Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Molly
“ Y ou don’t want to take the car?” I ask Gabe as we walk hand in hand out of the building where the gala was being held, and he leads me past the line of waiting cars.
“Nope. I want to go somewhere with you first.” He releases my hand and swings an arm around my shoulders as we walk deeper into campus.
Gabe hasn’t been quite himself since the moment earlier when I hesitated to slap a label on us. It’s nothing anyone else would pick up on, probably not even his sisters. But I’ve been tuned to Gabe’s frequency for almost fourteen years, and I know. I can feel his brain working as he tries to figure me out. He wants us to be us again. More than that, he wants me to want it. And I do. I just need a little more time. For what, I can’t quite tell. I’m hoping I’ll figure it out.
I’m so lost in thought I don’t realize where we are until Gabe tugs me to a stop.
Bancroft Dance Studio has barely changed in ten years. The aged wooden shingles. The neat hedges that line the stone stairs up to the building. But where my trips here used to be full of thrill and excitement, tonight, staring up at the building that used to house the keys to my future, I feel nothing but dread and a frisson of fear.
“Why are we here?” I ask Gabe, hating the tremor I hear in my voice.
“I think you need to be here.”
I shake my head, fighting the anxiety that snakes its way up my spine. “No.”
Gabe steps up to me, gathering my hair and pushing it back behind my shoulders, then framing my face with his hands. His eyes are soft but full of determination.
“Yes, Rory. I know you. I know you well enough to know there is a piece of you locked away. I can see it. You don’t owe it to me. You don’t owe it to anyone, and if I’m wrong here, you can tell me to fuck off, and we’ll go back to the hotel and never talk about this again. But I think that piece of you is in this building. I think you want it back but are afraid to look too closely at it. Afraid of what might happen if you do. But you don’t have to be afraid. Not of this, and definitely not with me. Come inside with me, baby. Let me help you find it.”
It’s the baby and the earnestness in his voice that has me taking the hand he offers and climbing the stone steps with him. It’s the knowledge that he is absolutely right—my missing piece is right here on Bancroft Way—that has me following him through the front doors.
It would be silly of me to ask how he can access a secure building on the campus of one of the biggest universities in the country at eleven o’clock at night. Gabe probably has the master key to the entire fucking school.
When we reach my old dance studio, I freeze, my hand on the door. My body shakes and fills with dread, and when I look at my hand, I’m suddenly twenty-one again, with my dance bag slung over my shoulder, about to burst through this door and lose myself in the music.
“I’ve got you, Rory,” Gabe murmurs from behind me. “It’s okay.”
It’s his soft voice and his warm body against mine that has me pushing the door open and stepping inside.
It’s been more than a decade since I’ve set foot in this dance studio, but it still looks the same. Smells exactly the same. As if in a trance, I walk around the space as memories pummel me. Launching myself into the air as the music soared. Stomping my foot in frustration when I couldn’t get a move right. Learning a contemporary routine for class. Choreographing my final exams. Getting the letter that I had been accepted to the dance company for after graduation. Lacing up my toe shoes to dance ballet just for me. And sometimes for Gabe.
I step up to the barre, running my hands over the worn wood, wondering if it’s the same one I used. If I’m touching the same wood my hands slid over a decade ago.
Looking up in the mirror for the first time, I see myself then and now. The bubbly dance major with her entire life in front of her. The thirty-two year old lawyer with shattered eyes who hasn’t danced in a decade.
“I miss it so much,” I whisper, my voice thick with unshed tears. “Sometimes I dance in my dreams, and when I wake up, it’s like losing it all over again.”
“You were so beautiful when you danced, Rory. I loved watching you.” Gabe comes up behind me, and when our eyes lock in the mirror, the memory of the last time we stood like this, the words he said. So similar to his words tonight, assaults me. I can see the unasked questions in Gabe’s eyes, and I suddenly know with absolute certainty that this is the thing keeping me from giving our second chance my all.
Dance. How much I loved it. How I lost it. When. When I lost it.
The fear I felt outside wasn’t about dancing. It was about this conversation. The one we are about to have. The one I don’t know how to have without feeling the full depth of my feelings. Showing them to him. But if we’re ever going to be anything, this is the boulder we need to shove our way through.
“Ask me a question, Gabe.”
He doesn’t smile at our little game the way he usually does. He can feel the enormity of this too. He knows this is the final piece of the puzzle, just like I do. We’ve always been in sync that way.
“Why did you stop dancing?”
I don’t expect the hot rush of anger at his question. The category five hurricane of fury that takes over and has me whirling around to face him.
“Because of what happened the last time I danced!” I yell.
Words rise up from the deepest depths of my soul. Words I’ve kept buried for ten years. Words I need to give him if we’re going to have any chance at all. My breaths come fast, and my face heats as I step forward so we’re toe-to-toe. Chest-to-chest.
Gabe’s eyes are locked on mine, face as wide open as I’ve ever seen it. Like he’s just waiting to hear what I have to say. Accept it. Carry it. It spurs me on.
“You came here to watch me. You told me I was beautiful when I danced. That you loved to watch me. You looked at me like I was the only thing in the entire world that mattered. Like I would be yours forever, and you would be mine, and nothing would ever tear us apart. But that wasn’t true. We were sitting right over there when you got the call.” I point over to the mirrored wall behind the barre.
