Chapter 13
Relief warred with desperate unease as Ginny lifted her hand tentatively to his.
She wanted this moment to be over, the pitying looks off her.
She was so glad he’d come to her rescue, she could have kissed him – on the cheek obviously.
But when his fingers closed around hers and her nerves lit up like the Eiffel Tower on Valentine’s Day, she began to doubt the wisdom of dancing with him.
‘How are you feeling after the fly-line?’
She understood the subtext. ‘I’m not going to vomit on you.’
When he choked instead of responding, Ginny wondered whether perhaps she had misunderstood the subtext.
‘But thank you,’ she said in a clipped tone.
‘You don’t need to thank me,’ he muttered in reply, his forehead creased in discomfort, while Ginny was trying not to wallow in the pleasantness of his hand clutching hers.
Petra called out to get everyone’s attention. ‘Men – or leading partners,’ she corrected herself with a nod to Tita’s wife, Sally, ‘take your right hand and place it firmly against your partner’s left shoulder blade.’
Ginny saw Rhys’s throat bob as he followed the instruction, his face scrunched up with concentration – or distaste, she thought ruefully.
‘I’ve never waltzed before,’ he explained.
Heat rushed up to Ginny’s cheeks and radiated there, no matter how hard she tried to make it go down again. What Rhys brought out in her was decidedly odd.
But when she looked up, he was very close, licking his dry lips. The warmth of his body reached hers. His hairline was damp with sweat already. If he was so uncomfortable, why had he offered to dance with her?
She hoped it hadn’t been out of pity.
‘Just a minute,’ he said, tearing away. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d dived into the lake to get away from her, but he just tugged off his knitted pullover, making her swallow a squeak of surprise at the flash of skin before he smoothed his T-shirt down.
When he clasped her hand again, her eyes popped at the sight of his corded forearm, dusted with pale hair. The man was wearing a T-shirt, in the mountains, in October, while she was in a fluffy jumper with a cute character on it and she’d seen him naked yesterday.
Her face flamed with the memory of that as his hand landed on her shoulder blade and she copied Petra’s stance with her husband, setting her arm on Rhys’s. Wow, the man was a furnace.
‘Side to side!’ Petra called. ‘And pendel.’ She repeated the German word in rhythm as Ginny stepped to the right – and Rhys went to his right, wrenching her arm.
More muttered apologies and Ginny’s heart was hammering at such a pace, she wasn’t sure how she was still able to think. But they mastered the simple step on the second attempt.
‘Keep a firm hold on your partner. When you move together, you need to feel it, anticipate it.’
Rhys took a deep breath before following Petra’s instructions and then Ginny found her chest pressed into his, the air whooshing from her lungs.
It was… superb, his body against hers. Perhaps it had been too long since Ginny had shared a breath with someone. That would explain the pure delight.
Until she kicked him in the shins.
‘Oh, fuck!’ She clamped her mouth shut, glancing guiltily around to find the kids mercifully out of earshot before blowing out a relieved sigh. ‘Sorry.’
Biting her lip, she glanced up to find Rhys giving her a perplexed smile.
That was a nice one. She didn’t think she’d seen that smile before.
His mouth looked made for kissing. She was suddenly, burningly curious about why he was nearly forty and single – and about what it would feel like to kiss him.
Just a light brush of her lips on his. That was all she’d have the courage for.
She forced herself to look away. Indulging the attraction to someone who was all wrong for her would not help her find contentment on her own. Eyes on the prize. It was just a shame that Rhys felt like quite a prize, when her chest was pressed into his.
‘Forward with the right leg and back with the left. For you, Ginny, back with the left and then forward with the right,’ Petra said, her expression pinched. Ginny hoped it was just because she and Rhys were so slow to master the steps and not because Petra had caught Ginny gazing into his eyes.
His eyes…
It was easy to forget he didn’t know what she looked like. She wondered with a start exactly what he saw when he looked at her – or anyone else.
His shoulder shifted under her hand as he gave a soft chuckle. ‘I’m not always very good at understanding facial expressions, but even I can tell you’re dissecting me right now.’
‘Oh – sorry,’ she said with a gulp, stumbling briefly before re-establishing the back-and-forth movement in rhythm.
‘Now with the music!’ Petra called out.
