Page 94 of At First Dance
“Morning,” she says, voice smoked with sleep.
“Morning.” I try to keep my own voice from showing all the things it wants to carry. It comes out steadier than I feel.
She slides a mug across. Our fingers don’t touch, but it feels like they do. She finally looks up and smiles, soft and crooked, but it doesn’t quite make the last step to her eyes.
There’s a pressure pattern you learn from weather. Heavy air, a hush in the trees, birds that choose not to waste energy—storm logic. The kitchen has that quiet now. It’s not the good kind. It’s the kind that means something’s coming.
“I need to head to Nashville,” she says, not sprinting, not hedging—just laying the truth down on the counter between us like a set of keys. “Two, three days. There are meetings I can nolonger postpone, fittings, and a film project. I fought for all of it to be in Nashville, not LA or New York. It’s… the least loud.”
The coffee turns bitter on my tongue. Not her. The idea of the machine that chews up people I love and spits them out shiny and tired.
“How long?” I ask, because practical questions give your hands something to hold.
“Quick,” she says, and then, quieter, “I’ll come back.”
Something under my ribs braces like I’m setting a post. I nod. “I believe you.” And I do. That’s the terrifying part.
She searches my face. “I don’t want you to think I’m running.”
“I don’t,” I say, and I mean it. “I think you’re doing your job. I also think I’d be lying if I said I like the way my stomach dropped when you told me.”
Her exhale catches. She comes around the island like she’s approaching a skittish horse, then stops when she’s close enough that I can see the gold flecks in the brown of her eyes. “Come with me,” she blurts, like the thought surprised her too. “Just… for a couple of days. Keep me honest. Remind me where I’m going back to.”
The word lands and rings. Come. There’s a kid part of me that wants to say yes so fast I forget to pack. There’s a man part of me that looks past her shoulder at the chores board: vaccinations tomorrow, feed delivery window, the far north fence that finally sagged like it’s tired of pretending it’s not weak at the corner.
I picture us on a plane, her hand under mine when it climbs, her head on my shoulder while I pretend I’m not a man who hates leaving the ground. I picture a hotel hallway with a camera flash blooming like summer lightning in a bad place. I picture her squeezed between handlers and stylists and a motherwho likes control more than she likes sunrise, and I’m a wall in a room that needs one.
It would be easy to go because I want to. It would be hard to go because I’m a person other people count on. The balance of that is adulthood and I hate it.
I set my mug down, palm flat to the counter to stop the urge to reach for her and say yes to everything. “I want to,” I tell her, and the wanting is the truest thing in the room. “Every part of me wants to. But if I go, I won’t do it halfway. And right now we’ve got the feed truck at ten, Jasper’s shoe to reset, and Bailey’s third-grade crew coming to read under the sycamores at noon tomorrow. If I bail because I can’t stand the idea of you walking into noise without me, that’s me making my fear your job. I don’t want to do that to you. Or them.”
She takes that in. Doesn’t flinch. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” Then she steps into me like the answer was a place, not a word. Her hands smooth down my ribs under the cotton, around my back, palms warm. “Then let me make this easier.”
“How?”
“Rules,” she says. “We write them right now.”
“Rules,” I repeat, because I’m a man who likes fences when they’re put in right. “Say them.”
“One,” she starts, eyes steady, “I call when the plane lands. Not a text. Your voice or mine. Two, if I start to drown in noise, I tell you before I’m fully under, not after. Three, you don’t sit here and invent stories about me in a dress on a step-and-repeat I didn’t even go to. You call me. You say, ‘Tell me where you are and what you can see.’ Four, if you want to come later, you come. If you don’t, I walk back to you, and we keep the porch light rule.”
I huff. “Porch light rule?”
She smiles, and it finally reaches her eyes. “You told me once you can tell whose lights are on because they’re up lateon purpose and whose because something’s wrong. Your house feels like the first one. Keep it on. I’ll find it.”
I do reach for her then. My hand cups her jaw because that’s where I feel her breath when she laughs. “Five,” I add. “We say the thing. Not the version that hides our soft parts.”
“Deal,” she whispers, and then she kisses me like she trusts me with something irreplaceable. It’s not a goodbye kiss. It’s a keep-this-in-your-pocket.
She pulls back and frowns at my mouth like she’s doing math. “You’re thinking.”
“I am.” I tip my forehead to hers. “About a talisman. Something of mine you take. Something of yours you leave. So neither of us can weasel out and pretend we imagined the last week.”
She laughs, soft. “Bossy.”
“Prepared.”
I tug the leather cord from my neck, the one with the tiny brass acorn my granddad carried as a pocket charm while he rebuilt this place with his hands and stubbornness. “He said it meant patient strength,” I tell her, thumb worrying the warm metal. “Also meant ‘don’t be an idiot about winter.’”
