Ladybug

I'm headed to the bar for another drink when I see her.

I can feel the bass reverberating in my bones and the droplets of sweat rolling across my skin as gravity pulls them down with a force nearly as irresistible as hers.

At first I think it is a trick of the lights or perhaps the various substances in my blood stream tangling with the secret I've kept buried so deep for so long now. A tangle of dancing limbs blocks my line of sight for a moment, but when it clears again she is still there only this time, she is looking at me, too.

Her long thin braids are gone - the ones I always got my ring clad fingers tangled in - and have been replaced by a regal crown of curls. The lights dance as frantically as the people and for a moment she is adorned by a magnificent halo of purple and gold. Her hazel eyes are locked with my brown ones. Her face wears a playful expression. She cocks her head slightly in silent question and I am reminded of my dog when he hears a treat bag, in both the way she cocks her head and the Pavlovian response my body has to her promise of pleasure.

Finally realizing that I've been standing here like some cringe mixture of creep and idiot for what feels like a lifetime, I blink. Exhale. Let a half smile tug at my lips as I offer a small wave, disbelief written clearly all over my face. We each begin to move towards each other when someone catches my arm.

"There you are!" Shane says, wrapping his arm around my waste.

Oh my god. SHANE. For a moment my impaired mind blocked out the fact that my boyfriend is here. The boyfriend I've been with for the past four years, since my sophomore year of college. For a moment, I was all-consumed by the flood of memories and emotions and possibilities that entered my brain and I completely forgot about Shane. Immediately, a wave of guilt threatens to pull me down.

I must have a strange look on my face because Shane's reflects concern back to me, but it's almost 2 in the morning and we've both consumed a lot tonight so he doesn't think twice when I tell him I just need the bathroom but will come find him when I'm done and ask if he would please order me another drink while he waits.

He kisses me and I close my eyes and try to imagine it's her but the stubble on his face and the roughness of his hands makes it impossible.

"Hurry back," he murmurs into my lips as he squeezes my ass in that possessive way of his that has always made some small part of me recoil from the touch.

I mumble something that not even I can decipher as I turn away from him and towards the bathroom, quickly disappearing behind a curtain of bodies. She's no longer standing where she was and I'm hit with a wave of disappointment so intense my knees threaten to buckle. Did she leave when she saw Shane? Or, worse, is she also here with someone else? Did my mind conjure her from the dank nightclub air, taunting me with this cruel, toxic mixture of excitement and shame?

After a moment of hazy contemplation, I decide that I do actually have to pee and start heading in the direction of the bathroom. I scan every face on my way, just in case, but do not find what I am looking for. Maybe it's the searching combined with the way the light trails in my impaired vision, or maybe I just hit my limit but suddenly I'm overwhelmed by the sensation of overstimulation. The damp bodies bumping into me from every direction, the layer of spilled drinks and sweat coalescing until it feels as though the floor is grabbing at my shoes with every step. The lights go from being beautiful auroras enveloping me in their dazzling display to taking on the feel of a hundred bright headlights accosting me while I attempt to navigate in the dark. The music is so loud I can feel it pulsing through every atom of my being, which threaten to burst amidst the sudden turbulence.

Like a baby emerging from the womb, gasping for fresh air and the novel taste of personal space, I slip into the bathroom as a pair of giggling girls slips out. One bumps into me quite hard as we pass but doesn't seem to notice and I don't have the capacity to hurl a cutting comment at her as I normally would. The restroom is dark and reeks of piss and vomit. In the dim lighting I notice the floor is almost as littered with trash as the stalls are with graffiti. Leaning over the sink, I splash cool water on my face in a desperate attempt to gather myself. As I look up at my reflection in the mirror, a stall door opens and my heart skips a beat.

She doesn't seem surprised to find me here, as if she was waiting.

"Are you... real?" I ask the reflection, not bothering to turn towards my hallucination.

Her head tips back and her laughter bubbles up all around me. When her eyes meet mine again they are crinkled at the corners from the smile she can't fight off.

"Long time no see, ladybug." Hearing the pet name makes me weak, memories flashing. A checkered picnic blanket on green summer grass, blue skies, belly laughs.

"Hold still," she said seriously and I froze, never having heard such a tone from her.

She leaned forward and my breath hitched. Her hand stroked my hair gently, her face mere inches from mine. She leaned back, still close but far enough to hold up her finger, on which a ladybug clung.

"Ladybug, ladybug fly away home. Your house is on fire, your kids are alone." I couldn't help but recite the old nursery rhyme my grandmother, an eccentric alcoholic who lived in the country and often spoke in riddles of antiquated nursery rhymes and southern colloquialisms, had taught me long ago. As if on queue, the creature's red and black bottom split in two and she ascended, quickly disappearing into the canopy above.

"Well Jesus, that's morbid," Piper laughed.

Piper is from southern California and often teases me when my rural roots expose themselves. I remember the first time I casually inserted "there's a hundred different ways to skin a cat" as a response to something she'd said and was met with abject horror. I'd never actually considered the phrase that had been a staple in my upbringing, which to be fair is quite disturbing when you think about it in a literal sense.

"Life is morbid sometimes," I say with a shrug. This was something I was coming to understand didn’t always apply to sunny beach towns in the same way it did to Midwestern farms. Mortality was blatantly on display, not just in the way it was when you raised and butchered your own meat supply, but perhaps more poignantly in the form of shuddered main street businesses and 'For Sale' farm land that made up much of the Bible Belt these days.

At the end of the day, when the sun had long ago set and I was dropping Piper off at her apartment, she looked into my eyes after our lips parted and said to me "Fly home, my morbid little ladybug. Your house could be on fire."

It was our first inside joke and the pet name stuck. We traded ladybug trinkets for the rest of that blissful summer. The one Shane spent studying abroad. I still have a box tucked away under my bed filled with every single thing she gave me - a plush keychain, a holographic sticker, a gummy candy that is slowly progressing towards fossilization, more than a few incriminating notes - that I haven't been able to bare throwing away.

My face is still dripping from the cool water I haven't yet dried off when I turn around to face her. It has been two and a half years since I'd seen her and somehow she seems to have gotten more beautiful in that time. Maybe it is the shock of finally having her in front of me after imagining countless times what I would do if I did, maybe it is all of the substances and neurochemicals coursing through my blood stream, but without a thought I move towards her as if we had seen each other just yesterday.

She bites her lip as I back her into the stall she just emerged from and then against the wall, shutting the door behind us. When my hand touches her I swear I feel an actual electric shock, like some cosmic assurance that what I am doing was meant to be all along. Or perhaps it is the opposite, like a mother gently swatting a child's hand away from a hot stove.

Her lips are as warm and soft as I remember and as they part for mine my stomach feels like it contains a thousand ladybugs flying desperately towards the flames. Our bodies tangle in the grimy bathroom stall, slipping into familiar rhythms honed over time to make each other sing. Our hands caress and grope and slip beneath various articles of clothing - shirts, bras, pants, a skirt.

I don't think about Shane, who is searching the club for me, a vodka cranberry in hand. I don't think about how I will look coming out of the bathroom with my makeup smeared and my clothes slightly askew from where they were mere minutes before. I don't think about how adulterous my behavior is, the harm it will cause.

As her breathing turns to panting, gasping, her back arching in pleasure, I exist only in this moment. Someone could tell me my house was one fire and it wouldn't matter. I'd be perfectly content to let it burn.