“You’d better,” she said, turning to glare playfully at me over her shoulder. “And if you don’t, you will soon. This is my favorite band in the world.”

As I moved into step with her, she looked up at me, singing a few lines from a song I did actually recognize from the general popular music osmosis one gets in public settings. Ruby’s voice was thin and off-key—bloody awful, really—but she didn’t care at all. Lord, would there be a single thing about this girl I didn’t find endlessly endearing?

“You’re thinking right now that I’m a terrible singer,” she said, poking me in the side.

“Yes,” I admitted, “but I have heard that song. I’ll tolerate the evening’s activity.”

She threw me a mock exasperated look. “How noble of you.”

* * *

The exterior of the Bowery Ballroom reminded me of an old firehouse: simple sandstone, wide central arch, with a green neon sign illuminating the entrance to the side. As we emerged from the subway station just outside the venue, Ruby bounced beside me, pulling me toward the entrance. Inside the space expanded into a much smaller floor than I’d been expecting, positioned less than a meter below a narrow stage lined on the sides with heavy velvet drapes. I could see in an instant why Ruby was so excited for the tickets: in a venue such as this, she would be closer to her favorite band than she’d likely ever been.

Upstairs, a balcony lined the sides and back of the room, looking down on the action, and had begun to fill with a few people holding cocktails. Already the floor had started to fill, and the humid air created by over a hundred bodies tripped my claustrophobic wire. As if sensing my impending panic, Ruby tugged my sleeve, pulling me to the bar.

“Two gin gimlets, tons of limes!” she yelled to the bartender. With a nod, he grabbed two glasses, filling them with ice. “I mean a lot of limes,” she added with a charming smile.

The oily hipster bartender smiled back at her, eyes stalling at her mouth before glancing at her chest and lingering.

Without thinking, I reached an arm around her shoulders, jerking her back against my front. The move surprised her. I could tell in the way she caught herself by wrapping both hands around my forearm, by the way she broke into a delighted laugh. Arching into me, Ruby slipped her hands behind her and around my lower back to hold me closer.

She turned her head, leaning against my chest and I bent so that her mouth was closer to my ear. “I’ve been crazy for you for months,” she reminded me with a small bite to my jaw. “Seeing you jealous like that just completely made my life.”

“I don’t share,” I warned her quietly.

“I don’t either.”

“And I don’t flirt.”

She paused, as she seemed to understand the depth of my reaction. I wasn’t even sure I understood the depth of my reaction. I’d never been jealous with Portia; even when she tried, by dancing at parties or getting drunk and flirtatious with friends. But with Ruby . . . there was an instinctive pull, some desire to claim her that made me at once uneasy and thrilled.

“I know I’m flirty,” she admitted, her eyes searching my face, “but I’d never betray anyone like that.”

And somehow, I knew that. In the dim light of the bar and in the midst of such a bustling crowd, our conversation felt even more intimate.

“I’m having more fun with you than I can remember having,” I told her. “I trust you, even though sometimes it feels like I know so much about you, and other times I remember that we’re barely acquainted.”

I had to remind myself that Ruby was only twenty-three, that she had broader sexual experience than I did, and far more experience with flirting—but no long-term relationships, nothing showing her how to enter into something to be treated initially as fragile. I wanted to balance her tendency to run headlong into things against my tendency to hide my head in the sand.

“We are not ‘barely acquainted,’ ” she growled, pinching my backside in her hand. “Just because this is a new relationship doesn’t mean I don’t know you in ways no one else does. How else are we supposed to start? You can’t know everything at the get-go.”

The bartender returned with our drinks and I released Ruby from my hold and paid before she could get her wallet out of her small bag. She offered me a petulant glare, and then turned, stretching to pull me into a kiss I expected to be only a small brush of her lips but immediately turned deep, her tongue sliding into my mouth, claiming me in the playfully brazen way she had.