This is Bliss.

There’s always group of people outside the restaurant because the band plays so loud you can hear it from the street and it sounds like the sweetest crème and tastes like rumba squirming in your stomach.

Once I went there, and a boy asked me to dance.

I said, “Why?”

And he told me, “Because the night is dark and you are pretty.”

And his voice ran like silk sheets and the curve of his nose in the backlight of the warm windows swept so softly that I believed him and said yes.

Another time, when the street lights were working properly, another boy asked me to dance.

I said, “Why?”

And he told me, “Because you’re even more beautiful than the music.”

But he was short and had big, floppy ears so I called him a liar, even though he liked me in the light.