15. Stephanie #2
“Are yours?” he asked softly.
I looked up at him. “What?”
“Your wounds.” He stepped closer, close enough that I could smell the hydrangea and the faint salt of him. “Do they still bleed?”
I swallowed hard. The question cut straight through me.
“I don’t know how to heal them,” I admitted. “I’ve tried distance and time and moving on, and none of it took. They’re still there.”
He cupped my cheek in his palm. His touch was gentle and tentative, giving me every opportunity to pull away.
“Let me help,” he pleaded. “Please. Let me try.”
My eyes blurred with unexpected tears. What if he could? What if that was the missing piece all along, not distance from the grief but somebody to carry it with me, so I wasn’t hauling it alone.
I looked down, unable to hold his gaze.
Then the music changed.
I recognized the opening notes immediately. “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” The song that had been playing the first time we kissed, out on the bluff all those years ago. The song we’d danced to at our wedding. Our song.
“Dance with me?” Kevin asked, holding out his hand.
I hesitated. Every rational part of my brain was screaming at me to walk away. To get on that ferry. To protect myself from this man who had already broken me once and might do it again if I let him close enough.
But the irrational part, the part that remembered how it felt to be loved by him, reached out and took his hand.
He pulled me close. Not too close. Carefully and respectfully, leaving space between our bodies. His hand was warm on my waist, his fingers intertwined with mine.
We danced.
And he made me smile.
“You know,” he said, spinning me gently, “I’ve been practicing.”
“Practicing what?”
“Dancing. I took lessons.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You took dance lessons?”
“Six months of them. I figured if I ever got the chance to dance with you again, I should probably not step on your feet.”
“That’s surprisingly thoughtful.”
“I’m a surprisingly thoughtful person now.” He dipped me, badly, and I laughed as he almost dropped me. “Okay, maybe the lessons didn’t fully take.”
“You’re still terrible.”
“But charmingly terrible?”
“Debatable.”
“Harsh.” He pulled me back up, his hand sliding to the small of my back. “What happened to the supportive ex-wife who used to tell me my dancing was ‘not that bad’?”
“She learned the value of honesty.”
“Honesty is overrated. I prefer delusion.”
“Clearly.”
He spun me again, more confidently this time. “Admit it. You missed this.”
“Missed what? Being thrown around a dance floor by a man with two left feet?”
“Missed me.” His voice softened.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. The truth was too complicated to fit into words, and the wine and the song and his hand at my back had loosened the grief I’d spent three years keeping locked.
“I missed you,” he said quietly. “Every day. I’d see a funny thing and think ‘Steph would love this’ and then remember I couldn’t tell you. I’d have a bad day and want to come home to you and then remember you weren’t there.”
“Kevin.”
“I know I don’t have the right to say any of this. I know I’m the one who drove you away. But I need you to know that losing you was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Worse than anything. And I’ve spent three years trying to become someone who deserves a second chance.”
The song changed. Upbeat, modern, the tempo doubling. But neither of us moved to leave the dance floor.
“Another dance?” he asked.
“Sure.”
One song became two. Two became five. He brought us drinks and we kept dancing, badly, laughing at ourselves.
He told me about his therapy, about the changes he’d made, about the person he was trying to become.
I told him about my new city, my job, my disastrous dating life.
We laughed about my bathroom window escape from the cryptocurrency guy.
He nearly choked on his drink when I described Jordan’s pre-injury pickup attempt.
“I always thought you were cute,” he mimicked in a terrible impression. “Even when you were married. I noticed you at family events.”
“It was deeply creepy.”
“I should have hit him with two soccer balls.”
“One was plenty.”
The party swirled around us but I barely noticed. The last ferry was completely forgotten. All I could see was Kevin, his eyes bright, his smile real, looking at me the way he used to look at me. The way no one else had ever managed to.
“I really need the bathroom,” I said finally.
His grin turned mischievous. “Your wish is my command.”
Before I could protest, he scooped me up bridal style.
“Kevin! Put me down!”
“Never.”
“People are staring!” I hissed, though I’d already stopped fighting him.
“Let them stare.”
He carried me off the dance floor, past the cake table, past the bar. I was giggling, actually giggling, clinging to his neck as he strode across the property with the string lights blurring past.
“The bathroom is the other way.”
“Is it? Oops.”
He was walking toward the woods. The trees at the edge of the property, dark and private and definitely not containing any bathrooms.
“Kevin. Where are we going?”
“Adventure.”
“I don’t need adventure. I need a toilet.” I thumped his shoulder, laughing.
“You can hold it.”
“I absolutely can’t hold it.”
“You’re a strong, capable woman. I believe in you.”
I was laughing too hard to argue. The wine had gone to my head, or maybe he had, and everything felt fizzy and bright and possible.
He carried me into the trees, and I let him, and somewhere behind us the last safe version of the weekend went out with the party lights.