“We’re two friends,” he said, distracting her. “Dancing.”
He hadn’t had the courage to look back down at her yet, but he could feel her eyes on him, on the normal and not-normal parts of his face, and his jaw ticked in anxious response. So far, at least, his body felt okay. The left hand chafing where it held her, but not too bad. His left leg straining uncomfortably with these unexpected movements, but holding up.
Six out of ten, still.
“How do you know how to dance?” she said.
“All rich people know,” he said. “There’s a special school we go to when we make our first million.”
She didn’t laugh this time, and he felt, rather than saw, her eyes drift from his face.
He tightened his hold. Left hand pressing anew against her lower back, damn the chafing. Right hand squeezing her fingers.
Her touching him, too: her small, warm palm on his back, her smooth hand inside his, and nothing,nothingabout that hurt. Like she put some kind of spell on those parts of him.
They looked at each other now. Up close, her eyes were more than mud-brown. Chocolate-brown, that was probably the betterdescription, with secret flecks of gold, stolen from a palace. The opposite of ostentatious.
“My mom taught me,” he said, “when I was a kid.”
In their kitchen, first, while a rare dinner she had time to make cooked in the oven. Him standing in his socked feet on her toes. Not so much a dance lesson as a game, which was uncommon in their house. It had been so much fun that he’d always—well, until he got older, bigger, more self-aware—asked her to do it again, anytime she was home and cooking dinner, more relaxed than usual. She would laugh and complain about how big he was getting, counting out aone, two, three; one, two, threeas they moved.
“I took the lessons, too,” she said in answer, an honest confession, and he could tell it cost her something—to admit that something about Michael and Emily had been cut from a cloth she’d already worn, with a guy who was only a few steps away, now doing the dance with someone new.
He nodded once in acknowledgment, thought he could feel the delicate skeleton inside her trembling, despite the way she held herself upright, following his steps smoothly.
So he kept talking. Honestly.
“I suppose most people would say it’s a not-job. My…job, I mean.”
He watched the long line of her pale throat bob in a swallow, her face still tipped up to his.
“I can’t work…uh. Regularly. I am not reliable. As an employee.”
She didn’t ask why, but he knew she probably knew. She was a doctor. She was up close to him now. He’d bet she had read papers about people like him.
“My last couple years of college, I made something. Designed something, I guess it’s better to say, with the help of a couple of myprofessors. It’s boring—a building material that turned out to have a lot of applications.”
“That doesn’t sound boring,” she said, tilting her head slightly, that little swoop of hair she always had in front moving with her. She was not looking at anything else but him, which was exactly the point of this, but also, he wondered if she could feel his skeleton shaking now.
“I have money from that,” he said, overly blunt, as though he could stop the shaking himself if he acted more and more unbothered.
Even though holding her like this was the most bothersome thing he had done in years.
And that counted the plane ride here. The hotel, this whole entire thing.
“Because I hold the patent,” he said, briefly stopping to clench his teeth. Somehow, without noticing, he’d moved the hand on her back up, and he thought he felt a brush of her hair on his wrist. But his left wrist was an unreliable place, a mysterious terrain of damage, and he couldn’t be sure. It could be a phantom, a figment, a harbinger. His pretend-brain back again.
“And have stake in the manufacturing company that came from the patent,” he rushed out, trying to shut it down. “My professors—well, they’re not professors anymore—they’re the ones who really run it.”
“Aretheybillionaires?” she asked, and he sort of wanted to smile. She really had a burr up her ass about billionaires, which was fair enough.
“No.”
“Hm,” she said, a deliberate imitation, and he liked it—the mocking sincerity of it, the friendship-feeling of it. By now, he doubted there was a need for this—a few brief turns and theywould’ve done what was needed to dispel the tension of that first moment—the ex arriving, Emily’s crestfallen face, Michael’s back-to-being-nervous one.
But he didn’t let her go.
“I also help manage my mom’s farm,” he added, which was an extremely unnecessary detail, and he realized, as soon as it came out of his mouth, that he was no longer doing this to distract her.