Ginny braced herself when the accordion player unclipped his bellows, but he was competent, when he wasn’t trying to produce vomit music. After a moment or two of shuffling and bumping, she and Rhys found the side-to-side rhythm and she settled into the movement, into his body.
‘You can study me. I won’t stop you,’ he said, surprising her. She’d expected him to mumble something barely intelligible and then stay quiet for the rest of the awkward dance, not revive the subject. ‘I’m just not sure I want to hear your conclusions.’
‘I’m observing, not judging,’ she insisted and was awarded a slight lift of his brow. She interpreted that as an opening. ‘I was just wondering what you see, when you look at people, if not their faces.’
‘Ah,’ he said with a sigh.
‘You probably don’t want to talk about it,’ she rushed on, giving him a way out before he rebuffed her himself.
‘It’s probably better to explain,’ was his low reply, which didn’t alleviate any of her guilt for being so nosy. ‘I can see your face. It’s not a problem with my eyes. It’s my brain. I can see all of your features: eyes, nose… mouth. Ears.’ His gaze roamed her face as he spoke.
Ah yes, her protruding ears, the bane of her teenage existence. How many times had people made the supposedly well-meaning suggestion that she could get them corrected? But Rhys said nothing further about her ears.
‘It’s the combination that doesn’t stay in my head and I can’t seem to file the images in the part of my brain where I store… you.’
His words registered more deeply than he’d surely intended, as she imagined the part of his brain where he had a little file labelled ‘Ginny’. ‘I’m not even sure who most people are beyond their faces.’
‘There’s a lot. Sometimes I don’t think I’m missing out on much, but other times…’ He clearly didn’t want to finish that sentence and she let it go.
‘Yesterday at the lake,’ she began, rushing on before those words made her blush, ‘you recognised me – from quite a distance.’
He lifted his shoulders in assent. ‘You often wear your hair the same way, with this… thing at the back, some strands here.’
His hand came close enough that she froze, wondering if he was going to smooth her hair between his fingertips, but of course he didn’t. She was just too good at imagining tenderness. He settled his hand on her back again, but this time the touch felt closer, warmer.
‘You remember my hair,’ she clarified softy.
‘I remember most people’s hair. Women are easier than men.’
Another little moment shut down. She took the message. He was casually explaining his condition, not confessing that he found her attractive.
‘It must be difficult meeting new people.’
‘I was never great at that even before,’ he said with half a smile. ‘Now I have an excuse. But I don’t recognise people I know well either.’
His smile faded and Ginny fancied she felt more behind that comment. ‘Before what? What happened?’
His hesitation was so short she might have missed it, if she hadn’t been moving seamlessly with him to the music. ‘I fell from a rock face during a photography assignment. The anchor point hadn’t been fixed properly. I damaged part of my brain.’
Ginny sucked in an alarmed breath.
‘It was a long time ago and I’m all right now.’
She remembered the puckered pink scar on his shoulder. She hated to picture how he would have got that. ‘But what about people from before? Do you remember them? Your parents?’
‘I do have memories of faces from before the accident, but I’m not always sure who they are. My mother…’ His fond smile struck Ginny deeply. ‘She smells like Elizabeth Arden. That hasn’t changed in thirty-five years.’
There was a ghost of a small boy in his expression, sweetly incongruous with the rugged man with the solemn eyes.
‘So you recognise people by hairstyle and… smells.’ She wondered for a moment if he’d catalogued the subtle scent of her rose moisturiser.
‘Hairstyles much more often than scents,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘I don’t normally come close enough to people to be able to remember their scent.’
He was close to her right now – so close she could feel the irregular rise and fall of his chest. ‘That makes sense. Plus, who’d want to smell your friends?’
Another eyebrow lift in agreement.
‘But you’re… easy,’ he said stiltedly.
‘I’m what?’
‘I mean easy to identify,’ he rushed on, looking up and dragging her around in a clumsy clockwise turn while her feet seemed to be refusing to participate.
‘Oh,’ she replied. Was it special that she was easy to identify?
‘Your piercing,’ he explained. ‘It’s… helpful.’
Helpful. Not sexy or beautiful or intriguing – not that she’d believe him if he said any of those.
‘That’s good. I’ll make sure I never stand next to someone else with a labret piercing.’
‘No, I mean, I could recognise you anyway, by now – especially with your ears. But at the beginning, the piercing identified you.’
