His lips twitch into something that might be a smile. “Because if I have to stand in this room for another minute pretending to enjoy small talk, I might set this entire place on fire.”
“And dancing is better?”
“With you, it might be.”
My heart stutters at that, and I hate that it does.
He offers a hand, and I stare at it for a second too long before finally placing mine in his.
He doesn’t pull me close, but his fingers close around mine. “Come on,Soreya,” he says, quieter this time.
At the sound of it, Christian’s head snaps up. He watches Kai now, with a sharp, sudden frown.
But I let Kai lead me anyway.
The music in the ballroom has shifted into something slower now. It follows us as Kai brings me to the edge of the room, just far enough from the crowd to feel separate, but close enough to still be seen. Always close enough to be seen.
He places a hand at my waist, light but certain. My palm finds his shoulder, and we start to move.
I study his face: the sharp cheekbones, the lashes darker than they should be. Up close, he looks the way he sounds lately: frayed.
Has he been sleeping?
I’m about to ask him if he’s okay. The words are already forming, pressing up against the back of my teeth.
“Don’t you think it’s funny,” he says, his voice quiet and close, just above the music, “how music with no words can still say more than most people ever manage with a thousand?”
I blink, caught off guard. “Yeah,” I murmur. “I guess it kind of forces you to feel it.”
He nods, his gaze fixed somewhere past my shoulder. “Some things are felt, not spoken.”
I let his words hang in the air between us. They’re soft. Simple. And yet… nothing about them is simple at all.
The strings swell in the background, the kind of sound that passes through your chest before you even notice it’s found its way in. And maybe that’s what he means. Maybe that’s what this is.
Feeling without saying.
He still isn’t looking at me.
“Is that why you don’t talk?” I ask before I can stop myself. “Why you avoid telling anyone how you’re actually doing?”
His gaze cuts to mine then, fast.
For a second, I think he’s going to walk away. That he’ll let go of my hand and vanish into the crowd. But he doesn’t.
Instead, he laughs. Quietly. “You really want to talk about feelings?” he asks, almost under his breath.
“I want to know if you’re okay,” I say.
He studies me now, really studies me, like he’s trying to decide what I’m really asking. “I’m not sure that matters,” he says eventually.
“It matters to me.”
That earns another flicker of something behind his eyes. Surprise, maybe.
Or guilt.
Maybe both.
