SOMETHING TO SEE
1726 Words
The bass hit her chest before she even cleared the doorway.
Sera stopped just inside the entrance of the dorm lounge and took it in, the colored lights strobing red and blue across every surface, the wall of bodies moving in the semi-dark, the smell of perfume and spilled drinks and the particular electric humidity of a room full of people who had decided tonight was for forgetting things.
Phones were raised everywhere, capturing everything, discarding nothing.
She had not wanted to come.
She had said this to Mia approximately seven times between the dorm room and the elevator and twice more in the hallway outside, and Mia had responded to all nine objections with the same expression, the one that said you're coming and we both know it so let's skip the part where you pretend otherwise.
"No backing out," Mia said now, grabbing her hand and pulling her through the crowd.
"You promised."
"I said maybe."
"Maybe means yes and you know it."
Sera exhaled and let herself be pulled.
She was wearing a black dress, Mia's choice, borrowed without much negotiation, shorter than anything she would have selected herself.
It clung to her waist and hips in a way that felt foreign after months of hoodies and oversized everything.
She felt exposed.
She felt like herself and not at the same time, like someone had taken the Sera Hollins that existed under all the armor and put her in a room full of people without the armor.
It was deeply uncomfortable.
And then the whispers started.
"Who is that?"
"She's stunning."
"She always wears baggy clothes, I had no idea she's that hot.”
Sera kept her chin up and her pace steady and told herself the heat in her cheeks was from the crowd and not from the fact that people were looking at her like she was something worth looking at and she had no idea what to do with that.
Mia spun toward her, eyes lit up,absolutely thriving.
"I told you. You look incredible."
Mia shoved her lightly toward the dance floor. "Stop thinking. Just move."
The music shifted, something heavier, slower, with a beat that moved through the floor and up through the soles of her feet.
Sera started small.
A sway.
Shoulders first, then hips, finding the rhythm the way she found everything,
carefully, then all at once.
The crowd gave her space. She wasn't sure when that happened.
The adrenaline moved through her like something warm and reckless, the kind she usually only felt at the gym, hitting something, building herself back up from the inside out.
And then, because Mia was cheering and the beat dropped at exactly the right moment and Sera had spent six weeks being the girl who flinched at nothing and felt everything alone, she let herself go.
Her hips rolled with the music, slow and deliberate and completely unbothered.
She bent forward, let the beat take over, and twerked, once, twice, easy and unhurried, like she had always known how to do this and had simply been waiting for the right room.
The crowd erupted.
Whistles. Cheers. A ring of phones raised in the same moment.
Sera laughed, real, surprised, slightly delighted by her own nerve, and kept moving.
Zade had been at the bar for twenty minutes.
He had come because Zack had asked three times and he had nothing better to do and the apartment had been too quiet since Nova went to bed.
He had not come for this.
He had not come to stand with his drink going warm in his hand while every functioning part of his brain ground to a halt.
But there she was.
In the middle of the dance floor, in a black dress that had no business existing, moving like she had been holding this back for months.
He didn't move.
He couldn't have if he tried.
Every line of her, the curve of her waist, the roll of her hips, the way she bent forward and came back up with that specific confidence of someone who had stopped caring what the room thought, hit him somewhere below rational thought. His jaw tightened.
His hand around the glass tightened.
Something hot and possessive moved through his chest and he had absolutely no interest in examining it.
"You're drooling," Adien said pleasantly from beside him.
"I'm not."
"Your jaw is on the floor, Calloway."
"f**k off, Adien."
Adien did not walk away. Neither did Zack or Leo.
They stood in a row at the bar, watching him pretend not to watch Sera Hollins own the dance floor, and said nothing, which was somehow worse than anything they could have said.
The waiter appeared at Sera's elbow between songs, young, smiling, a tray balanced in one hand with a single glass on it.
Something pink and sparkling, catching the light in a way that made it look expensive.
"Compliments of the party," he said, already moving on to the next person.
Sera hesitated.
Glanced at Mia, who was already three feet away laughing at something Xander had said.
"Mia,"
"Just one drink, Sera!" Mia called back without turning around.
"You've earned it!"
Sera looked at the glass. Pink. Fruity.
