“Just an hour?” There’s that smile again.
“Oh, did you want me to humiliate myself for longer?”
He grins and steps forward to give his coffee order and then buys me mine.
We stand together against the wall of the tiny coffee shop waiting for our orders as he looks at me again. His eyes are a complicated hazel color—a warm green with a ring of warm brown in the center—and he has a way of fixing his gaze on me that’s both intense and incredibly hard to read.
“How about this?” he says. “I would like to take you out. But if we’re going to do that, you have to stick with West Coast Swing. At least for a month. You can’t just take a one-hour lesson and quit.”
“You want to see me embarrass myself more?”
“I didn’t say you had to takemyclass. I just want you to stick with it.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “Maybe I think you’re a good dancer.”
“I am a terrible dancer.”
He smiles. “No. The terrible ones have no rhythm and that is almost impossible to teach. You have a sense of how music works. It’s visible in the way you move. Youlikemusic.”
“Well, my ex-husband was a musician.” I consider what he’s said. I’ve never thought much about my relationship with music. “I used to love going to shows and dancing around for hours, but then I guess I started to associate music with my ex-husband, who never showed up when he said he would.”
“Don’t let him take music from you. I let my ex-wife take a lot of stuff that I used to love. It’s one reason I came back to the city, to reclaim the stuff that I accidentally gave up in the divorce.”
He’s right. I used to love bands and rooms full of people before I associated them with a man who dropped in and out of my life like a signal from the world’s weakest radio station.
I take a breath. “Okay. I’ll stick with it for a month. Maybe I can sign Hannah up for karate classes or something at the same time. She’s been hounding me for martial arts lessons.”
“She sounds fierce.”
“You have no idea. She’ll probably be Brooklyn Borough President by the time she’s twenty-one. She has opinions on everything.”
We grab our coffees and walk to the door.
“I remember your daughter, actually,” he replies as he holds the door open for me.
“You do? That was years ago.”
“She was funny. Dark, curly hair, right? She reminded me of you.”
“You didn’t even know me back then.”
“I noticed you,” he says. “But I was married and I assumed you were, too.”
“No, I was already divorced.” I consider what to say. “Hannah is a great kid with an unreliable dad, and I try to shield her from that fact, and that makes her hate me.”
Ollie nods slowly, taking this in. “Why would she hate you?”
“Because he doesn’t show up, and I pretend it wasn’t his fault, and then I’m the bad guy who’s mad at her perfect dad all the time. Sorry, you don’t need to hear about that. Angry ranting about exes is the third date, right? Or is it the fourth? I’m rusty.”
He laughs. “You’re not ranting, you’re telling me about your life.”
I smile, charmed in spite of myself. “My subway is that way.”
He walks down the street with me and then pauses when we reach the subway entrance. We stand there for a moment, sipping our coffees, looking at each other.
“Laura, may I take you on a date?”