“I danced, and you tied me to the barre with my goddamn toe shoes and fucked me until I couldn’t see straight. And you got the call. Your parents were dead, and that was the moment we broke. It might have been a month before it was over for good, but we broke right here in this studio the second your telephone rang. I was still fucking naked.”
I break off, chest heaving, anger pouring out of me in a red-hot tsunami. I consider reining it in, but I can’t. I won’t. The anger feels good. Cleansing, almost. This is righteous rage, and Gabe is going to feel every single bit of it.
“You shoved me out of your life, Gabe. Like I was nothing. Like we were nothing. I could have taken your anger and your grief. Your confusion and your sadness, and every ounce of devastation you felt. I would have taken it from you. Carried every single bit of it for you until you were ready to carry it yourself. I would have taken care of you and wiped your tears and held your sisters while they cried and put all of you back together. I would never have left you. Ever. That was my choice. Mine, Gabe. Not yours. But you made it yours. You took my choice away from me. You told me to go, and I didn’t have it in me to be one more thing you had to survive. So, I left. I went home to my parents’ house, and I cried for you for months. I grieved for you like you were dead, too, and my heart shattered into a million tiny pieces that were way too small for me to pick up and put back together.
“So, why did I stop dancing, you ask?” I laugh a little, but there’s no humor in it. “I stopped dancing because I couldn’t dance. I literally couldn’t. I tried. God, did I ever try. But every time I did, all I could think about was that night. The night we broke. The ringing of your phone that was the death knell of the life I knew. I lived that night over and over again every time I set foot in a dance studio. Or tied my toe shoes. Or heard a song that used to be a part of one of my routines. I couldn’t even go to a fucking Zumba class. Dancing was my joy. It was my heart and my salvation. And then it wasn’t. So, I lost dance, and I lost you, and then I had nothing left. I built a new life on the wreckage of the one we had together. It’s a good life, and I’m proud of it, but it was second best. It will always be second best because the life I wanted was a life with you.”
My voice breaks on the last word, and then every ounce of anger I didn’t even know I had been carrying all these years drains out of me, all at once. Underneath are emotions I’m not ready to explore and a well of unshed tears.
They pour down my face, and with no anger left to hold me up, I start to collapse to the studio floor.
But I’m not alone anymore.
Gabe is there to catch me.
He sits down with me gently, guiding me into his lap and wrapping his arms tightly around me. I cry into his beautiful custom-made tux for what feels like hours. I soak his shirt in tears and ruin it with the makeup running down my face. He doesn’t care. It’s almost like he welcomes it. He strokes my hair and whispers words I can’t hear but sound like let it out and you’re right and I wish and I’m sorry .
He kisses my forehead and glides his hands over my face and my back and every part of me he can reach, as if to say I’m here and you’re not alone .
Even after I’m all cried out, we stay there, tangled together on the studio floor, for ten minutes or ten hours, I’m really not sure which. When we finally get up off the floor and make our way outside, there’s a car waiting for us in front of the building, no doubt another one of Gabe’s billionaire tech god magic tricks.
We don’t say much, but we stay wrapped together. In the car. In the hotel lobby. In the elevator and walking to our rooms. Hands and arms and legs intertwined and heads against each other like neither of us can bear any distance between us.
When we get to our rooms, Gabe presses me against my door and frames my face in his hands, kissing me like the world is ending. I wrap my arms tightly around his waist as he slants his lips over mine, and I open for him, loving the slide of his tongue and the taste of him, and the feel of his hard body under my hands. His cock hardening between us and the arousal that pools between my legs. Gabe pushes his hands into my hair and tilts my head back, taking the kiss even deeper, and I welcome it, my brain dizzy at his proximity and his scent surrounding me and the way we fit together.
When we break apart, we stare at each other, breathing hard, and I know without consciously knowing that what comes next is up to me. Gabe is letting me steer this ship. I don’t know if it’s the exhaustion or the emotional weight of the night or just the fact that my toes are screaming at me in my shoes, but I hesitate. I kiss him again and whisper goodnight and slide my key into the lock and go into my room, closing the door behind me with a definitive click .
Alone in my room, I kick off my shoes and lean back against the door, but I can’t be still. I toss my bag on the bed and start to pace. I walk back and forth along the carpeted floor as images of tonight race through my brain. Gabe’s eyes bugging out when he saw my dress. The gala. Laughing with his sisters. Leaning back against him, his arms wrapped around me. Him taking me to the dance studio, not knowing what would happen. Heaving ten years of untapped rage at Gabe and him wrapping his arms around me and whispering all the comforting words.
The love. Holy shit.
I stop dead in my tracks.
I already knew I loved Gabe. That I always have. Always would. But without the blinders of anger and with my newfound clarity, I suddenly need him to know it more than I need to take my next breath. I need to give him the words and watch his face while he accepts them. Then I need to wrap myself around him and promise him forever. Because that’s what we are.
Forever.
Always.
Molly and Gabe.
Gabe and Molly.
The anger and the tears broke the last tether I had to reluctance and fear, and now I know for sure.
I’m ready.
It’s time I claimed what’s mine.
Without another thought or even a second of hesitation, I bolt out into the hall and lift my hand to knock on Gabe’s door.