The line was snaking around the block even before we’d approached the building, as if a celebrity was going to show up. Raf’s white Chrysler followed a black stretch limo around the corner, and as the limo disappeared, we pulled up in the parking lot, then we followed the line back up the street to the front of the building, along a brick wall advertising posters of the live music, an act called Zarsky Raitaro: a DJ and female singer duo.

At the front, a ritzy double-storey façade like an Art Noveau Hotel or Theater, but accented with neon lights, and freestanding neon lettering that said Club Galaxy with a glowing satellite dish sending out waves.

“I KNOW WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE,” Raf was saying as we walked up the street. He was dressed as Han Solo, “IT LOOKS LIKE MADNESS. BUT TRY TO ACT NATURAL, YO.”

I barely heard him, too busy trying to unwind the twist in the white twine handcuffing my wrists. It was in theme with my Spider-Man costume, except the other end was also strung around Jen’s engagement ring, which was stubbornly anchored to her finger. The twine ensued that if I slipped from her tenacious grasp, I would not fortuitously steal free, but dangle helplessly by my wrists from her ring finger. It had been her personal addition to my costume.

“JERRY,” she now huffed, “WHAT HE SAID: NATURAL. DON’T FIDGET.”

She’d come dressed as Mary-Jane Watson, in a cheerleader costume that clung to her body. She’d dyed her hair red, which came up dark and wine-colored where the black dye was, lightening into fuchsia where the blonde was. Because her hands were occupied by me, the costume pom poms were attached to the waist of her short pleated skirt and bounced with small papery flaps, somehow more eye-catching than if she’d held them.

As she spoke, the nape of my neck was made the site of a couple of sharp taps with a nail tip to try and get me to still. Then I was pressed inward against her bust as she looked up. Instead of a football team emblazoned over her boobs, it said ‘ANGEL.’

“GO ON.”

She was talking to Raf. He looked back at us with a grin that seemed uncharacteristically nervous.

“MY GIRL’S HERE; I WANT FOR YOU GUYS TO DO SOME BONDING.” His eyes fixed on me in particular. “DON’T STRESS. YOU’LL SEE.”

“She’s here tonight?” I said, as a group of both costumed and casually-dressed people attached themselves to the end of the long line running outside the club.

“WITHOUT A DOUBT. SHE MIGHT BE INSIDE ALREADY.”

“WELL, TELL HER TO HAVE ANOTHER DRINK,” Jen sighed, “THE LINE’S NOT GETTING ANY SHORTER FOR US.”

“NO, SHE WORKS HERE.” His voice got urgent. “BUT YOU’RE RIGHT – I DON’T WANT TO WAIT OUTSIDE, EITHER.” He stood back to allow us to both survey the full snaking conga of people collecting around the perimeter of the building. “NOT TONIGHT.”

“Alright.” I rubbed my red webbed gloves together. “Take me to the front. I’ll see what I can do.”

The hand gripping me gave me an affectionate squeeze as Jennifer whooped.

“YOU’RE GETTING US IN VIP?!”

Raf gave her a regretful look.

“NO BOTTLE SERVICE HERE.”

Her exuberance deflated. But knowing her, it would recharge very quickly.

Raf squared his shoulders and began striding up towards the front entrance, with Jen coming eagerly behind, and me bumping against her chest with every footstep.

The bouncer stood between two roped bollards, observing us without reaction. He was wearing a black t-shirt exposing his tattooed biceps.

 “WITH JERRY MOUSSEAU,” Raf said, and Jen held me out as if I was a special pass.

The bouncer stared down at me without expression. Maybe he thought I was a Spider-man doll.

“Farris Franklin’s guest list,” I said.

He unclipped one of the rope bollards and we went through. He hadn’t even asked for my ID; then again, my height was practically my ID. No one could possibly impersonate me.

Down a low-lit, faintly purple corridor, I was lifted until the soft pressure of lips planted a kiss on the top of my head, or at least, my mask.

“THAT WAS SO AWESOME,” her whisper rumbled my ear as she kept my head close, rubbing my scalp against her mouth in an affectionate way, but made me feel like I was being nuzzled by a giant animal.

Back home she snuck me into clubs, in her handbag, or even inside her mouth. The favor had been overdue.

