Page 98 of At First Dance
“Do you want me there?” I ask. I’m already rolling socks in my head, which is how you know I’m not thinking straight.
“No,” she says immediately, then softer, “Yes. Always. But not because I need you to hold me up. I want to prove to myself that I remember how to hold the line. Will you meet me halfway?”
“Pick a halfway,” I say.
“FaceTime from the hotel at nine,” she answers. “I’ll sit on the floor so it doesn’t feel fancy. You sit on your porch steps. We’ll split the difference.”
Nine comes like a ritual I didn’t know I needed until it was here—nine at night, porch light on, me on the bottom step, forearms on my thighs, phone face-up like a promise. Some nights she’s cross-legged on a hotel carpet that looks soft enough to apologize to. Some nights she sits against a window, city smearing behind her in runway lights and red brake lines. Some nights, the signal hiccups, and all I get is her breath in my ear and the scratch of a zipper as she digs for tea in a minibar that doesn’t have any.
We talk about nothing on purpose. A goat that has discovered the single loose board in a mile of fence and ismaking a life out of it. The weird sock folds people with more money than sense invent. I send her pictures when the service will carry them—Butterscotch in a sunbeam with a blade of hay stuck to her nose; the creek glassed over at first light; an egg on the porch railing that looks like it was laid purely for drama. She sends me ceiling corners and shoes in hallways and the inside of a wardrobe trailer that looks like a spaceship built entirely out of mirrors. Proof of life. Proof of days.
On the third night, she says, “They asked me to add a second brand segment,” meaning a man in a suit who says synergy like it buys groceries. “I told them no. My voice shook, but I did it.”
I don’t bother swallowing the sting in my eyes on my own porch. Let it sit there with the crickets and the gravel and all the words I don’t know how to carve. “Good,” I say, and it’s too small for what I feel. “I’m proud.”
“Say it again,” she whispers, like it’s medicine.
“I’m proud of you,” I tell her, slow as a steady cut. “Ivy Quinn, I am proud of you.”
Her eyes fall shut on the screen like I just set a warm hand over her heart. “Thank you.”
We’ve been closing the same way, two days running. She lifts her phone and frames the little acorn at her throat. I lift mine to the tin star on the sill. North star and oak. Then she tucks the acorn back under the collar of my hoodie she “forgot” to return, and I stick the star back in its dent, and we hang up before either of us calls the light across the distance what it is.
The fourth night, she doesn’t call at nine. The text nails through at 9:17.
Ivy:
Running late. Don’t wait up.
I don’t say I was already waiting. I send a thumbs-up and a picture of the sky cutting itself open in pink over the southfield because it costs me nothing to be generous with what the day handed me. At 11:03, she calls from under a hotel duvet, whisper-hoarse, and I sit back down on the step because the porch knows the shape of this better than the couch does.
“Hi,” she says, and you can hear the day in it.
“Hi.”
“You still up?”
“Now I am.”
She tells me about measurements no one needs, a dress that would make more sense as a sculpture, a meeting where everyone used my name as a border around the conversation without knowing they’d drawn one. When she runs out of steam, she asks me for a sound, so I set the phone on the top step and let her listen to rain hit the window. She breathes it in like medicine. I breathe her in like the same.
Day five, Crew texts me first.
Crew:
You good?
I look at the screen long enough that the message thinks I died.
Me:
Fine. You?
He sends a grainy picture—locker room, laces undone, grin I recognize and remember teaching.
Crew:
You hear from her?
