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your sad face all night.” Edwin jumps up off the couch. “Let’s pretend we’re in high school again, when we were ignorant and cute and thin, although I was never the thin one. Come on.” He grabs Danny’s sleeve and propels him toward the bedroom. “Put something nice on and let’s get the fuck out of here.”
    This is a feeling Danny knows well: that combination of weed and gin, when the music in the club bores into his eyes and ears and belly button until his heart is beating harder than he ever thought it could. It rises and falls and rises and falls and he is breathless, leaning against a concrete pillar that is sticky against his palms with old beer and the fluids of others. Hewants to scream above the driving music, slam his body into the crowd, fight or fuck or both, it doesn’t matter. Edwin bounces across the dance floor, damp hair flopping against his forehead. Danny laughs and then emits a loud, deep belly cry that peaks above the driving bass line for one short, crystalline second. He is lost in the crowd, the men whose skin rubs against his, whose sweat dries in layers, one for every hour spent in this dark, airless club.
    Edwin breezes past him and shouts something in his ear, but all Danny can hear is hot, green pants and don’t look now . He watches him dance to the middle of the room where he shimmies to the irregularity inside his head, which is like no rhythm Danny has ever heard. Edwin looks over his shoulder and winks in Danny’s direction, and it feels like an arrow burrowing into his gut.
    There has always been something about Edwin that isn’t quite right. He explodes with enthusiasm, squeezes kittens until they squirm and cry and wriggle out of his grasp. He smiles openly at strangers until they look at the ground. Instead of walking, he bounds down the street, his unbuttoned jacket flapping in the air behind him. When they were teenagers, he always offered to buy the beer, even though the clerks ejected him, their faces grim when he stuck his tongue out at them through the glass doors. These are the reasons Danny loves him, but these are also the reasons Danny wants to shake him until his head rolls loosely on his neck and he is mercifully silent.
    No matter. There is music to dance to and men all around him with square hands and sharply lined jaws. He runs his finger along a tall man’s stubble, his skin tingling as he feels one hair after another. Yes, this is why he’s here. For this very thing.
    Later, Danny walks down Richards Street, his hands and hips and spine still loose and warm from an hour in another man’s apartment. He passes club after club, smiling to himself, sure that no one can see his face on this dark night. He can smell the spilled beer on the sidewalk, hear the sound of high heels on concrete. At the corner, he stops for the traffic light and turns his head to look into the lit window of a club on his right. Through the glass, he sees three men—all tall, all handsome—gathered around one woman in a purple dress. She holds a martini glass and balances expertly in her gold pumps. One of the men whispers in her ear, and she flips back her black hair and turns her face upward. Danny starts. It’s Cindy—languorous, lean, smiling. The very same Cindy he saw three days ago shuffling through their parents’ house. Her lipstick is glossy. Her hold on these men is iron-tight; they look at nothing but her.
    Danny knows the pre-sex dance as well as anyone, and he can see that Cindy is poised for a long night. The fabric of her dress shivers as she moves, slides like water over her hips, her small breasts. She shines for the night, and the night loves her back.
    He knows that Cindy will sleep with one of these men in a matter of hours, a man whom she will probably never see again, even if he phones, even if he asks to meet her parents and offers to take her far from the house on Dundas. He knows that tonight will be filled with deep core urges, and that tomorrow she