“You know,” Shiloh said, “wecouldjust be talking comfortably at a table...”
“We could,” Cary said. He didn’t let go. “Dancing is better.”
“Why?”
“Because youcantalk when you’re dancing, but you don’t have to. And nobody else can interrupt.”
“Somebody could cut in.”
“Nobody’s gonna cut in.”
“You think that nobody else wants to dance with me?”
“I think that when two people are slow-dancing to ‘Hey Ya!,’ everyone leaves them alone.”
Shiloh frowned. She looked around. “Now that you’ve called attention to the song... it’s actually hardnotto dance.”
Cary smiled. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
He pulled her closer and started to sway faster, in time with the music.
Shiloh laughed.
Cary held her tight, moving his shoulders back and forth to the beat.
Shiloh tried to move her shoulders, too. She was clumsier than him. She was laughing. And blushing.
“This better?” Cary asked. He was grinning with his mouth closed. His eyes were light.
Shiloh was laughing too hard (and quietly) to answer. Her face fell forward. She let him move her hand to the music. She rocked back and forth with him and tried to relax her neck.
“Hey Ya!” turned into “Groove Is in the Heart,” and then, to Shiloh’s dismay, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.
Cary kept them moving. It was easier if Shiloh didn’t look at him—but she couldn’tnotlook at him. (Time was short.) She lifted up her chin.
He looked like he’d been laughing, too.
“Whoareyou?” she asked.
“I’m a grown man,” Cary said, like that was an answer.
Shiloh laughed some more, letting her forehead rest on the far edge of his shoulder. She was glad they didn’t have to talk, because this was a lot to take in. So much more than she’d been hoping for tonight—more than just a good look at him and a warm conversation.
And it wasn’t over yet.
To keep it going, all Shiloh had to do was keep her self-consciousness at bay. (Her self-consciousness and her bone-deep desolation.) (She could be desolate tomorrow. And the next day. She could table her ennui.)
Shiloh was getting another hour with Cary. A bonus hour. In his arms.
Her teenage self could never have predicted—or even comprehended—how precious this would feel. That seventeen-year-old kid had aglutof Cary hours. All the Cary she cared to eat. Cary was her day-in, day-out. Her standard operating procedure.
Shiloh hadn’t been able to conceive of a life without Cary... until that’s what she had. A whole life without him, years and years, with no sign of that ever changing.
This night was an aberration.
This dance.
