"Are you two enjoying yourselves?" Rasmus muttered as Siena reached for her can of hairspray and Cora grabbed her black lipstick.

She popped off the cap, twisted the tube, and grinned. "Pucker up, buttercup."

They were almost done transforming him for the party tonight. She'd never done a couples costume for Halloween before, but Siena, who was going as Catwoman, had thrown out the suggestion that they go as Edward Scissorhands and Kim Boggs since the event was movie themed.

So here she was, donning a simple white dress and putting lipstick on her boyfriend while her roommate sprayed his hair into submission. It almost felt like she was prepping for the show again even though they'd already done their one performance for the day, but there was a sense of relief that came with knowing that she was going to get out and have some fun. She loved this season of life—getting to be on freaking Broadway—but it didn't come without a price. Most of her daily activities revolved around conserving her voice and energy and making sure she stayed healthy, so she didn't exactly get out a lot.

There was something liberating about having a chance to let loose around people she would probably never see again. And if the party sucked...well, they could always just get drunk.

She didn't care if it meant spending her day off tomorrow hungover—Cora was going to enjoy herself tonight.

The Ivory Lounge was hidden away in a corner of Brooklyn that Cora had not yet explored, but Sie promised them that it was amazing. She'd apparently been on several occasions with her grad school friends, the same group that was hosting tonight's party. It was foggy out, but even from a distance, she could see the light of the neon sign that read The Ivory Lounge in cursive font. It was tucked into the basement of an old building, so they had to descend a steep set of stairs to get to the front doors.

But entering was like stepping through a portal in time. The Ivory's aesthetic clearly hinged on Old Hollywood, on a world of glitz and glamor and trailblazing jazz singers crooning their songs while wealthy couples danced the night away. The bar was designed in an Art Deco style, but the patrons who sat at it were entirely from the present day—Cora spotted two Spidermen, a Princess Buttercup, and a Cruella de Vil ordering cocktails.

"Jackson said he saved us a spot," Siena said as she led them off to the seating area.

Cora had no idea who Jackson was—a guy Sie was seeing, perhaps, or maybe just a friend—but she wasn't too fussed about it. If he was important enough, she'd hear more about him eventually. Rasmus and Cora were a couple of steps behind Sie, and when he turned to her and mouthed Who's Jackson?, she just shrugged.

Jackson, it turned out, was a graduate student like Siena, only at NYU instead of Columbia. When the two of them settled onto the low, black couch across from Rasmus and Cora, he made no sort of territorial move to indicate that he and Sie were an item—no resting his arm on the back of the cushion, no taking her hand—but he was clearly checking out the way she looked in that tight catsuit. Sie's lips tilted into a naive smile, but Cora knew damn well she had a sixth sense for male attention. And she had no problem rejecting unwanted advances, so she must have been enjoying whatever this thing was with Jackson. Hopefully, Cora would be able to tell by the end of the night whether it was just a game of cat and mouse or a glimpse of something more substantial.

Jackson was attractive if you were attracted to blondes, which Cora wasn't, but he still seemed to have an appealing, nerdy sort of charm to him. He was dressed as Anakin Skywalker, quite the contrast to the Edward Scissorhands sitting at her side. Cora was the only one out of the bunch not wearing any black.

They quickly ordered an appetizer and some drinks. She wanted to dance before the night was over, but she knew she'd need some liquid courage flowing through her veins to be that comfortable in her own skin. She had never heard of the band who was playing tonight, but they sounded good, and bodies were already swaying on the dance floor. She was itching to be a part of that consciousness, to melt into a group of other people for one night instead of being the center of attention.

The food was better than she would have expected from a place primarily focused on drinks and her cocktail gave her a pleasant punch of warmth as soon as she took the first sip. She tried some of Rasmus', too. Sie was bragging about the two of them to Jackson, and it finally occurred to Cora that making it to the Great White Way made her a pretty objectively cool person, especially in a room mostly filled with people who were still figuring out where they wanted to go in life. She didn't need to hide in the shadows every second she was offstage—she was a badass.

