She wasn’t the only one affected by our nearness. My heart was pounding so hard I was sure that she could hear it, and my legs felt like jelly. I closed my eyes as we swayed together and inhaled the sweet floral scent of her perfume.
It had been so long since I’d held her, since I’d touched her, but it felt so familiar, like no time had passed at all.
“I’ve never danced with a king before.”
Yeah, because you ghosted me the week before our prom. I shook off the snarky comment. As grateful as I was that she had shown up and was here, seeing her again brought back so many feelings that I’d done my best to bury.
One would think that in the two decades that had passed I would have gotten over the pain; I’d tried to convince myself I had, but seeing Peyton again made it feel like it was yesterday. It was raw. Like an open wound.
“You said you read about me, what did you read?” I asked referring to the comment she made about me being able to afford a bribe.
She licked her lips nervously. I watched as her tongue slid along the seam of her mouth and my cock twitched in my pants. Apparently, my dick was ready to forgive and forget.
“Um, I read the Time article on tech billionaires. And a few other things I found online.”
“Did you Google stalk me?” I teased.
“There may have been a few deep dives, yes. But there’s not a lot out there.”
As the DJ mixed the last song into the next, I found it ironic when I heard the soft melodic stylings of Jodeci’s “Stay” coming through the speakers. In the song it talked about starting love again and forgetting about yesterday. It was like it was playing just for us. I tried not to think about the lyrics or about howgood, howrightshe felt in my arms.
“Have you ever looked me up?” she asked quietly.
“I may have done a few dives in the Google pool looking for you, too.”
She tilted her head to the right. “What did you find?”
“Nothing. You don’t have a digital footprint. No Insta. Facebook. LinkedIn. Twitter. TikTok. Snapchat. Nothing.”
“Yeah, I never really got on the social media train. And now that I’m a teacher, I just feel like it’s safer not to have anything personal about my life online.”
That was smart, but it had been frustrating for me. “What grade do you teach?”
“Right now, fourth grade. But I’ve taught middle school and high school aged kids, too.”
“Do you like it? Teaching?”
“I do.” She nodded. “It comes with a lot of challenges that I wasn’t expecting, but that’s probably true for any job.”
I nodded. “And where do you teach these fourth graders?”
“In Brooklyn.”
“East Coast, huh?”
“Yeah. I went to school at Sarah Lawrence, and just stayed in New York after I graduated.”
“So you’re happy? I mean, with your life in general, you’re happy?”
She stared at me, and opened her mouth to speak but then shut it again. Her nose twitched right before she nodded her head. “Yes, I’m happy.”
She was lying. Whenever she lied her nose twitched like Samantha in Bewitched. She wasn’t happy, but why? And why would she lie to me about it?
“What about you? Are you happy?” she asked.
“I am, most of the time,” I answered honestly. I left out the part where I felt empty, and like I was missing part of myself, becauseshewas the remedy for that, and I could never admit that to her.
I hadn’t truly admitted it to myself. But after seeing her again, hearing her voice, feeling her touch as we swayed to the music, I knew it to be true.