She didn't see the faint shimmer in the liquid that shouldn't have been there.
She drank it.
It tasted like fruit and sweetness and nothing dangerous at all.
The warmth came within minutes.
Not the warmth of alcohol, she knew what that felt like from the occasional drink with Mia, the gradual loosening of things.
This was different. Faster. Total.
Like someone had turned a dial from the inside without asking permission.
The music got louder.
The lights got brighter.
Everything took on a specific, heightened quality, colors more saturated, sounds more immediate, the air itself feeling charged in a way it hadn't before.
Her body felt light and strange and thrillingly outside her own control.
She laughed at something that wasn't that funny.
She spun once, twice, and didn't feel dizzy.
She felt, unstoppable.
Mia appeared at her elbow, eyes narrowing.
"Sera. Hey. Look at me."
Sera turned, grinning. "I'm fine."
"You don't look fine. You look ," Mia's expression shifted, concern sharpening into something more urgent.
"What did you drink?"
"Just the one they gave me.
The pink one."
Mia's head turned fast, scanning the room.
Her eyes found Alicia Quinn at the far wall, arms crossed, smiling with the particular satisfaction of someone watching a plan execute itself.
Mia's stomach dropped.
"Sera,"
But Sera was already moving.
She didn't know it was him at first.
Her vision had softened at the edges, the room blurring slightly, everything too warm and too bright and too much, and then there was a solid presence at the bar and her body moved toward it the way bodies move toward warmth when everything else has gone liquid and uncertain.
She registered height.
Dark eyes.
The particular stillness of someone who didn't move when the crowd moved around them.
She was close before she processed who it was.
And then she knew.
Some part of her that was still functioning clearly enough knew, and the part that should have stopped her had apparently clocked out for the evening.
Zade's expression changed when he saw her coming.
Something moved through his eyes, fast, complicated, not quite controlled.
He straightened off the bar.
"Sera," Low. Warning.
She didn't stop.
She moved into his space with the unhurried confidence of someone operating outside their own guardrails, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off him, close enough that there was no performance left in either of them, just the compressed heat of months of war and tension and carefully maintained distance collapsing into nothing.
Her hands found his shoulders. Light.
Testing.
His entire body went rigid.
"What are you doing," he said, voice rough and quiet and directed somewhere in the vicinity of the last functioning wire of his self-control.
She tilted her head, eyes heavy and dark and not entirely focused, and rolled her hips against him, slow, deliberate, the music pulling her body into a rhythm that had nothing careful about it.
She pressed her chest against his, close enough that he could feel every breath she took, her hips moving in slow, grinding circles against him, her body finding his with a precision that felt less like dancing and more like something neither of them had names for yet.
His hands came up.
Stopped an inch from her waist.
Every instinct he had said touch her.
Every rule he had ever made said don’t.
Hovered there, trembling with the specific effort of someone who had decided something and was losing the argument with themselves in real time.
She arched into him, her lower body pressing harder, the grind deepening, her breath warm against the side of his neck.
His jaw clenched so tight she could see the muscle jumping.
His hands were still not touching her, but the distance had become almost nothing less than a breath, the heat between his palms and her waist its own physical thing.
"Sera." His voice had dropped to something dangerous and fractured.
"Stop."
She didn't stop.
She rolled her hips again, her body flush against his from chest to thigh, slow and devastating and completely unaware of what she was dismantling in him.
A sound moved through him, low, involuntary, immediately suppressed, and his hands finally, finally closed around her waist.
Not to pull her closer.
Not to push her away.
Just, held.
Gripping her like something he didn't know what to do with.
Like something he was terrified to keep and more terrified to let go.
The crowd around them had noticed.
Phones were raised.
Someone whistled.
The music kept moving and neither of them did.
Then Mia was there, cutting through the circle of spectators with her hand closing around Sera's arm, firm and urgent.
"Sera. Come with me. Right now."
Sera blinked.
The warmth in her head was still there, still thick, but Mia's voice cut through it with the particular authority of someone who loved her.
Zade's hands released her.
Slowly.
Like it cost something.
Sera let Mia pull her away from him.
She didn't look back.
But she felt his eyes, steady, burning, absolutely fixed, following her the entire length of the room.
- Writer
