“What?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“You were about to say something.”
“I was about to say you’re good at this.”
“At what?”
“Seeing people.”
She didn’t take the compliment. Didn’t deflect it either. Just held it for a moment and let it pass. “Everybody’s good at it. Most people just don’t pay attention.”
The second song ended. A pause stretched between them—that natural seam where one of them should step back, say thanks, let go. Isaac felt it open and waited.
Fallon’s hand stayed on his shoulder. Her thumb shifted, settling in rather than pulling away.
“I like this song,” she said.
The third song hadn’t started yet.
“Me too,” Isaac agreed.
The space between them closed by half an inch. Her fingers rested against the back of his neck now, just barely, just thetips. His thumb traced a slow line against the fabric at her waist. Small adjustments that neither of them acknowledged.
Or stopped.
They kept talking. Lower now, more for each other than for conversation’s sake. She told him the auction items were overpriced and that the crab cakes were the only thing worth eating at the buffet. He told her the quartet’s cellist was the only one actually enjoying herself. Fallon said she could tell by the way the woman leaned into the low notes. Isaac said he could tell because she was the only musician not watching the clock on the back wall.
The pauses got longer. Neither of them rushed to fill them.
Damn, she was striking. The simplicity of her next to the overdone glitter of the ballroom. The absence of effort. But it wasn’t her looks that kept him on this dance floor through a third song he couldn’t have named at gunpoint. It was that she was honest. No polish, no pretense, nothing calculated.
Every other person here was selling something—status, connections, the polished fiction that they belonged. Fallon wasn’t selling anything. She wasn’t impressed by any of it, including him. And instead of making him try harder, it made him stop trying altogether.
He didn’t want to be charming with her. He just wanted to keep talking.
But then across the ballroom, a hand went up. Graham Ashford, standing near the south corridor, had finally surfaced. The restrained half-wave of a man who didn’t want to shout across a crowded floor.
Fuck.
Isaac’s own hand stilled against Fallon’s waist. He didn’t want to leave her but couldn’t ignore the real reason he was here.
“I have to go deal with something,” he said. “Thirty minutes, maybe less.”
She pulled back enough to look at him. Reading him the same way she’d read everyone else tonight. “Okay.”
“Meet me at the bar?”
“Maybe.”
He held her gaze. “That’s not a yes.”
“It’s not a no, either.” She stepped out of his frame. The loss of contact registered immediately—a small, specific absence where her hand had been. “Go do your thing, Isaac.”
He watched her for one more beat. Then, regretting every life choice he’d ever made, he turned and walked toward Graham. When he glanced over his shoulder, Fallon had already disappeared into the crowd.
Graham Ashford was a reasonable man. Mid-sixties, trim, with silver hair that looked like it cost a hundred dollars a month to maintain. He shook Isaac’s hand with a grip that meant business and got right to it.
