Coincidence

I told myself it was luck. Three weeks of rain and nothing, and then she was simply there, leaning against the bar of some dim lounge I had wandered into to escape a downpour, the kind of place I never go, where the music is too low and the light is too warm and the drinks cost too much.

She caught me looking. I expected her to look away, the way people do with me. Instead she held it, and smiled, slow, private, like we shared a joke I had not yet been told. My pulse did something embarrassing. I looked down at my glass.

"You," she said, settling onto the stool beside me as though the entire crowded bar had been reserved for this single seat. Up close, the air around her was cooler, faintly electric, and there was that scent again, I could not place it, only that it made my mouth water and my thoughts go soft at the edges. "We have to stop meeting like this."

"I don't—" I swallowed. "Have we met?"

Her laugh was low, a sound I felt below my ribs. "No." She tilted her head, studying me the way one studies a sentence, deciding where to put the emphasis. "Not yet."

She ordered for us both, something dark, something I did not recognize, and her fingers brushed mine as she slid the glass over. The cold of her touch sank straight through my skin and settled somewhere deep, and I did not pull away. I could not have. Every rational part of me was standing at the door, screaming, and the rest of me was leaning closer.

"Strange," she murmured, and her gaze dropped to my throat for half a second before climbing back to my mouth. "I never come here. And yet tonight I couldn't stay away. Like something was waiting."

"It's a coincidence," I said, though the word felt thin, stage-managed, as if she had placed it on my tongue.

"Mm." She did not agree or deny. She just traced the rim of her glass with one pale fingertip, slow, and watched me watch her do it. "Don't you find coincidence is just fate being coy?"

I laughed, nervously, and it came out breathless. She was standing too close and somehow not close enough. I could feel the heat climbing in my chest, my face, the backs of my hands, heat that had nothing to do with the room and everything to do with the impossible, magnetic woman beside me, who smelled like rain on old stone and who looked at me as if she already knew exactly how the night would end.

"I'm Elena," she said, and offered her hand.

When I took it, the cold of her fingers laced through mine, and she did not let go. She drew my hand closer, turned it, and pressed her lips, softly, deliberately, to the inside of my wrist, right where my blood drummed closest to the skin.

The room tilted.

"And you," she said against my pulse, "are exactly where you're supposed to be."

I believed her. God help me, I believed every word.