Page 19 of At First Dance
“Come on,” I say. “Before the humidity remembers us.”
We jog the twenty yards to the house, laughing like kids running to beat the porch. We make it under the eaves and stand there grinning and breathing hard like we just outran something bigger than weather.
“Shower,” I command. If she stays right here any longer, I’m going to say a thing I can’t unsay. “I’ll make dinner.”
“You can’t always bribe me with food,” she says. Then she softens it herself with, “Okay, you can. Thank you.”
I slip inside the main house to fry chicken like my mother isn’t standing in my head, reminding me not to dry it out. Music through the open windows tells me she’s put the record back on and maybe the shower, too. Steam and Stevie drift in tandem across the grass. I stand at the stove and get every timing right that a man can get right when he’s not sure what he’s doing with his life is right at all.
By the time she appears on the porch in bare legs and damp hair—the tank and shorts swapped for a soft T-shirt that announces a band I haven’t heard of—the light is syrup, and the yard smells like hay and my mother’s rosemary that refuses to die. I bring the plates out, set them on the little table, and try not to watch her sit down like I set a table for a woman on purpose.
“Looks incredible,” she says, lifting her fork.
“Tastes better,” I answer, because confidence can be cooked into things even if I can’t seem to put it anywhere else today.
We eat. It’s quiet in all the right places and talk in the rest. She tells me about a girl in Des Moines who pressed a letter into her hand after a show and said, “You made me feel less alone,” and how that ruined her—in a good way—for a while.I tell her about the fourth-grade field trip where I explained photosynthesis to a kid who hated science and watched his face change, and how I keep chasing that same look in kids when I volunteer at the school garden. We are, without either of us naming it, handing each other the little anchors we tie to our ankles so we don’t float away.
After, I wash up while she dries, which is a domestic choreography that makes my bones ache in a way swinging a post driver never has. When we finish, she lingers with the towel in her hands, and I point my chin at the porch swing because if we’re going to flirt with fire, we might as well sit where I can face the yard and remember I’m responsible for more than my heartbeat.
We swing. Fireflies start up in the low places, a hundred small yeses. She tucks her feet under her and leans back, head tipping to the board like she trusts the piece of wood and me by extension.
Her phone buzzes on the little table next to us. She flips it, face down, without checking. I raise one eyebrow.
“I’m off the clock,” she says.
“Then learn the cricket chorus,” I answer, because that’s a choice, too. She does, eyes half-closed, mouth going soft in a way that is going to ruin me for years if I let it.
The sky loses its last blue. The swing’s chains creak like an older man telling a story he’s earned the right to repeat. We’re one degree from asleep when a truck crunches up the drive and brakes too quickly.
Crew.
I don’t sigh out loud. Ivy sits up, reflexes quick and brittle. “Expecting him?”
“No,” I say, which is the problem.
He hops out with a grin and a six-pack, sunglasses in his hair even though the sun bit it an hour ago. “Crashing the party,” he calls, too loud for this hour.
I stand. Ivy stands too, a fraction behind me, and it isn’t the wrong picture.
Crew clocks it. He’s not dumb. His smirk tips to a question mark that I don’t have the patience to answer in front of anything with ears.
“Evening, Ivy,” he says, easy as a man walking into a room where he expects clapping. “You stuck around after all.”
She doesn’t flinch. Good girl. “Guess I did.”
“Carl says two to three days,” I add, like we’re sharing a farm report.
He laughs and hands me the six-pack like a peace offering. “You two good?” he asks, finally looking at her with something that isn’t entirely show.
“We are,” she says, simple as a line drawn right where she wants it.
He takes that in, nods once, and backs down the steps. “See you later,” he says. Some party crasher.
When his taillights get swallowed by the trees, the night exhales again. Ivy doesn’t look at me, and I don’t look at her. We sit back down and swing until the bugs turn from chorus to lullaby, the six-pack resting on the porch earning every drop of condensation.
“I should sleep,” she says finally, voice soft as church.
“Yeah,” I say, because I don’t trust myself to say anything else. I walk with her to the bottom of the cottage steps like I wasn’t going to. She climbs two, then turns back—close enough that if I leaned, my mouth would find the place at her temple that feels like a secret.