We came to a dingy, rickety railed stairway, followed it down through a basement floor with a twin set of steel fire escape doors which opened into the cavernous retro bar. The name was fitting; it was like stepping onto another planet. The interior was saturated with technicolor like a surreal 80s horror movie, people shaded either red, pink or blue, with lime green lasers splintering overhead, glancing off hanging silver disco balls.

Fake cobwebs were draped around the corners of the room. Costumed, bodies flashed out from the dark like trees during lightning, this alien planet was populated by vampires, skeletons, demons, witches, zombies, soldiers, punks, Elves, doctors, nurses, little red riding hood, Austin Powers, Jokers, Harley Quinns, Supergirls, Playboy Bunnies, and cat-eared girls.

With Raf in front, we weaved through the room, along some less crowded aisles, coming to a long vinyl pink banquette so puffed it looked like a balloon, and squeaked like one as Raf sat down. Jennifer took a seat next to him, and placed me down on her thigh. I stood upright and she brought her forefinger and thumb in on either side of my belly to hold me still. If anything, someone needed to hold her still; I could feel her muscles tense and flexing beneath my feet. She wanted to get up lose herself in the atmosphere. I wanted to get my bearings first.

“How do you and Anya know each other?” I asked Raf. He’d never mentioned he was in a relationship.

He leaned forward, rubbing his thighs and scanning the crowd, and for a moment, looking confused by my question.

“I SAW HER ONCE AT LIFT – IT’S A CLUB.”

I hesitated, taking this in.

“You don’t know her?”

He smiled in a lopsided way, his eyes running back and forth through the crowds.

“SHE’S SO BUSY ALL THE TIME, YOU DON’T JUST BUMP INTO HER.”

I swept my gaze from the left pit wall to the right, swamped by costumed bodies everywhere between.

“Well, it looks pretty busy tonight, so I don’t see how…”

“WE GOTTA PICK THE RIGHT MOMENT AND GRAB HER ATTENTION.”

As I considered this, Jennifer’s fingers stroked my stomach. I ran my hands over the shiny surfaces of her nails, watching the ghostly reflection of my hands flash across the gloss as the lasers oscillated.

“I think you need an air horn to get past all this noise.”

“DAMN RIGHT! I CAN BARELY HEAR YOU.” He bent his upper down, his face growing large as it leaned in at me, his voice coming out breathless but determined:

“WHAT IF I ASKED YOU A REAL TINY FAVOR? WHAT IF YOU WENT UP TO HER AND PUT IN A GOOD WORD ABOUT ME?”

My eyes jumped back and forth behind the bar, searching for the bartender, expecting to see a young woman back there shaking a cocktail, but so far the only bartender I could see was a tall, broad-chested guy with very steely looking eyes. Maybe it wasn’t her shift yet.

“You want to ask her out on a date.”

Raf’s eyes went wide.

“NO! SHE’LL SAY NO.”

“You don’t know that. You have to try first.”

“COME ON MAN, THIS IS REALLY SERIOUS.” He sounded almost painfully sincere, like the mere suggestion of rejection would make it happen. “YOU’RE MY ONE AND ONLY SHOT, AND THAT’S IT.”

“What does she look like?”

“OH!” he said, as if embarrassed it had not crossed his mind. Cradling me against his chest with one hand, he juggled his phone in his other, flipping through some pictures before stopping on a picture, and holding his phone up for me to see. It was a photo of a young woman with porcelain skin and doll-like features, her hair bleached and eyes surreally silver, close-fit pants and baggy, rock band t-shirt. A white-haired lowkey goth. I couldn’t blame him for crushing; she wasn’t my usual type, but there was something entrancing about her.

Unable to wait any longer, Jennifer then asked where the bar was, and Raf pointed it out. Then I was rising into the air and we were swishing around submerging into the dark crowd again. Tall, strange and extravagantly-attired bodies weaved, shifted and parted on either side.

I stared up at passing people baldly, enjoying the double-whammy of anonymity from behind my mask, plus my inconspicuous size – hovering against Jen’s abdomen, with her hands shielding me. If anyone’s eyes found us, they were pulled to Jen like a heat-seeking missile. And Jen happily soaked up the attention as a cat soaks up sunlight.

The bar loomed out of the flashing dark, and halting before the counter, I rose up against her face and was held there like a microphone so she could speak to me.

“THIRSTY?”

As she said this, her broad thumbpad rolled back and forth over my abdomen very fast, and slightly too rough, heating my muscles by the sheer friction.

I shrugged and said:

“Whatever you’re having.”

