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“Stop that,” Alec murmured against his cheek, following Magnus as he danced back out of reach. There was a thread of laughter in his tone. “There’s no way I could possibly step on your feet like this.”
“I’m just practicing an appropriate degree of caution,” Magnus said, but he stepped closer, slotting his body against Alec’s, swaying together with him on the balcony. Someone was playing music on the street below, the sound filtered up through the summer air along with the smell of klepon and the soothing rise and fall of Indonesian, voices mostly too distant for him to pick out the words unless he paid attention. Which, with Alec laughing in his arms, he definitely wasn’t doing.
The cadence was familiar, though, in a way that still pricked at his heart after all these centuries. It wasn’t often that he found himself in this part of the world, but there’d been a reclusive client who refused to leave the country with a finicky curse that only Magnus could lift, and so here he was.
And here was Alec, who had of course seen through all of Magnus’s breezy complaints and decided that he was suddenly in need of a long weekend away from Idris.
“I’m not even wearing shoes,” Alec said, but he was smiling as he pulled back to kiss Magnus lightly on the mouth. “And I’m not that bad.”
“Hmm,” Magnus said, although it was true. Alec had a decent sense of rhythm and a trained shadowhunter’s control over his body. What he didn’t have was any ability to relax into the music and just enjoy it; any kind of complicated dance had him as stiff and nervous as if he was in the midst of ballroom classes back in Alicante, just waiting for some stern nephilim teacher to happen by and fix his posture with a sharp jab between the shoulder blades.
Dancing like this, though, just swaying together to the sound of some busker or lovelorn fool picking out a tune on an acoustic guitar beneath their hotel window--that, he could do. That was something they could both do.
There was a laughing shout from below and the guitar player stopped suddenly. Before Alec could pull away, Magnus freed one hand to twist a spell into the air, conjuring up a gramophone in the corner of the room to play an old jazz standard in crisp clean tones that weren’t strictly possible on that kind of machine. Alec laughed into his hair, sounding delighted.
“Hush,” Magnus said. “I like dancing with you.”
“Even if I step on your feet?”
“Even then,” Magnus said, pulling him closer. At this point it was less dancing than it was embracing while they swayed back and forth to the music, but that was alright. This way, he could feel Alec in his arms, smell his skin, feel his heartbeat beneath the sturdy cage of his ribs. The nearness of him was a balm on Magnus’s edgy nerves. “Thank you. For coming with me.”
“Of course,” Alec murmured. For a moment it seemed like he might say something else, but instead he just tucked his head against Magnus’s shoulder and swayed with him while Buddy Bolden played and the warm breeze carried in the smell of a place that had once been home.