“And being on a worldwide tour as a ballerina,” she insists. “Going down to have a café au lait in a café on the ancient streets.”
I slide a palm over her calf, down to her sock and back up. Why is she knocking herself out for something she’s not a hundred percent on? She’s barely twenty percent on it.
“So you like it in theory, just not in reality,” I say.
She raises one brow. “You’d better not be suggesting I blow off this tour. Because then we’d have a problem.”
“You hear me suggesting that?” I protest.
“I think you’re thinking that I should do my own damn tour. Maybe with the girls. Make that my whole thing. I think that’s what you’re saying.”
“I said all that?” I tease.
She pokes my chest. “I think you should screw off.”
I grab her finger and brush a kiss on her knucklebone.
“Not this again,” she says.
I move on to the next knuckle.
“It’s a lifelong dream,” she says. “My dream since I was a kid. And you want to act like it’s boring ice cream parts.”
“I think you fought for it,” I say. “I think you are the most tenacious person on this rooftop.”
“No, you’re the most tenacious person,” she says.
I brush my lips over another knuckle. “It’s a thing we have in common.”
“Who knew!” she says.
A rush of déjà vu hits me. The memory of a conversation from the night we were married.
“What?” she asks, tilting her head. Her silky hair catches the light from atop a nearby building. “I can see those gears in your mind turning and churning. Tell me.”
She’s waiting, really wanting to know. She so hates being the last to know things. And somehow, I can’t resist. One brief trip to the past. “We knew that night.”
“We talked about it?” she asks.
“We talked about being tenacious that night. That people get it wrong, like they take it weirdly personally. We talked about being both outsiders.”
“I hate that I forgot so much of it,” she says. “And I hate so much of how I acted.”
“It’s past. We don’t have to talk about it.” I glide my palm along her calf, soft and cool. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Maybe you don’t like to talk about it, but I want to know. Tell me what else happened,” she says. “I know you remember.”
“For one thing, I had no idea that you were such a lightweight.”
“Sucha lightweight,” she says.
“I wasn’t used to drinking either, but—”
“But at least you remember our nuptials!” she says.
“We were acting in…an uncharacteristic way,” I say.
“Like how?”