She stared down at me a moment longer as if distracted. Then sidled over to the side of the bar, and a moment later I came to rest on the bar countertop. As her hand came down on the bartop beside me, the strings around my wrists trailed around my feet, coiling until they wrapped around her engagement ring. I tugged at the strings with some discomfort, looking around to see if anyone saw me, but they weren’t looking; it was dim and her towering body and huge hand shielded me from view. The green lasers oscillated, backlighting her eerily, and her hand resting hand was suddenly airborne, coming for me. She began trying to tickle my stomach with the working of an impatient pointer nail.

"Hey! What are you doing?” I exclaimed, dancing away from the finger trying to dart in at me, but I couldn’t run very far because I was attached to the string. Her stringed hand moved in, snatching me effortlessly, pinching my waist to hold me still. A curtain of red hair rained over me as she bent her head close and revealed her intentions:

“SLIP THIS THING OFF. YOU’VE GOT YOURSELF A VIP PASS – INSIDE ME.”

She was not trying to tickle me, but trying to locate a shirt or pant hem in order to peel my costume back, but there was no hem, it was a full body suit. And ‘inside’ was referring to her mouth.

Jesus, she was so casual about it; I was starting to feel like some orthodontic device, like a retainer or something she poked inside her mouth without shame. I wasn’t wearing anything beneath the costume. And what if Raf came looking for me? Was I supposed to poke my hand out between her lips and wave at him to tell him where I was?

"No!" My face was going as red as my mask.

"WHAT'S WRONG?" It was too dim to see, but, from her tone, I could tell she was frowning.

I folded my arms over my chest – taking care to avoid knotting up the string – avoiding eye contact to scan the crowd nervously.

"Not tonight. Some other time."

Her brow appeared to harden with impatience. Hovering just in front of me against the bar counter, pointing out against the bust of the cheerleading cut-off, level with my face, the hardening nubs of her nipples glared at me.

"OH, LIKE, IN FIVE MINUTES?”

“Not here.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, but the tendons of her hand, resting on the bartop (the one attached to the string) twitched as her fingers extended and flexed. Her frustration was palpable in the dark, like a wild animal in a cage. She loved clubbing but more than that, because of her kink, she loved clubbing with me in her mouth, and I was denying her. It was like telling a man to visit a strip bar wearing a blindfold the whole time.

She angled her head close, bringing her lips right against the side of my head.

“DO THIS FOR ME AND THE CUFFS COME OFF.”

“’Cuffs’? What cuffs?”

She withdrew, fiddling with her engagement ring.

“WHOOPS, I MEANT STRING, SPIDER-WEB SHIT, WHATEVER.”

“We just got here; I want to enjoy myself, too.”

The dark outline of her posture relaxed subtly as if in accession. I gave a small sigh.

Then, in one instantaneous motion her hand whipped up and flipped around. The binds around my wrists went tight. My arms jerked up and I was flying through the air, at the same time, being pulled around in a centripetal arc by the rapid twisting motion of her hand. I flew right around like a yo-yo before zooming back down onto the palm of her hand, where her fingers curled around me, trapping me against her palm. The catch was so fast and startling and perfect that I just lay back giddily, unable to get up. Then my spine began to pat her soft palm in repeated jerks as she bounced me gently, baring a curling, triumphant smile directly over my head, like I was little trained pet doing exactly as I was taught.

I didn’t want to reveal that, in a strange, resigned way, I liked being tied to her hand. Not liked, but preferred. Felt okay. It made me feel like I could turn my brain off and just enjoy the atmosphere without worrying about keeping myself safe. Without a doubt it beat running around on the floor of Skyros avoiding wayward stomping shoes and the broomhead.

Coiled in string and fitted into the soft contoured palm, her face lowered close over me, ominously, eyes narrowed.

“THIS IS NOT OVER, SPIDER-MAN,” she said with a low dramatic flair.

As if to punish me, or remind me who was really in charge, her breasts ballooned as my face was brought level with her chest, and stopped unduly close to the doming face of one spandex-stretched jug. The nipple, budding with arousal, wiggled and danced right in front of my eyes with the bounce of each of her powerful steps.

In order to meet her eyes I had to ignore this pornographic close-up. She gave me a lazy blink from behind the obtruding mammary, before her head turned up again, becoming distracted by the crowds. Costumed figures loomed over my head as they swept past, and we became easily insinuated amidst a gaggle of dancers, and she became one of them, falling into some familiar rumba-like hip gyrations, accentuated by the flick of the pom poms at her waist.

