Page 97 of A Midnight Dance

“How’s about this, love? If your answer is no, spin off stage left and be done with it after the third dance. But if you’ll have me, go stage right and then come back to join me for the final sequence.” He looked me over as if he couldn’t get enough of the sight. “Finish this story standing beside me, as I’d always dreamed you would.”

My heart pounded so hard I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe as the music cued up and everything was before us.

He pulled me close again and laid his cheek on my head. “I suppose we’d best go finish. We’ve a theater full of people dying to know how it ends.”

I knew how it ended, though, at least in part. It ran parallel in some ways to the complex story of Delphine Bessette, but here is where it diverged forever. Jack had taught me how to dance as one who already belongs, as one set utterly free, and we’d learned together how to live that way too.

As the music began, I turned back toward the man who’d once pushed me, opened me up to the freedom I’d always possessed, and tugged him along with me. “Come. It’s time.”

My heart pounded as we danced together on that stage, the perfect symmetry of our movements sweeping us through the song. But it wasn’t the audience that made my heart pound so much. It was the last little sequence, the one that hadn’t been in this rewritten script. In a moment I’d spin off stage rightthen burst back upon the scene for the final pas de deux that I had been prepared to dance for all these years, and Jack would sweep me up once again, guiding me along to the end of the performance.

But of course, it wouldn’t stop there.