Some more of Siena's friends came like the tide, never staying around for too long. More drinks came, and then more. Cora's skin grew flushed with the warmth of all the alcohol she'd consumed. Eventually, Jackson pulled a giggly Sie off to dance, leaving Rasmus and Cora to themselves.

"Coraline?"

"Yes?"

"You two did a great job with this makeup, but can you please get it off of me?"

She laughed an ungainly, drunk sort of laugh, which made him laugh, too. But she wasn't too proud to admit that the thick, ghostly white drugstore foundation was looking pretty caked onto his face, and she'd shoved a pack of makeup wipes in her purse in preparation for this very scenario.

"I suppose I can put you out of your misery," she agreed as she rifled through her bag for it. "Since you asked so nicely."

While she worked on swiping the makeup off, Cora also ran her free hand through his hair a couple of times to start loosening the ungodly amount of spray they'd put into it. She could feel her eyebrows scrunched with concentration as she worked the wipe into the creases around his nose and eyes, something he seemed to notice.

"Don't smile," she warned when she caught one corner of his lips twitch upward. "Unless you want me to accidentally rub this on your teeth."

So he kept his lips pressed together until the very end, when she cleaned off the remainder of the stain on them. "There he is," she murmured when she could see her Rasmus again instead of knockoff Johnny Depp.

He leaned in and pressed a swift kiss onto her mouth. "Dance with me?"

"Not with those scissor gloves on, I won't," she grinned.

They weren't actually sharp, of course, but that didn't mean it would feel good on her skin, so she reached over and carefully shimmied them off his fingers. Rasmus took her hand and pulled her onto the dance floor right at the start of a new song.

She'd forgotten how good dancing could feel.

The last time she'd danced, it had been in a dark, humid club with a man she barely knew. A man she couldn't be fully comfortable with, a man she had to keep some distance from, a man who just wanted to watch her. So a small breath of surprise left her lips when Rasmus drew her flush against him, his hand finding the place on her hip where it already knew it belonged.

"I didn't know you liked to dance," she murmured.

A sly, dark glint in his eyes. "I like to dance with the right person."

So they danced, and danced, and danced, the space between them imploding as their bodies moved together like they'd done this a million times before. The air around them was throbbing to the rhythm of the music, the room dissolving into pure sound and heat, that ephemeral energy Cora had wanted out of tonight. They danced until her feet were aching, until he dipped his head to press kisses onto her neck, her jaw.

She shivered, and that made him hold her even closer, his lips trailing into her hair. "Do you want to get out of here?" he whispered, and her goosebumps were suddenly replaced with a shudder of warmth.

"Yes," she breathed. "But–" she grabbed his hand. "–How drunk are you?"

Rasmus buried his face back against her shoulder. "Not too drunk to know what I want."

And so she was pulling him off the dance floor, and they were forgetting to grab his gloves off the couch before telling Sie a little too quickly that they were worn out and heading out, and they were giggling like schoolkids as they practically ran out the front doors—and right into the rain.

"Oh, shit," Cora groaned.

Rasmus was looking up at the sky as if he'd never seen rain before. "It's just drizzling, we'll be okay."

By the time they ran into the shelter of the subway station, they were uncomfortably damp but not soaked. Cora was thanking her past self immensely for the fact that she'd worn a camisole and spanx shorts under her white dress; otherwise, she'd be humiliated right now. But it wasn't sexy, the thought which made her heart pound in her chest even more than it already was.

The ride home felt unbearably long, and she nearly turned into one of those girls who starts making out with her boyfriend in the hallway before his hands can even fumble for the key to the door. She forced herself to have a little more class than that, but only a little bit, and the second the door was shut behind them, he was pressing her up against it, their mouths colliding.