Meanwhile, stuffed in her hand with my body turned inwards towards her, I was forced into distraction by the hypnotic gymnastics of the great flapping breast and nipple spike that seemed to be straining to sucker me in the face.

"HEY, MJ!" a man’s voice passed by, "GO GET 'EM TIGER!"

Jen – to whom ‘Mary Jane’ was foremost, slang for weed – whipped her head down to me, mystified at the comic book reference. The only reason she came as MJ was to partner my costume, and for the excuse to dye her hair. I’d first had to advise her on what that Mary Jane bimbo (her term) actually looked like.

"I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HE JUST SAID."

"I think he means to say he’s a Spider-man fan."

Her eyes narrowed.

"NOT ON MY WATCH--"

Her fingers rippled around me with muscular efficiency, squeezing and adjusting me until I was further buried in the cushioned padding of her closed hand, with the dull weight of her thumb resting on top of my head, keeping me driven down out of sight. With her hand turned in against her body, the dancers were shielded out. My limited view was filled solely by the rebounding breasts, trampolining against the spandex sports top. If my head was any closer to the whumping erogenous organ I would have gotten whiplash, if not a broken neck. It jumped in time to the sub-bass, and seriously threatened making a landing pad out of my comparatively diminutive face. Given its blown up size, that would be like a one-ton punch. Sometimes ropey strands of red hair flung down her chest before she ran a hand over her head, flicking them back over her shoulder again, but not before some of the silky tresses flipped me in the head.

She was too distracted by the men emerging from the crowd, to dance up close, drawing themselves up against her, grinding her from behind. These tall shadowy forms materialized in my periphery, around the edges of her ever-present bouncing breast that commanded my direct view. I caught glimpses of costumed arms and jutting shoulders, and inhaled hits of cologne and sweat. Once one man had his turn, another quickly sprung in for a round.

As the music hit a quieter part, we were back at the bar and she ordered a slim-lined bottle. The bottle was taller than I was, and the way her fingers were wrapped around the neck was probably not dissimilar from the way she sometimes held me, pinched between her fingertips. Watching the ease with which rim of the bottom – approximating the size of my head – slipped in through the crinkled scrunching lips and disappeared from sight, I shivered a little. Five minutes ago that would have been me slurping into her mouth, if I hadn’t dug my heels in.

I was bobbed and swayed around in mid-air until the song ended and there was a quiet part. I was becoming duly sick of this rotation of random men swishing in and out for a dance with my beloved.

“Hey,” I called to her, “I’m still here, remember. Under your boob.”

Lowering the bottle, she looked down at me in with skepticism. From my position, tight at her midsection, the dyed red-framed edge of her head was just visible beyond the horizon of the bloated up breasts.

“UHMMM, NOW YOU WANNA JOIN IN?”

“Just a friendly neighborhood reminder not to pound my head flat.”

Her exhilarated voice ran a little ahead of itself.

“WANNA STAY ON MY GOOD SIDE? GOTTA DO WHAT I SAY, SHORTSTACK.”

“Undo the string first,” I countered up at her intruding chest all, which heaved in and out with tantalizing pulsation, from her physical exertion. Beyond, her forehead, barely glimpsed, glittered with perspiration under the Technicolor light.

Fingers shifted and tapped, making my ribs buckle inwards.

“ON THE FLOOR,” she said impatiently “OH, AND—” Her chest dropped below my feet as my face soared up to pause right in front of her lips, allowing her to beat my tiny ears with her provocative rumbling murmur: “—HOW MUCH YOU BET I’M COMMANDO?”

“I’m not playing this game.”

“YOU’RE ALREADY PLAYING. AND IF YOU PLAY IT RIGHT, YOU’LL WIN A PRIZE. ANYWAY, WHAT ARE YOU WRAPPED IN DOWN THERE?”

She reached down and spread my legs to stroke my bulge with a fingertip. My balls screwed up and I shut my eyes as the fingertip poked it back and forth like a kitten pawing a toy until she’d deduced I wasn’t wearing anything beneath my costume.

“YOU’RE NOT JUST COMMANDO, YOU’RE READY TO FIRE!”

“Jennifer…!”

The darkness of the night club, shifting walls of distracted people, and my negligible size all worked as a conspiracy to permit her mischief.

