The bass was too loud to think and perfect for pretending.
He noticed her because she laughed half a second too late.
It was a small thing—but it snagged his attention. Her friends leaned in close, shouting over the music, and she mirrored them perfectly: head thrown back, hand on someone’s arm, lips parted in a bright, practiced smile. But the delay was there. Always a beat behind. Like she was translating a language everyone else spoke natively.
He watched longer than he meant to.
Not in the way men usually watched women in clubs—there was no hunger in it, no inventory-taking. It was curiosity. Recognition, almost. He’d seen that kind of performance before. Worn it himself, once.
She took a sip of her drink and didn’t taste it. He could tell. Her eyes skimmed the crowd without landing anywhere, searching for something she hadn’t named.
One of her friends said something that should’ve been funny. The group erupted. She laughed too, bright and sharp—perfect.
Her fingers tightened around her glass.
That was the tell.
He moved before he could overthink it, slipping through the crowd until he was standing beside her. Not too close. Close enough.
“You don’t have to keep doing that,” he said.
She turned, startled. Up close, the mask was even better—smooth, effortless. Her eyes flicked over him, assessing, dismissing, ready to return to her orbit.
“Doing what?” she asked lightly.
“Laughing on cue.”
There it was again—that flicker. A crack so small most people would miss it. But he didn’t.
Her smile held, but it strained now. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yeah, you do.”
Her friends were still talking, still dancing. No one noticed the shift. Or maybe they did and chose not to. It’s easier that way—keeping the rhythm intact.
“You don’t even know me,” she said, a hint of steel creeping in.
“No,” he agreed. “But I know that look.”
She scoffed softly, turning her body away, angling back toward her group. “You’re projecting.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe you’re exhausted.”
That made her pause.
Just for a second. But it was enough.
The music swelled, a drop hitting hard enough to shake the floor. Around them, people shouted, hands in the air, alive in a way that demanded witnesses.
She wasn’t looking at her friends anymore.
“What do you want?” she asked, quieter now.
“Nothing.”
A lie, maybe. Or not. He hadn’t planned this far.
“I just thought—” He stopped, searching for something that wouldn’t sound like pity. “It looks lonely. That’s all.”
Her jaw tightened. “I’m not lonely.”
“Okay.”
He didn’t argue. That seemed to unsettle her more than anything else.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The noise pressed in, but it felt distant somehow, like they’d stepped out of sync with it.
“You think you’ve figured me out in five minutes?” she said finally.
“No,” he said again. “I just noticed you stopped smiling when they looked away.”
Silence.
This time, it lingered.
Her grip on the glass loosened. When she spoke, her voice had changed—less polished, less certain.
“…They’re having fun.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want to ruin that.”
He nodded, like that made sense. Because it did.
“So you carry it,” he said. “So they don’t have to.”
She let out a small breath—almost a laugh, but not quite. “You make it sound noble.”
“I don’t think it feels that way.”
Another crack. Wider now.
She looked back at her friends. One of them waved her over, smiling, oblivious. She lifted her hand automatically, halfway through the motion—
—and stopped.
For the first time since he’d been watching her, she didn’t complete the gesture.
When she turned back to him, the mask wasn’t gone. But it wasn’t seamless anymore.
“How did you see that?” she asked.
He shrugged slightly. “Because I used to do the exact same thing.”
That landed.
Not like a revelation. More like a quiet confirmation of something she hadn’t let herself name.
The music shifted again, something slower, heavier. The crowd adjusted, bodies swaying instead of jumping.
She looked down at her drink, “I don’t even know what I’d do if I stopped,” she admitted.