Chapter 31 Not a Cheater
POV: Carly
He asked her to dance the way he did most things.
Like it was already decided and he was just giving her the courtesy of hearing it first.
"We had a deal." He said. "I kept my end. Now I'm collecting."
She looked at the dance floor below the amphitheater. Couples and groups and strangers who had found each other over the course of the evening moving to the slow warm music from the stage. Nobody was watching anybody else. Everyone too absorbed in their own moment to care about anyone else's.
She looked back at him.
He was holding out his hand with that expression. Patient and certain and just slightly daring.
She looked at his hand.
She thought about Tommy on the field. His arms around her and his lips on hers and the way he had said do you even want to be with me with that tired honest hurt in his voice.
She thought about I love you said quietly against her lips that she had not said back.
She thought about the east lawn and the lie she had constructed in seven minutes in a locker room mirror and how easily it had come.
She looked at Niko's hand.
She put hers in it.
He didn't make a thing of it. Just stood and led her down toward the dance floor in that unhurried way he had of moving through spaces like he had already decided how they were going to go.
They found a spot at the edge of the floor where the crowd thinned slightly. The band was playing something that had just enough pace to require actual dancing and just enough warmth to make everything feel closer than it was.
They turned to face each other and there was a beat of genuine awkwardness that she hadn't expected from either of them. Hand placement and where to look and the specific vulnerability of being this deliberately close to someone in public.
She almost laughed at him for it.
She almost laughed at herself.
"Here." She said and lifted his hand into position and stepped into him and felt his whole body register it.
His other hand found her lower back.
She felt that from her spine to her toes.
They started moving.
It took about thirty seconds for the awkwardness to dissolve into something else entirely. They found the rhythm the way they found most things with each other lately, without planning it, just following where it went. His hand was warm on her back and her hand was in his and they were close enough that she could feel the slight warmth coming off him even through their clothes.
She looked up at him.
He was already looking at her.
"So he dances." She said.
"I said on occasion." He said. "This qualifies."
"You're actually good." She said.
"Don't sound so surprised." He said.
"Forced ballroom lessons as a kid." She said. "Me too apparently."
"Were you a pageant queen as well." He said.
She kept her face neutral. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
He smiled. "Of course not."
He twirled her without warning, one clean rotation that sent her dress flaring out around her and pulled her back into him before she had fully landed and she laughed at the surprise of it and felt his hand tighten slightly on her back like the laugh had done something to him.
She settled back against him and they kept moving.
"How do you do it." She said after a while. Her voice quieter than the dancing required.
"Do what." He said.
"Live the way you do." She said. "Without fear of what anyone thinks. Without following the rules that were handed to you." She looked at him. "How do you just decide to be different from what everyone expects."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I got tired." He said simply. "Of performing the version of myself that made other people comfortable. It costs too much and you never get anything back for it."
She thought about that.
He looked at her carefully. "You already know how to do it." He said. "You're here aren't you."
She looked at the dance floor around them. All these strangers. The music and the lights and the fog pressing softly against the edges of the park.
"This is different." She said.
"Is it." He said.
She didn't have an answer for that.
They kept dancing and the song shifted into something slightly slower and neither of them adjusted the distance between them to account for it. If anything the distance decreased without either of them deciding that.
She became aware of how close they were.
She had been aware of it the whole time but now she was aware of it differently. Their joined hands. His palm on her lower back. The way she had tilted her face up to talk to him and hadn't tilted it back down.
His eyes dropped to her lips.
She felt it like a physical thing even though nothing had moved.
Her breath slowed.
He was looking at her the way he had been looking at her for weeks, that patient focused look that she had been calling intensity and curiosity and anything else she could find that wasn't what it actually was.
He leaned forward slightly.
Just slightly. Just enough that the distance between them became something that required a decision.
Tommy.
His name appeared in her mind like a hand on her shoulder.
Tommy in his helmet on the field. Tommy's arms lifting her off the ground. Tommy's quiet hurt voice asking do you even want to be with me.
She was not a cheater.
Whatever was happening in her head and her chest and every place she had been refusing to examine for the past two weeks, she was not going to be the person who did this. Who stood on a dance floor with someone she had no business feeling this way about and crossed a line she could not uncross.
She pulled back.
Not dramatically. Just a small withdrawal. Enough that the moment dissolved quietly rather than breaking.
She looked at the stage.
He said nothing.
She appreciated that more than she could explain.
"It's getting late." She said. Her voice came out steady which surprised her. "We should head back."
She stepped away from him and crossed her arms over her chest and started toward the exit without looking back.
She heard him exhale behind her. Low and controlled and she filed it away with everything else she was not examining tonight.
He caught up to her in a few strides and walked beside her and put his hands in his pockets and they moved through the thinning crowd toward the bus stop in a silence that was not comfortable this time.
It was not uncomfortable either.
It was just honest.
She had pulled back and they both knew why and neither of them was going to say it out loud and that felt like the most truthful thing that had happened all evening.
She glanced at him sideways.
His jaw was set and his eyes were forward and he looked like someone processing something privately.
She looked forward too.
The fog of Black River Falls had crept all the way into the park by now, sitting low between the vendor stalls and softening all the edges. The lights above them turned it gold.
She pulled her jacket tighter.
He noticed and said nothing and she was grateful for that too.
They walked and the music faded behind them and the night settled around them and she thought about Tommy and she thought about the hand on her lower back and she thought about her mother's face saying I just thought of an idea and she thought about Niko saying I don't want to lie to you even if the truth costs me.
She thought about a lot of things.
She kept walking.
He kept pace beside her and didn't push and didn't perform being unbothered and didn't make her feel like she owed him an explanation and she thought that might be the most disarming thing about him.
Not the accent or the eyes or the way he quoted Brontë in a dim library like it was nothing.
Just this.
Walking next to her in the honest quiet and not asking her to fill it.
She looked at him one more time before they reached the bus stop.
He caught her looking.
He didn't smirk.
He just looked back.
She faced forward and told herself she was going to figure all of this out.
She was going to figure it out later.
Right now she just needed to get back over that wall and back into her room and back into the version of her life that made sense.
The bus arrived.
They got on.
Neither of them said anything for a long time.
Then somewhere in the middle of the dark ride back through the fog of Black River Falls she heard him speak.
"You know." He said quietly. "For what it's worth." He paused. "Tonight was the best night I've had in a long time."
She looked at the window.
At her own reflection looking back at her in the dark glass.
She pressed her lips together.
"Me too." She said.
The bus moved through the fog.
Neither of them said anything after that.
Author's Note:
She pulled back. She chose not to be a cheater. And then she said me too on a dark bus in the fog and I have been staring at that sentence for ten minutes. This is only the beginning and it is already destroying me.