“NO SECRETS FROM ME, BUB.” A nail tip dug itself into my left pec, where the tattoo was, as if to reinforce that the branding of her name designated my body as her property.

“We’re not even married yet! You can’t just – ”

Her hand assumed a pecking shape, the long nail tips forming the ‘beak’, before closing with a snap around my skull, subjecting it to a rapid squeeze, and I quickly went silent.

She unwound more string from her finger until it stretched over half her height. I was placed down on the resin dancefloor and her upper body soared back up towards the ceiling, to rejoin the dark shifting pillars that were the other partiers, leaving me woefully vulnerable at shoe level, so small I almost felt like I was one of her big toes, helplessly stuck in a crowd of stamping, squeaking shoes. The closest of these, hemming me on my immediate left and right, were her white sneakers, either of which I could have sat on like couches.

The floor seemed to swell in undulations beneath my boots, in time with the music reverb and hundreds of shoes mashing into it. This must have been what a bowling pin felt like before a bowling ball charged it down. I felt like at any minute one of countless huge shoes was going to materialize out of the dark and pirouette upon me, grinding my musculature into so much gum to coat a heel or tread. Only Jen’s hawkish supervision separated me from that fate; I had no ability to outrun or ultimately resist anyone’s momentous weight.

The giant white sneakers began to tap around in front of me, bizarre such huge things could move so lightly and gracefully, more than I felt I could. The grand curtain of her pleated skirt flapped far above my head, and like a fan, sending whuffs of air over the top of my head. She was not commando, but only a thin, dark stretch of thong fabric veiled her mound, and it puffed out slightly in a camel toe.

“CARE TO DANCE, NOW?” she called down, as one shoe came thumping down in front of my face, nearly making me jump out of my skin. “OR ARE YOU JUST GOING TO STARE UP MY SKIRT ALL NIGHT?”

I was too afraid to dance in case I tangled up the string around my wrists and tripped over myself, and couldn’t say so, because she couldn’t hear me anymore, over the bursting club music.

Anyway, there was no time for dancing; I was forced to dash and dart around as her feet stamped closer and closer to my insignificant form, while she lost herself in her sultry, hip-swaying routine. But her steps were too close to be accidental. She must have been throwing me glances because every time a sneaker dropped in front of my face and met the floor with a quake, and I skidded and twisted away, laughter hailed down from the ceiling, in sharp spurts in between the music beats. She seemed to be playing a disastrously reckless game of seeing how close she could tramp around my body short of pancaking me. Maybe she was still pissed off that I’d refused to go into her mouth, and was trying to make every place that wasn’t her mouth look unwelcome—even hostile—by comparison.

Then, out of nowhere, one of those flat-bottomed white missiles came flying down with unavoidably lethal intent. The white toe came barreling at my head like the nose of a crashing plane and I was paralyzed, stricken with terror as it seemed to be playing out before my eyes in slow motion.

Jennifer…I thought, feeling sick and betrayed and horrified…how could you…?

She was actually going to do it; she was going to crush me. My heart was in such disbelieving agony it was like a barbed cincture had drawn tight around my chest, and I could no longer breathe.

There was no Jennifer anymore, no people, and no club, just a white sneaker growing monstrously large in view, taking up the entire ceiling like a horrifying eclipse, caused by the whim of an arrogant, punitive Goddess amusing herself by squashing the life out of some lowly mortal.

My heart skittered like I’d slipped on something. At the last second my arms yanked tight over my head and I was flying, kicking my legs as I spun and swayed alongside the twin smokestacks of her smooth bare legs, being carried like a marionette by her ring finger.

She was laughing again, thrilled at her own nerve.

“HEART RACING YET? FEEL ALIVE?” she whooped over the music.

More accurately, I felt narrowly not dead.

My brain had crashed. As I stammered in shock, my bulge was captured and given a prickling pinch and, just before they departed, the tip of a finger flicked against my groin, generating a lasting spasm of sensation.

“REMEMBER TO SAVE A LITTLE EXTRA CIRCULATION. JUST FOR ME.”

“Sure,” I said weakly, by now totally cowed by her. Maybe lucky the string was holding me up, I had no muscle tension in my legs anymore. They quaked like jelly.

