Page 56 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper
“Hi,” he said, more breath than voice.
“Tolly! What are you doing here?”
“I work for Hawthorne Drake, the sponsor of the gala. You look…”
He couldn’t find the words.
But he didn’t need to. Chloe blushed anyway. “Thank you.”
“So this was the party you were buying the dress for. What are the chances?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. You’re the numbers expert. Whatarethe chances?”
Oliver started to smile. But then he remembered—at Bergdorf’s, Chloe had said herdatewas paying for her dress. Which meant she wasn’t here alone.
He took a polite step backward. “So, uh, where’s the lucky man who gets to spend the evening with you?”
“Well, it turns out that I get to spend the first part of tonight with you,” she said. “My date is coming late.”
For once, luck is on my side,Oliver thought.
Behind them, the band began to play. First there was the double bass. Then a sultry saxophone.
“Would you care to dance?” he asked.
Maybe it was too bold of him. Or maybe he was being selfish. But hewanted to be close to her, and this was a socially acceptable way to do it. There were a few other couples on the parquet dance floor.
“I would love to,” Chloe said with one of those soft smiles of hers that liquified Oliver’s soul.
He led her to the music, then twined his fingers through hers with one hand, and rested his other on her waist. He could feel the warmth of her skin through the gossamer fabric, her heat seeping into his palm, up his arm, and straight into the center of his chest where he’d always kept her memory.
“You know how to dance,” she said.
“Not really. But if I’m going to make a fool of myself, I’d like it to be with you.”
She laughed quietly, then shifted her body closer to his. They weren’t touching, other than where their hands had settled, but there was that tangible hum between them again. Were they corresponding magnets, just waiting for the right moment to come together? Or were they poles that would eternally remain apart, the electricity between them a barrier rather than a prelude?
As the pianist joined the sax and bass in the song, Oliver closed his eyes to focus on the present, to enjoy what he had of Chloe now. It was already more than he could have dreamed of; sixteen years ago, he’d thought their time was over for good.
Don’t think about the future, he told himself.Don’t think about tomorrow, or even about the rest of tonight after her date arrives. There is only you and her, right here. Together for now.
She smelled of rose petals and jasmine, of summer and light morning rain. He remembered when they were seven years old and summer had just begun, and how they’d abandoned their bikes on Chloe’s porch and then run into the neighboring fields of wildflowers, feeling freedom from the yoke of first grade, which had seemed so burdensome back then. She had picked so many flowers, she couldn’t hold them all—red, violet, azure, yellow, vermillion—and Oliver had offered his arms as a repository for all her bouquets.
There was her birthday in sixth grade, when Chloe had had a cake with chocolate ice cream and a mulberry jam swirl. As she blew out the candles, she had held his gaze in a different way than he’d known before. Oliver hadbeen too immature to read the wish in her eyes then. But now he’d do anything to see it appear again.
Then there were all those years after his family left, when he would fall asleep thinking of her. He’d dream—sometimes innocently and full of longing, sometimesnotinnocent and filled with another type of longing—but he never desecrated her memory, not like that. Chloe was an unadulterated happiness he kept tucked in his pocket, and he wanted to keep her that way.
A trumpet crooned, and as their bodies swayed, Oliver leaned closer to her, her temple not an inch from his mouth. He wanted to brush his lips against her there, to trail down over the sprinkle of freckles on her cheek, to graze his mouth against the soft red of hers.
But then the song ended, the instruments blending and then fading together, replaced by applause from the other dancers around them. Oliver held still, near her, for another second more, the humming in the small space between them more palpable than before.
The band eased into another melody, this one even slower and more seductive than the last.
Oliver wanted to ask for another dance. Whereas he had dreaded the gala in the days leading up to it, now he would be euphoric if time stopped and he were trapped here at this event, for eternity.
But he knew that if he asked Chloe to dance again, that if he didn’t let go of her hand and her waist, he wouldn’t be able to resist through another song. He would kiss her, right here in the middle of the ballroom in front of his boss and his colleagues, all of whom would soon enough know that Chloe was here with a different date.
Oliver held her a little longer than he probably should have, his soul caught in the rightness of being in the same space, and the touch of her body against his. Things he used to take for granted when he hadn’t known how easy they were to lose.
