twas the night before HARLEM SUNSET and all through through the house, and the writer was very, very nervous
I am not good at rhyming
Hi friends!
HARLEM SUNSET comes out tomorrow, and I wanted to just give you a little taste. An amuse-bouche, if you will.
Ready?
Good. Let’s go.
After the day--summer--she'd had, all she wanted to do was dance. The Gold Room was nearly full, in Harlem, much dirtier than where they usually went. But it was special. The Gold Room was for women like her, woman who liked other women.
She was escorted by Rosa Maria Moreno, and they were on a mission.
A mission to spend every moment possible on the dance floor.
The band was playing and Louise felt more herself than she had in weeks. After everything, she wanted to be herself again.
This was step one.
The band was playing a waltz, but they had a plan. She and Rosa Maria ran to the bar, they drank two drinks, and by the time the tempo had changed, they were ready to get on the floor.
"This place is nice," Louise said.
Rosa Maria considered it. "Not as nice as the Dove will be."
It was a moot point, considering the Dove wasn't open yet. Louise allowed her girlfriend to pull her onto the dance floor.
The music was tense and desperate. Louise let Rosa Maria pull her close. They were the only people on the dance floor. Everyone else was seated around tables, talking over the band, drinking.
It was any other ordinary night and they were going to make it good.
They began a tight tango. Her tango wasn't very good, but she trusted Rosa Maria to lead her across the floor. She trusted herself to listen to the music and react accordingly.
They could never go to a club and not dance.
She could feel eyes on them as they moved across the floor. At once, everything she had been thinking of, fearing, melted away. She concentrated on not falling over her feet. She concentrated on going where Rosa Maria lead her.
But every time she closed her eyes, all she saw was the body of her dead sister lying on the cold concrete. She tried not to blink anymore. She tried not to sleep anymore.
Spending almost all night every night with Rosa Maria was a welcome distraction. Being on the dance floor was the only way she knew how to deal with this.
She was in uncharted territory, a pioneer of this grief.
How did she even being to deal with it?
"You all right, Lou?" Rosa Maria asked. She could always tell if something was wrong. She said it was the way she held herself, stiff and tense. Louise relaxed.
"This place really isn't as good as the Dove."
Rosa Maria laughed. Louise always liked her laugh.
"People'll actually dance at the Dove." It was hard to keep up a conversation, whispered in partial sentences between twists and turns and pauses. They managed it though. Rosa Maria, always able to do multiple things at once, was scanning the crowd. "I like the look of the singer."
Louise was staring into a pair of light blue eyes, a pair that seemed so familiar and yet, so far away.
The world around her stopped functioning. The air was drained from her body and she nearly stumbled.
It was impossible for Theodore Gilbert to be in this club on this night. She knew that. She knew that because she had shot and killed him.
She blinked, and she realized the pair of eyes, which seemed so distinctive, belonged to a woman who was sitting alone at a table. As fast as it had come, her panic dissipated.
"Copacetic, babe?"
"Sure am." Louise looked around, trying to find the woman again. But she had lost her.
Maybe she had made her up.
Rosa Maria righted her. It wasn't always easy to put all of her trust in someone else. But it was Rosa Maria.
Could she trust anyone anymore?
Her mind was playing tricks on her. She was exhausted. She was seeing things that weren't there.
She looked back into Rosa Maria's eyes. Under the lights, the corner of her eyes crinkled. The music cried behind them, and when it finished, the crowd around them rather politely applauded.
Rosa Maria immediately left her to talk to the singer, a willowy woman with bronze skin, who was standing next to the band.
And Louise tried to find that very familiar pair of eyes again. When she scanned the crowd, the band switching songs with the swell of a frenzied Charleston, she couldn't find them.
But she couldn't let herself believe she had made everything up.
She wasn't sure how she was going to survive.
Anyway, I LOVE them.
I hope you’re as excited for HARLEM SUNSET as I am!
xo, Nekesa