@𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚕𝚖𝚛𝚢. 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚠𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚜𝚘𝚛.
It'd been a long while since Windsor had gone out. Not for work, not because someone had dragged her along, but because she'd actually decided to step outside the carefully constructed boundaries of her comfort zone. She'd never been much of a drinker. With good reason. Music had always been her drug of choice.
The rush of it. The pulse. The way a bassline could settle somewhere beneath her ribs and convince her heart to beat in time with it. She'd made a career out of chasing that feeling, made a life of following the heartbeat of the kick drum and the soul buried somewhere in the bass. Road cases, soundchecks, tangled cables, sleepless nights in unfamiliar cities, and often times curled up on pavement, those things made sense to her. Music made sense to her.
People were considerably harder.
Which was probably why it was so strange to find herself standing in some random club on one of her rare nights off, still entirely sober, still wearing gloves, and actually enjoying herself. The crowd is packed tight around her, bodies moving with the music, sweat and perfume and spilled drinks mingling into the unmistakable scent of a room full of people having a good time. The lights flash overhead in fractured bursts, painting strangers in reds and blues before plunging them back into darkness.
She's bopping along right in the middle of it. No drink in her hand. No substances. No ulterior motive. Just the joy of music.
She'd always made fun of Hannah for this.
These are the nights I feel most alive....Hannah had said it with that ridiculous little smile of hers, surrounded by a crowd of sweaty strangers, convinced that somehow this was where life made the most sense. Windsor had never understood it. Until now....without her.
Her gloved hands lift slightly as the beat drops, shoulders rolling with it before she laughs beneath her breath. There's something almost liberating about being anonymous in a crowd. Nobody knows her. Nobody knows what she's seen, what she's lost, what she's carrying. Nobody is asking questions.
For a few minutes, she's just another body moving to the music. And perhaps that's the strangest part. She finally understands what Hannah meant. Her smile falters for the briefest moment. Because suddenly, impossibly, she can almost hear her sister laughing over the music.
Windsor swallows, blinking rapidly as the lights strobe across the crowd. "Yeah," she murmurs to nobody in particular, the corner of her mouth curling again.
Then the bass kicks back in. And for once, Windsor doesn't run from the feeling. She does, however, make a b-line to the bar in search of water.
