Page 95 of At First Dance
She goes very still, like I just handed her a baby bird. “Rowan…”
“I want you to wear it,” I say, and my voice lowers, not on purpose. “For luck. For reminding. For me being with you, even when I’m not wearing my worst button-down in a Nashville conference room.”
She slides her hair aside, and I knot the cord at the back of her neck, my fingers clumsy the way they get when I’m doing something that matters. The acorn settles just above her pulse. It looks right. It looks like the room breathed out.
She rushes toward the couch, shuffling through the pages of the notebook she carries with her everywhere, thenreturns with her eyes darting around nervously. She lifts her hand and settles something in mine in return. A guitar pick, edges worn smooth, a tiny silver star stamped dead center. “First song I wrote for me,” she says. “The day I played it without asking if it would trend. I’ve kept this with me ever since for courage.”
“It worked,” I say, because I’m not shy about naming bravery when I see it.
“Keep it,” she says. “For the days you forget you have enough.”
We spend the next hour doing the most domestic things I’ve ever wanted. Packing without fanfare. Folding the hoodie she steals because it smells like my soap. She writes a list where I’ll see it without making a production of it: Butterscotch—AM bottle on the hook (don’t forget to warm); Mrs. Carmichael—market eggs; Bailey—text her about rain plan. She adds a dumb little drawing of a chicken and then pretends she didn’t.
I want to ask her to stay. I don’t, because a relationship, or whatever it is we’re doing, without trust is just another fence that bends the wrong direction. Instead, I make her an egg sandwich the way she likes it and wrap it in wax paper for the road and tuck a note inside that says,Rule #5. Say the thing. You’ve got me.
She sees me tuck it. She pretends not to.
She pops the hatch on her car, and I set her bag inside, palms lingering on the edge of the trunk while I ignore the stupid, selfish urge to scoop her up and carry her back into the house like we’re the only two people left who know how to be quiet together. Instead, I touch the acorn at her throat and feel the beat under it answer my thumb. “Call me when you land.”
She nods. “I will.”
“Say the thing,” I remind her.
“I love how you stay,” she blurts, then laughs, embarrassed and not at all. “I love that you are the same in a storm as you are when the kitchen’s clean. I love that you made me a sandwich like it’s a spell.”
None of this is casual. I lean in and kiss her like the porch light’s already on. When I let her go, it’s not with fear. It’s with a plan.
The car door shuts. Gravel hisses. The taillights blink at the end of the lane like two eyes checking if I’m watching.
I am.
I go back inside and flip the porch light on even though it’s full morning and ridiculous.
Rules are rules.
I make the day honest. That’s what you do when you want to spiral—you make the list and you do the list so your brain can’t draft disaster scenarios in the idle space between fence posts.
Feed. Water. Check the west line. Run Jasper on the hill and not because I’m trying to outrun a feeling. I sharpen the loppers. Oil the chainsaw. Set out the shade tents for Bailey’s readers tomorrow. Measure the blanket space under the sycamores, test the old speaker, and ensure the volume tops out under the threshold the school nurse wrote down for me.
At the market, Mrs. Carmichael asks after Ivy without asking after Ivy. “Saw her with a shine about her,” she says, weighing peaches like they tell secrets. “Sun agrees with that girl. So do men with sense.”
“I’m working on the sense,” I deadpan, and the old woman snorts into her apron.
By the time I get back, the house feels too big, the kitchen too tidy, every surface an absence where Ivy usually is: her mug drying on the rack and her hair tie abandoned on my wrist because I needed it while we fixed the hose. I loop it over thewindow latch without thinking, and it looks like a flag I don’t recognize yet, but I already salute.
I stare at my phone and yank myself away before I can be a man who waits by a window and thinks his wanting makes him noble. She’ll call when she lands. I trust that because we said it out loud.
So I go do the thing that scares me in a different direction. I put my number on the school’s official volunteer list. It’s a small line of text that means big things, and I do it with steady hands.
Then I call my brother.
Crew picks up on the second ring with the breathy background sound of a treadmill. “Say it,” he says. “You don’t call me before noon unless something is on fire or you have a revelation.”
“Ivy’s flying to Nashville,” I say, and there’s a rustle as he slows and then steps off like he’s giving the conversation his whole ear and not the part that does laps. “She asked me to go. I said no. Not because I don’t want to, but because the work here won’t do itself and because if I go every time my fear says jump, I’m not the man I told her I’d be.”
“That sounds like growth,” Crew says. “Are we proud or alarmed?”
“Both,” I admit, and he laughs.
