Page 67 of It's Always Been You
I know I’ve been silent too long, that everyone is waiting for me to say that this is, in fact, not fake at all. I know because Gabe stiffens a little behind me at the same time his arm around me tightens, and his other hand comes up to grasp my hip like he can keep me with him through sheer force of will alone.
“What we are is still under negotiation,” Gabe says. His voice is light, but I know without looking at him that his smile doesn’t go all the way to his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Molly
“You don’t want to take the car?” I ask Gabe as we walk hand in hand out of the building where the gala was being held, and he leads me past the line of waiting cars.
“Nope. I want to go somewhere with you first.” He releases my hand and swings an arm around my shoulders as we walk deeper into campus.
Gabe hasn’t been quite himself since the moment earlier when I hesitated to slap a label on us. It’s nothing anyone else would pick up on, probably not even his sisters. But I’ve been tuned to Gabe’s frequency for almost fourteen years, and I know. I can feel his brain working as he tries to figure me out. He wants us to beusagain. More than that, he wants me to want it. And I do. I just need a little more time. For what, I can’t quite tell. I’m hoping I’ll figure it out.
I’m so lost in thought I don’t realize where we are until Gabe tugs me to a stop.
Bancroft Dance Studio has barely changed in ten years. The aged wooden shingles. The neat hedges that line the stone stairs up to the building. But where my trips here used to be full ofthrill and excitement, tonight, staring up at the building that used to house the keys to my future, I feel nothing but dread and a frisson of fear.
“Why are we here?” I ask Gabe, hating the tremor I hear in my voice.
“I think you need to be here.”
I shake my head, fighting the anxiety that snakes its way up my spine. “No.”
Gabe steps up to me, gathering my hair and pushing it back behind my shoulders, then framing my face with his hands. His eyes are soft but full of determination.
“Yes, Rory. I know you. I know you well enough to know there is a piece of you locked away. I can see it. You don’t owe it to me. You don’t owe it to anyone, and if I’m wrong here, you can tell me to fuck off, and we’ll go back to the hotel and never talk about this again. But I think that piece of you is in this building. I think you want it back but are afraid to look too closely at it. Afraid of what might happen if you do. But you don’t have to be afraid. Not of this, and definitely not with me. Come inside with me, baby. Let me help you find it.”
It’s thebabyand the earnestness in his voice that has me taking the hand he offers and climbing the stone steps with him. It’s the knowledge that he is absolutely right—my missing piece is right here on Bancroft Way—that has me following him through the front doors.
It would be silly of me to ask how he can access a secure building on the campus of one of the biggest universities in the country at eleven o’clock at night. Gabe probably has the master key to the entire fucking school.
When we reach my old dance studio, I freeze, my hand on the door. My body shakes and fills with dread, and when I look at my hand, I’m suddenly twenty-one again, with my dance bagslung over my shoulder, about to burst through this door and lose myself in the music.
“I’ve got you, Rory,” Gabe murmurs from behind me. “It’s okay.”
It’s his soft voice and his warm body against mine that has me pushing the door open and stepping inside.
It’s been more than a decade since I’ve set foot in this dance studio, but it still looks the same. Smells exactly the same. As if in a trance, I walk around the space as memories pummel me. Launching myself into the air as the music soared. Stomping my foot in frustration when I couldn’t get a move right. Learning a contemporary routine for class. Choreographing my final exams. Getting the letter that I had been accepted to the dance company for after graduation. Lacing up my toe shoes to dance ballet just for me. And sometimes for Gabe.
I step up to the barre, running my hands over the worn wood, wondering if it’s the same one I used. If I’m touching the same wood my hands slid over a decade ago.
Looking up in the mirror for the first time, I see myself then and now. The bubbly dance major with her entire life in front of her. The thirty-two year old lawyer with shattered eyes who hasn’t danced in a decade.
“I miss it so much,” I whisper, my voice thick with unshed tears. “Sometimes I dance in my dreams, and when I wake up, it’s like losing it all over again.”
“You were so beautiful when you danced, Rory. I loved watching you.” Gabe comes up behind me, and when our eyes lock in the mirror, the memory of the last time we stood like this, the words he said. So similar to his words tonight, assaults me. I can see the unasked questions in Gabe’s eyes, and I suddenly know with absolute certainty that this is the thing keeping me from giving our second chance my all.
Dance. How much I loved it. How I lost it. When. When I lost it.
The fear I felt outside wasn’t about dancing. It was about this conversation. The one we are about to have. The one I don’t know how to have without feeling the full depth of my feelings. Showing them to him. But if we’re ever going to be anything, this is the boulder we need to shove our way through.
“Ask me a question, Gabe.”
He doesn’t smile at our little game the way he usually does. He can feel the enormity of this too. He knows this is the final piece of the puzzle, just like I do. We’ve always been in sync that way.
“Why did you stop dancing?”
I don’t expect the hot rush of anger at his question. The category five hurricane of fury that takes over and has me whirling around to face him.
