Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
I wet my lips, shaking my head even though I knew he was right. I could feel it humming in my soul, that part of me that had always longed to move, to stretch, to cross distance and take up space and bend my body in ways that created art.
“What do you feel when you imagine it?” he asked.
I looked at him, unable to answer. My voice was stuck in my throat that was thick with emotion. When he gestured to the studio, I looked around again.
I took in the mirrors. The floor. The barres. The empty open space just waiting to be filled.
“Imagine a class full of little girls in here,” he said.
“Hair in buns and glitter on their eyelids and too much energy in their tiny bodies. Or maybe they look different. A little older. Maybe they’re a little rough around the edges.
Maybe no one has ever taught them a thing about dance but they’re here because they want to move, because they feel that same calling you do.
Imagine them all waiting for you to tell them what comes next.
” He reached for my hand. “How does that make you feel?”
I opened my mouth, closed it, and then laughed through the tears threatening to spill. “Terrified?”
Braden smiled. “Okay. Fair.”
“And…” My voice cracked, and I pressed my lips together before trying again. “And kind of… excited.”
His whole face changed at that, his shoulders relaxing, chest emptying like he’d been worried he’d overstepped, like he’d been hoping I’d admit what I just had.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “That’s what I thought.”
I looked around the room again, but this time, I didn’t just see a studio.
I saw little girls in pink tights and oversized sweatshirts.
I saw teenagers with ponytails and ambition and nerves.
I saw a version of myself standing at the front of the room, counting off an eight-count, clapping my hands, calling out corrections, believing in them until they believed in themselves.
I saw a life I’d never let myself fully picture.
And for the first time since my injury, I didn’t feel grief when I imagined dance.
I felt possibility.
My hand floated absently to my wrist, flexing it just a little. It was still stiff. Still weak. Still healing.
But maybe I was, too.
When I looked back at Braden, he was already watching me like he knew exactly where I’d gone.
My vision blurred. “You did all this for me?”
His mouth tipped at one corner. “You only turn thirty once, birthday girl.”
That did it.
A tear slipped free, and I laughed as I swiped it away. “You are making it really hard to keep pretending this is casual.”
His grin widened, but there was something deeper in his eyes when he said, “Yeah. I’m kind of done pretending.”
My heart stalled. Once again I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came.
Braden’s hand traveled up, caressing my arm and neck along the way to frame my face. His eyes searched mine. “Nothing about you and me is casual, Em.”
I leaned into his touch with my heart beating out of my chest. “What about our contracts?”
Braden let out a long, pained sigh. “I don’t know.
Not yet. I guess for now we still need to keep things under wraps, but…
I don’t want to act like this isn’t something.
You make me feel alive,” he said, covering my chest with his hand, right over my thumping heart.
“You… fuck, Em, you make me feel like life is worth living, like it’s not just something to survive. I never thought I’d feel that way.”
I leaned forward, pressing my forehead to his. “You make me feel safe. I never thought I’d ever find that. I thought I was meant to live in the unsteady.”
“You shook up my life, and I brought stillness to yours,” he said with a smile, and then he tipped my chin, his lips hovering over mine. “Maybe we’re what the other has been missing all along.”
He kissed me, his lips firm and soft, his body warm and all-encompassing as he wrapped me in his arms. I inhaled that kiss, inhaled him, inhaled the possibility that he could be staying, that this didn’t have to end.
When I wrapped my arms around his neck to deepen the kiss, Braden laughed, peeling me off reluctantly. “Okay, okay, before we get distracted... I think you should dance.”
“Now?”
He nodded, another quick kiss planted to my lips as he backed up and fished his phone out of his pocket.
“Right now. I had the owner hook my phone up to their Bluetooth system. I don’t know what you’ll think about this song, but...
” He swallowed, his eyes finding mine. “I think of you every time I hear it, and I’d love to see you dance to it. If you’re up to it.”
I held up my injured hand. “I don’t know how much I’ll be able to do with this.”
“I think you might be surprised.”
He said it with a soft smile, and then his thumb dropped to his phone screen, and a slow, beat-heavy melody began to play.
I recognized it instantly.
“Stay With Me” by Sam Smith.
A laugh caught in my throat, soft and disbelieving.
“Really?” I asked, but it was with a playful smile.
Braden’s shoulders lifted. “Too on the nose?”
“A little.”
He grinned. “I stand by it.”
The first few notes poured through the studio, rich and aching and slow enough to settle under my skin before I’d even fully taken my place in the center of the floor.
I looked at Braden one more time, my heart already too full, and then I turned away from him and let my eyes fall shut.
For a moment, I just stood there. I breathed, listened, felt the pulse of the song in the soles of my feet. I took a deep breath, and then I moved.
I was tentative at first — one foot sliding back, one arm lifting. A careful turn of my head, my shoulders, my torso. I let my body ease into it instead of demanding anything from it, following instinct over choreography, feeling for what was still there after weeks of stiffness and fear and loss.
My wrist protested immediately.
It wasn’t a sharp pain or anything that stopped me, but it was a soft reminder.
I’m still healing.
I moved with intention, taking slow steps, feeling a roll through my spine. I swept my arm, finding I couldn’t quite finish the way I used to, but I found a way to make it beautiful.
God, I had missed this.
I knew that before now. I felt the ache every time I stood on the sideline during a game, watching Marcus and Darcy and the rest of the squad performing. I felt it in practice when I marked the dance with them but couldn’t fully perform it.
But this was what I’d missed most — the way music could climb inside me and pull emotion out through movement. The way dancing had always felt like speaking in a language no one had ever had to teach me.
The lyrics wrapped around me, and I let them, smiling to myself as I imagined Braden did hearing this song and thinking of us. I thought of all the ways Braden had unraveled me from the start. How nothing about him had ever felt temporary, even when we’d both tried to force it into that shape.