The soles of my boots united with the floor again, and were now jolted up and down against the floor as her hand lifted and dropped me, and jiggling me back and forth in an unbalanced way to suggest dancing. In time with the music, I was bounced and leap-frogged around – and even on – her shoes until I felt like I was a human yo-yo. My limbs kicked and twisted sporadically as I tried to pull off some dancing of my own, difficult when I was flying and swooping around like a fish on the end of a fishing line. Soon my shoulders and back muscles began to seize and twitch with the strain of dangling from my wrists. Sweat ran down my sides and I gritted my teeth in pain.

The giant white sneakers roguishly directed more close stomps around my suspended body, and again, zoomed me into the air to safety at the last second. Each stomp surged with a clap of air and frightening bone-shaking presence that blasted into my face like a bomb going off. These crush fake outs brought her no end of amusement, and shocked my heart into a gallop, but I recognized it was the drink talking and she probably wouldn’t even remember she did it the next morning.

But I was sober enough to admit that, I recognized in the darkest recesses of her psyche she was aroused by her lethal impulse over me. But she no more wanted to actually kill me than an extreme tightrope walker wants to fall and die, as much as their actions look to some outsider otherwise. Dying is, in fact, the last thing they want. She wanted me to marvel at the power she had over me, and that meant awing me that she could just as easily take my life as she’d so often saved it. She liked to flaunt that she had the power of both readily within her grasp.

Tens of meters of her form scrolled down past me as she wound the string around her hand, drawing me to a stop before her looming face, which flashed successive shades of vivid Technicolor under the disco lighting. Hovering in space, with the bass pulsing through my skeleton, I was surrounded by a frightful display of masks which bobbed and jeered in and out of my perception.

“WOW. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?” she said flatly.

I was spinning slowly from my wrists in front of her eyes. Her face was in view, then rotated away behind my head. Then it rotated back into view, but her expression hadn’t changed, it was still a flat glare.

“What?” I exclaimed. “Uh, what are you doing?”

“YOU’D RATHER DIE THAN DANCE WITH ME. I’M CUT.”

“You’re trying to erase me from existence, big lady!”

Her lashes lowered and the corner of her mouth twisted in a humorless ‘nice-try-wise-guy’ sort of way.

“YOU STEPPED A LITTLE INTO THE PATH OF MY SHOE. YOU WERE TRYING TO MAKE IT HAPPEN FASTER.”

“We both feinted,” I blathered tiredly. “We both pretended to step away but then reversed without warning.”

She expressed how disappointed she was with this response by choosing not to respond to it. She was yet too impatient to dance.

Suspended from the floor, I was now flung and twirled around her body as she carried on dancing. The club became a whip-fast overload of sharp, beating lights; something resembling David Bowman’s journey through the Star Gate. I shut my eyes at intervals to avoid seizuring or passing out.

When I opened my eyes, the bulging shelf of her bust writ with the stretched enscription ‘ANGEL’ in large, flew out of the dark and pumped into my head like a pair of massive air bags. The shock of impact coursed through my spine and I rebounded in a mass of flailing limbs, wheezing and dazed. The string twirled me around and over like a shoelace being done up, gelled floodlights switched places and then her ass was expanding in direct view, bigger and bigger, and gyrating. I was momentarily lost in the flicking pleats of her short skin before her ass seemed to slap me across the face, swatting me away again. I spun like a boomerang, inevitably returning to her mega dancing form, now pummeling into one of her outer thighs.

By now she not only had my attention, but several random onlookers delighted in my spinning, bouncing dance – not to mention the ironic juxtaposition of gargantuan Mary Jane toying with a tiny Spider-Man. People eyed me and grinned as I was dipped and dived past their shimmying legs. Giant hands dived down and plucked at the string before Jen could stop them, wrenching one of my arms until I feared it would tear off. I found myself flying through the air whipping away from the greedy grabbing hands and kicked my legs for stability as I aeroplaned around in the flashing colorful lights, trying to look unperturbed and in my own zone, like Peter Parker swinging serenely from skyscrapers in a glittery, colorful night.

It became clear why I had been allowed to fling with abandon into random dancers. Jennifer had been dancing with her eyes closed. She opened them and looked at me, her eyes whirled with the red and green and blue light.

“I LOVE YOU JERRY JERONIMO MOUSSEAU!” she yelled into my face with such agitated declaration I seriously feared being either snarfed into her mouth or snorted up her nostril like a line of coke. Lucky I was not insect-sized or – in the swelling electricity of that moment – she might have attempted the latter.