Page 66 of Reclaim Me

“Maybe.”

“Ain’t no, maybe, Deanna; you just said you’re sad and lonely. That means it’s time to come on home.”

“I didn’t say I was sad, bitch.”

I snort out a laugh. “Damn, why I gotta be all of that?”

“Because you’re getting on my nerves. Now, pick up the phone and show me around this building your baby daddy bought you before Aaron burns it to the ground.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” I tell her, wishing I had as much confidence in my relationship with Aaron as I do in his aversion to arson. Dee twists her lips to the side, letting me know she’s not as certain as I am, but she doesn’t say anything else on the topic, which allows me the chance to give her a full tour of the building before she has to hang up to tend to the clients that actually pay her.

Once our call ends, I pull up my favorite playlist and turn the volume up as high as it will go before putting on my freshly broken-in shoes and letting the music take me where it wants to go. Ballet is one of the most structured forms of dance, so there’s not usually room for free-styling, but that’s all I’m doing at this moment. There’s no rhyme or reason or finesse to my movements, and because I’m out of practice, there are several moments when my shoulders and hips are not on the same line, but still, it feels good to move. To dance. To get back in touch with the part of me that loves the burn in my muscles when I stretch them to their limits and, as crazy as it sounds, the slight ache in my toes from the pressure of balancing the weight of my entire body on them when I’m en pointe.

There’s madness to this art form, yes, but there’s beauty too, and that’s what I want to teach the kids that pass through the doors of my school. I want them to learn to appreciate the fundamentals like first position and then push themselves to perfect the harder skills like going en pointe, and I want them to leave here knowing that even if this world doesn’t want them, they can still want it. They can still have it.

By the time I’m done, my ankles hurt, and my lungs are burning, but I’m happy, happier than I’ve been in a long time, about something that doesn’t have to do with Riley. I collapse on the floor, wishing for a water bottle and maybe a snack, when my playlist stops, and my phone starts to ring, playing the ringtone I designated for Hunter. I lay there, staring up at the ceiling and contemplating letting him go to voicemail, but then I reconsider because he hasn’t done anything to deserve that from me.

I pull myself up off the floor, hurrying over to the window sill where I sat the phone and scooping it up.

“Hello?” I’m breathless, a byproduct of pushing myself to physical exhaustion after months of doing nothing, and Hunter notices.

“Did I catch you at a bad time?” he asks, and I can practically see his eyebrows reaching for his non-existent hairline as he jumps to an inappropriate conclusion.

“No, this is a perfect time.” I rub a hand down my face and over my neck, clutching at my dry throat. “I’m just down at the building…cleaning up.” I close my eyes and groan silently at the poorly executed lie. I could have just told him I was dancing.

“Oh. Okay.” There’s a smile in his voice that teases me, calling me a liar.

“Did you need something?”

He never calls me. The one time we’ve talked on the phone since exchanging numbers, I initiated the phone call, and he’s never returned the favor, until now.

“I wanted to know if Riley has a savings account.”

God, why is that such an attractive combination of words?

I bite my lip, wondering if I’ll dream about him again tonight, only this time, he won’t be eating my pussy in the middle of a room full of mirrors; he’ll be seducing me with finance terms like APY and compounding interest.

“Yeah, I, uh, I started her one when she was a baby with the money I got from Will’s life insurance.”

“Oh.” His end of the line goes quiet, and I realize that it’s the first time one of us has mentioned Will since we’ve been back in each other’s lives. “That was smart.”

“Thank you?”

“What’s with the tone?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out your tone.”

“I don’t have a tone,” he insists, and I purse my lips even though he can’t see me because we both know he’s lying. “Okay, maybe there was a bit of a tone,” he admits, which makes me smile.

“Do you want to tell me why there was a tone?”

Hunter blows out a breath. “You’re just so good at this whole parenting thing.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

His answer comes immediately. “No. I couldn’t be prouder or more impressed with the mother that you are. I just—” he pauses, and I try to picture him now in this rare moment of self-doubt “—I’m just trying to catch up, to make up for fucking up so thoroughly that I ended up missing everything. I don’t want to miss any more, Rae.”

“You won’t,” I assure him because I can’t picture going back to a reality where he’s not a part of Riley’s life, where he’s not a part of mine. “I won’t let you.”

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