‘My ears, of course,’ she muttered, but she paused, considering his words. ‘So you did always recognise me?’ His ‘look’ wasn’t confusion, then. Now she was back to square one, trying to work out why he didn’t like her.
‘Yes, but with my colour perception, I’ve always struggled with your eyes.’
She blinked at him. He didn’t mean he didn’t like her eyes. She’d just mashed together her unspoken thoughts and his clipped sentence. She peered up at him.
‘My eyes are brown. What’s the problem for you?’
He studied her. ‘Brown? Really?’
Ginny’s skin prickled. Even though she knew he was studying her as a photographer rather than a friend – or more – heat still flared up her throat. She might like being his subject – when she wasn’t in tracksuit bottoms and a silly jumper, or looking as though she had to vomit.
‘I see shades – yellow, amber. There’s something about the refraction. It’s a little clearer to see right now, without your eye make-up on.’
She tried to tell herself what he was saying wasn’t intimate, but her lungs were tight as she stared up at him. He didn’t hold her gaze for long. He’d said he struggled with her eyes. For some reason, that hurt even more the second time she thought about it.
She asked, ‘You can’t remember my face, but you know I usually wear eye make-up?’
‘The black is quite dramatic.’
More careful word choice – impersonal, objective. He looked at the world through a camera lens and she had to wonder whether that was a way to distance himself. It was only Ginny who felt as though she were pulled closer with every step they danced.
‘I don’t know many women who wear as much make-up as you do.’
That was an objective observation that provoked a different emotional reaction. ‘Are you implying I wear too much?’
‘No,’ he insisted. ‘I might not have noticed if I didn’t have prosopagnosia – that’s the proper name for the condition. I tend to memorise prominent details—’
‘Like my ears. I get it,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Wait, how did you recognise me at the pub? You couldn’t see me at all.’
He gave her a look that suggested she should have worked that out herself. ‘I’m better at recognising voices than most people. I remember your posh, nasal twang.’
‘My—’
Before she could finish her indignant reply – which would have been half-hearted anyway, with Rhys giving her a smile with a hint of a dimple – Petra called out more instructions over the sound of the accordion.
‘Now we use both steps in the carré. Forwards, side, together. Backwards, side, together.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Rhys muttered and Ginny burst out laughing. When heads turned in their direction, she bit her lip to shut herself up. She could feel Kira’s curious glance and she didn’t want to answer questions about what had changed in the past ten minutes.
Maybe she could believe Rhys when he said he didn’t dislike her, although she suspected he hadn’t meant he actively liked her. But one thing was clear – she liked him, monosyllabic tendencies and objective statements and all.
An unattainable crush, which was exactly what she didn’t need right now.
When they attempted the carré, her body suddenly became a jumble of limbs, as did his.
Gone was that harmonious press of his chest to hers, warmth and instinct.
Instead, he was stiff and she was uncomfortable and it was lucky she was wearing slippers, because otherwise she would have done some damage to his toes.
As he swung her under his arm in a wonky spin at the end of the dance, studying Petra and Oswald with a grim intensity the casual lesson didn’t warrant, Ginny was both relieved and disheartened. One last brush of his fingertips along her back and there was no excuse for intimacy any more.
‘Now take the right hand of your partner,’ Petra called out, and Rhys obediently grasped Ginny’s hand, ‘and the leader can give her a little kiss.’
Rhys froze, staring at her knuckles.
‘Feet together and bow over her hand.’
Ginny wanted to tell him he didn’t have to, but he looked so apprehensive, her throat was thick and she wasn’t sure her words would register anyway.
Bending his tall body, he brought her hand up, hesitated long enough for her to feel the warm gust of his breath, then his mouth feathered over her skin.
The pressure of his lips was slight, but she felt it through her whole body. Her knees wobbled. By the time he lifted his head, she was worried she might hyperventilate.
It was the single most romantic moment of her life.
‘Of course, you don’t actually kiss her hand,’ Petra continued.
The alarm in his expression would have been funny in other circumstances. Rhys dropped her hand as though it were burning. There was another flame in his cheeks, the blush fierce under his pale skin.
She wanted to reassure him that he hadn’t done anything wrong and she’d assumed he was supposed to give her a real kiss too, but what came out of her mouth was, ‘Whoops, that was weird.’