His teeth skimmed against her bottom lip as her hands tangled into his hair, the stickiness now completely washed away by the rain. She was fairly certain she sighed his name, but her mind was a blissful, blurry rush of gold as his mouth found its way back to her skin, leaving a line of kisses. And as he kissed her over and over, Cora realized that she'd been aching for this for so damn long, since the very first time they'd kissed in rehearsals. Since the first time he partially undressed her and she panicked because she was scared a small part of her might enjoy it. Their bodies were hot, aching for each other, slick from the lounge and from the rain and from this. In one fluid motion, his fingers undid the top few buttons of her dress. He was trailing kisses on her décolletage; her fingers were gripping onto the hem of his shirt. She clumsily reached down for his belt, then–

Her phone started buzzing.

Cora silently cursed pretty much every god she knew the name of as Rasmus backed away from her, the mood abruptly killed by one little chime of a cell phone.

It didn't help when she dug her phone out of her purse and the number that appeared on her screen was Simon's. She declined the call, not looking directly at Rasmus, but the damage had already been done.

"Have you told him yet?" he asked quietly.

Her silence gave him the only answer he needed.

She heard him sigh—not a pleasured one like he'd breathed onto her skin a moment before, but a bitter one—and timidly looked back at him as he redid the marginal progress she'd made on his belt.

"That would have been nice to know before we started taking each other's clothes off," he noted dryly.

Cora bristled. "I thought you did know."

Rasmus ran a hand through his hair in that dumb way that boys did. "I just—I get it, but I also don't. Are you that ashamed of me? It's been months, Cora. Not days, not weeks. Months."

A wave of shame washed over her, and she blushed as she ran her fingers through her mussed hair and rebuttoned her dress, but she'd go to hell before she crumbled in front of Rasmus North right now. "Have you told your parents about me?" It was a lower blow, she knew, but at that moment she didn't care.

"I haven't told my parents shit about my personal life since I got out of college. It couldn't matter less to them—you know that."

Cora was suddenly very overwhelmed, like she'd been drowning all night and was just now realizing it. Her fingers balled into fists. "What kind of future do we have if we can't tell our literal families about each other?!"

"We've been dating for three months, can we not just enjoy ourselves for a little while?!"

She scoffed, moisture stinging the back of her eyes. "Is that all this is to you?" she asked, her voice smaller than it was a second ago. "Enjoying ourselves?"

"That's not what I said–"

"Let me get this straight," she stopped him. "Five seconds ago, you were mad that I haven't told Simon about us, and now you're saying that we're just having fun. Which fucking thing is it, Rasmus? Are we serious or not?"

His mouth had hardened into a sharp line; all that affection that he'd been crooning into her ear at the lounge felt like nothing more than a distant memory. "You tell me," he said sharply. "Every single person in your life disapproves of me. Are you really okay with that?"

She exploded. "Of course I'm not okay with that! But you won't even answer the damn question. "If you had the guts to at least admit to me that this is real, then that would be enough. I might still be working down my list of people who need to know, but I'm still out there defending you to them and you haven't even considered letting yours know that I exist. Why are you being a coward?"

She bowed her head so that he wouldn't see her cry, the flooring panels beneath her feet blurring into a dull brown as the moisture welled up in her eyes and obscured her vision. But it didn't matter because he came back to her. He came back to her, lifting her chin so that she had to look him in the eyes and see that he was about to cry, too.

His hand was a soft cradle to her cheek as he brushed the tears off, but he pulled it away once the work was done.

"Did it ever cross your mind," he asked quietly. "That I might want to keep you from them so that they can't find a way to hurt you too? I won't trade your safety for anything in the world, Cora. I can't."

She only got to see the look in his eyes for a second.

Rasmus' footsteps echoed through the otherwise silent room as he turned his back to her and walked away, retreating to the bathroom to wash the memory of tonight, of her, off of his skin.

She was smart enough to eventually show herself out the door.