The Transformation Of Amy Lunaro: Chapter Thirty Two. {fiction}
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It was 7 o’clock, and Amy and Sadie had been lying in bed listening to Lou’s jazz band echo across the field from the main hall for over an hour.
Amy was scrolling through her phone with an adamant feeling that she was missing real life to look at others’ lives on Instagram. She remembered an Anthropology course in college where the professor had told her how eventually technology would become a mode of keeping us all separate and asleep.
And Amy felt separate, and asleep. She’d lit a fire but kept the windows open to hear the dance, and she tapped her bare feet on the comforter impatiently to the music that drifted in through the screens.
Sadie swished her tail along with Amy’s impatient feet, then she pawed at Amy’s belly. Amy absentmindedly reached over and petted Sadie’s head, her eyes still locked into the Instagram scroll. Then Sadie whined, low and deep.
Amy looked over at her.
“What, girl?” she asked. But she knew, Sadie wanted out. And so did Amy.
Amy slid off the bed and plunked her slippered feet on the floor.
“Fine,” she said. She went to the mirror and pulled back her hair. She cat-eyed her eyes with black liner and painted her lips red. She guessed she looked alright, although she still barely recognized herself.
She pulled a big black V-neck cashmere sweater over her head and slipped into tight jeans, and then she walked through a cloud of her mother’s Tresor perfume.
“We’ll just go for a second,” she told Sadie, pulling suede black moccasins on. “But we are not,” and she shook a finger at the pup, and then she did that thing where she pointed into her eyes with two fingers and then Sadie’s eyes with two fingers, “do you hear me, not speaking to him. Don’t run up and be all nice.”
Sadie stared at her blankly.
“Don’t play dumb,” Amy said to Sadie. “Don’t take his side. He should have told me. When he felt that electric current running through us, he should have told me he was married.”
Sadie slinked to the door and scratched at it with her long black nails.
“Fine,” Amy said. “We’re going. In and out. Just a quick appllearance.”
Amy opened the door and stepped through it dramatically, as Sadie lurched out and bounded across the moonlit fields.
But she found her step became less and less confident as she approached the big wooden building, with its gooey golden light gleaming from its windows, and the sound of chatter and saxophone and strings spilling out its doors.
By the time she reached it she was positively shaking, like a wallflower showing up stag to a high school dance. Sadie shot up across the porch and in through the open door.
“Sadie,” Amy hissed.
“Sadie!!!” she yell-whispered. Amy put one trepidatious moccasin on the porch. She craned her neck through the doors to look for her, but Sadie was gone, she’d disappeared into the bodies of the dance. With one quick peek, Amy didn’t recognize anyone she knew, meaning Alba, Louis, or him. She stepped back into the darkness.
She’d lost all confidence, and as she waited for it to return, she lurked outside of the hall like Michael Myers, before completely giving up and then turning to head back to her cabin.
She walked alongside the hall in the grass, stealing glances through the windows, pretending she didn’t know what she was looking for, when he caught her eye.
He was dancing in the center of the room with Alba to Louis’s sax solo of “Moonlight in Vermont,” swirling Alba round and round as she laughed like a child. Amy smiled despite herself, and she felt her heart soften, even sigh.
He caught Alba, in her black dress and big goddessy crystal pendant, as she fell back into his strong arms. He was clad in a plaid shirt with a cotton tan tie. Alba was right. He was a good man. And dammit, a good dancer. And he hadn’t done anything malicious not to tell her he was married. He was just being her friend.
And anyway, it wasn’t any of Amy’s business. They had just met, despite the feeling she had known him since before she even existed. She told herself she had probably invented the chemistry she had felt because it had been so long since she had felt it, and we invent what we need.
We tell ourselves what we want to believe.
She stepped a little closer to the barn to watch the dance. Todd and Alba swirled away through the crowd and she suddenly lost sight of them, and, trying to get a better view, she climbed up on an old wooden crate that sat beneath the window.
She rested her elbows on the sill, outside with the crickets and the breeze in the trees. Inside they were gleeful and warm, their cheeks glowed and laughter rose in the air.
And Amy felt this was all too familiar, to be outside looking in, and she wanted to get up, to go in or go home, but she was transfixed, under a spell, watching Todd and Alba dance. She was lost in the way Todd moved, with the grace he held Alba, with that glint of both sweetness and mischief in his eyes.
Alba’s head rested dreamily on his shoulder as he glided her around the floor.
It was then Todd looked up and caught sight of Amy, perched on the crate, staring in. She ducked fast. At first she thought it was possible he hadn’t really seen her, just something out of the window, but when she peeked up to check, he was still looking at her.
She rose her hand slowly, sheepishly, and then he took his hand off Alba’s back and raised his in return. And for a moment, once again, it was just the two of them staring at each other, frozen in time, and she sat there on that old crate, waiting until she knew what to do.
She knew this might be the last time she ever saw him, and she never wanted to stop looking at him. She never wanted to break the gaze.
But then softly, he smiled at her, and then softly, she smiled back, and her whole body melted, and her heart banged alive in her chest — like someone waking up in a coffin and demanding to break out and be free again. She was startled by the feeling in her chest, she had forgotten it was possible.
She pulled her hand out of the air and clasped it to her heart that gasped for breath, as if it was coming up for air after lifetimes.
She was looking at him like that, her mouth open, clutching her heart, and then she felt the crate go crashing beneath her.
This is an ongoing series from a forthcoming fiction novel by Sarah Durham Wilson of DOITGIRL.
Tune in weekly for the next chapter in ‘The Transformation of Amy Lunaro’.
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