Chapter 108: The Dance
POV: Carly
She felt him before she saw him.
That specific shift in the air that she had stopped being able to ignore months ago and had not managed to start ignoring in the past three days despite genuinely trying. She was mid-turn on the dance floor when it hit her and she slowed without meaning to and the girl beside her said something she didn't hear.
She turned.
He was at the edge of the floor. Not pushing through the crowd toward her. Just standing there, hands in his pockets, watching her with that expression. The real one. The one she had been cataloguing since October.
She looked at him.
He looked back.
He tilted his head very slightly toward the edge of the room. A question. Just that.
She held his gaze for a moment.
Then she said something to the girl beside her and moved off the floor.
He met her near the side wall, away from the speakers, far enough from the main cluster of people that they had something approaching privacy without having actually sought it. The red uplighting was doing something to the room that made everything feel warmer than it was and she was aware of that and told herself to account for it.
He looked at the room first. Slowly. The way he looked at things he was taking seriously.
"You built this." He said.
"My committee built this." She said.
He looked at her. "You built this."
She looked at the banner. At the candelabras. At the room full of people moving and laughing and being exactly where they were supposed to be.
"Yeah." She said softly. "I did."
He was quiet for a moment.
"It's extraordinary." He said. "Like most things you put your hands to."
She felt the warmth move through her and crossed her arms over herself to contain it.
He noticed the arm crossing. He didn't say anything about it.
"How are you?" He asked.
She looked at him. "You're asking me that tonight?"
"I've been wanting to ask you for three days." He said simply. "Tonight seemed like a window."
She pressed her lips together. "I'm okay." She said. "I'm better than I was. I'm still working through some things."
He nodded. "I know. I'm not pushing."
"I know you're not." She said.
They stood in the side of the room together with the music and the crowd around them and the specific quality of a conversation that was being carefully managed by both parties to avoid saying too much or too little.
She looked at him properly for the first time tonight. The dark jacket. The white shirt. The curls pushed back in the way that meant he'd made an effort. The necklaces at his collar including the sapphire one that she had been turning over in his fingers in her sleep for three days without meaning to.
"You came." She said.
"Of course I came." He said.
"You didn't have to."
"I wanted to see you in your element." He said. "I've been looking forward to it for weeks, actually. Before everything." He paused. "And you look—" He stopped himself.
She raised an eyebrow.
"I was going to pay you a compliment." He said. "And then I remembered I'm supposed to be giving you space and complimenting you in that dress feels like it's pushing slightly past the boundary."
She stared at him.
Then she laughed.
It came out of her unexpectedly, the real kind, the one she couldn't manufacture, and she pressed her hand over her mouth too late to catch it and when she looked back at him his face was doing the thing that she was never going to be fully prepared for.
"There she is." He said quietly. Like he had been waiting for it.
She dropped her hand. "Don't."
"I'm not doing anything." He said.
"You're doing the face." She said.
"I don't know what that means." He said.
"Yes you do." She said.
He looked at the dance floor. Then back at her. Something shifted in his expression into something more careful.
"I have something for you." He said. "Not as a gesture. Not as a way of pushing past the space. Just something I needed you to have."
She looked at him.
He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
She took it.
She opened it.
It was a drawing.
Her, on the football field the night she had walked away from him. He had drawn it from behind, just the outline of her, the dress and the ponytail and the space of the campus around her. Small and alone and holding herself together with her own arms. The fog of Black River Falls sitting low around her feet. A single lamp post casting light to her left that she remembered, that had actually been there, that she had not registered consciously but he had.
Underneath it, in his handwriting, two words.
I'm sorry.
She looked at the drawing for a long time.
She looked up at him.
He was watching her face with the careful patience of someone who had decided the outcome was out of their hands and was trying to be at peace with that.
She folded it along the original creases and held it.
"Thank you." She said. Her voice came out softer than she intended.
He nodded once.
The DJ shifted into something slower. The tempo dropped and the crowd on the floor adjusted around it and the room became slightly more intimate in that specific way that slow songs created even in a gymnasium.
She looked at the floor.
She looked at him.
"One dance." She said. "That's not me deciding anything. It's just one dance."
Something moved through his face that he contained almost immediately.
"One dance." He agreed.
He offered his hand.
She took it.
POV: Niko
He had not expected her to say yes.
He had prepared himself very specifically for her not to say yes, had built a whole structure around the possibility of her taking the drawing and thanking him politely and walking back to her coven girls, and he had been ready for that.
She had said yes.
He led her to the edge of the floor, not the center, somewhere with slightly less visibility, and turned to face her and she stepped into him without hesitation and the specific feeling of having her close again after three days of carefully maintained distance was something he was not going to be able to describe accurately so he didn't try.
His hand at her waist. Her hand on his shoulder. The appropriate distance of something that was not a reconciliation and both of them knowing it.
The song was something slow and unhurried that he did not know and did not need to know.
They moved together with the ease of something that had been practiced even though it hadn't. He thought about the festival, the first time they had danced, the almost-kiss that she had stepped back from on a cobblestone street that felt like a hundred years ago.
She was looking at the room over his shoulder.
He was looking at her.
"Niko." She said without looking at him.
"Mm." He said.
"Stop staring at me."
"Absolutely not." He said.
She made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost an exhale and landed somewhere between the two.
He pulled her slightly closer. She let him. He noted that and said nothing about it.
"I read the note Whitney left you." She said. Still looking at the room.
He stilled for a fraction of a second. "When?"
"Before I came here." She said. "She pushed it under our door."
He said nothing. Waiting.
"It was honest." She said. "The way the things you said in the courtyard were honest. Just the truth with the explanations stripped out." She paused. "I think I'm going to talk to her."
He processed that. "How do you feel about it?"
"Scared." She said. "And relieved. Both." She finally looked at him. "Is that weird?"
"No." He said. "That's exactly how it should feel."
She held his gaze for a moment.
The song moved around them, the crowd moved around them, the red light of the room made everything feel slightly apart from the ordinary world and he was aware that was the lighting doing its work but was grateful for it regardless.
"I miss you." She said. Very quietly. Like she hadn't fully decided to say it until it was already out.
He felt it land everywhere at once.
"I know." He said. Just as quietly. "I miss you too."
She looked at him.
He looked back.
Neither of them said the next thing, the thing that was sitting just past that exchange, because this was one dance and she had said that clearly and he was going to honor it. But it was there between them, visible even if it was not named, the specific presence of two people who had made the same decision and were waiting for the right moment to say it out loud.
The song ended.
She stepped back.
He let go.
She smoothed her dress and looked at him with an expression that was doing several things simultaneously, none of them fully readable, all of them hers.
"Thank you." She said. "For the drawing. And for tonight."
"Thank you for the dance." He said.
She nodded once.
She started to turn back toward the floor.
"Carly." He said.
She looked back.
"You built something extraordinary tonight." He said. "And you did it while everything else was falling apart. I just need you to know I see that."
She held his gaze for one long second.
Then she walked back to the dance floor.
He stayed where he was and watched her go and thought that one dance was either the beginning of something or the end of it and he was not yet sure which one and he was going to have to be patient with not knowing.
He was going to try to be patient.
He turned toward the exit.
He nearly walked directly into Leona McPherson.
He stopped.
She smiled.
"Nicholas." She said pleasantly. "Just the person I was looking for."
Author's Note:
I miss you. She said it first. She said it quietly like she hadn't decided to until it was already out and he said I know and I miss you too and the song ended and they both stepped back because one dance meant one dance and both of them honored that and I am going to be thinking about this chapter for a very long time. And then Leona. LEONA at the end.