to dance,” Ivy offered, and held out her hand. I bit my lip and looked from her to the others who were crowding the floor now that it was finished. Once I would have been the one dragging her out there to dance, and in memory of that girl that I was starting to accept was gone, I took her hand. She squealed.

“I told you it wouldn’t kill you to loosen up,” she crowed as we got closer to the horde of people filing in. It wasn’t hard for us to get in there, everybody and their dog were moving out of the way gracefully enough that we had a straight shot to anywhere we wanted to go. I’ll admit, my legs were still shaking from our earlier activities but when I saw what passed for dancing. My breath was stolen clean from my lungs, I had a insitinctive lighting strike of moment when the only thought going through my head was along the lines of, ‘Ah s**t-fuck.’ 

“I’m in way over my head,” I muttered, my brain trying to make sense of what my eyes were telling me we were seeing. Ivy watched me cautiously enough that I knew she was gauge for some kind of reaction. The whole thing left me feeling like I was taking part in some kind of experiment without being told. 

“What do you see?” she enquired softly, squeezing my hand. I swallowed and tried to form an appropriate answer to the question. They were spinning. Lots of spinning and laughing and chaos, and lifts. Which was what was so mentally challenging. My head insisted that they were lifts. My eyes were contesting that pretty f*****g vehemently, and claiming they were floating. It was like remembering someone's name, but forgetting entirely what they looked like. I had a feeling that this wasn’t what she was asking for.

“Glittery, and colours,” I said finally, “It’s like… people have colours around them. The air is sparkly. It’s not…” Ivy cut me off before I could finish my question.

“No it’s not drugs. You don’t have to ask every time, I learnt my lesson from last time,” she grumbled, but it was so half-hearted and adorable that I knew she wasn’t really complaining. Ivy began to tug my hand again to start us forwards, and I yanked back instinctively. 

“I can’t do that,” I told her both frankly, and frankly embarrassed, “I don’t know how.”

“I do,” she replied with a smile, “I can get us both through this.” Have you ever heard someone say something, and there are so many unsaid implications attached to it that you can feel it. Resting in the air around you, and coming to settle on your shoulders. Time starts to clearly move just that little bit slower while they wait for you to respond to whatever they’ve said. Call me crazy, because I know that things have been going too well for them to continue to do so, but I was starting to think that whatever it was that was going to go wrong wasn’t going to be Ivy’s fault.

“We can do that?” I double checked in disbelief. She nodded, and I gave up fighting. Following her out into the middle of the floor, other’s crowd off to line the sides until we’re the only two standing on the floor. My breath freezes in my lungs, and my hands shake in hers. This was not what I had in mind, I thought somewhat hysterically. I was thinking that we could blend into the crowd so that if this went horribly wrong, because I was so unskilled that Ivy couldn’t compensate for it, then it wouldn’t be obvious. That was starting to look less likely than a pipe dream, with every eye on us. Now the way I see it, I had two choices. The first, make a scene and get the hell out of here, running screaming from the potential of failure and thus making it moot point anyway. On the other hand, I could trust her, and maybe we could pull this off. It was a hard choice, considering that if I trusted her and I was wrong that pretty much just defaulted me to option a. How long had it been since I had tried for something? Really tried, with failure as a possibility? 

Today I decided, and when she led me across the floor and was too nervous to breathe without it tingling. It was something about the way her arms were wrapped around me, or something about how only the lightest of touches were enough to get me to move as she needed me to. Maybe it was how dizzying all the spinning we were doing was, or the literal otherworldly quality to the music and the goosebumps it left in its wake. At times I was certain that we were floating. People were sitting perched on the branches forming the pavilion like they were monkey bars, and one by one the people surrounding us joined us back on the floor. 

“Tell me when you get tired,” she whispers gently in my ear. It sends the acute, baffling, and downright irritating fear that when the song was over so was the dance hurling far into the back of my mind and I smiled at her. The sun sets and stars come out before that happens, floating balls of light keeping us from being stranded in the dark. My legs are jello, and the hand around my waist was the only thing keeping me upright. I was going to regret this later, but not now. In fact we were very much lost in our own little bubble of happiness. It forcibly popped when we got back to our table and a furious looking Kaede was waiting for us. Ivy’s face became more and more expressionless the closer we got, and I sighed. This prick was going to ruin a perfectly lovey date, I could just feel it.