36. Watch it Burn
Chapter thirty-six
Watch it Burn
Emma
I ’m not going to cry.
I’m not going to cry.
I’m not going to cry.
“Here.” Cici hands me a tissue without looking, her eyes on the dance floor where Grayson is attempting to spin Sienna. “You’ve been blinking like you have something in your eye for the last three minutes. Nobody’s buying it.”
“I have allergies.”
“To what? Love?”
I take the tissue. Dab once. Maintain my dignity or what remains of it.
Luke’s toast is still reverberating through my chest like the bass line of a song I’ll be humming for the rest of my life.
Specifically the part where he stood in front of two hundred people, including my mother and Ethan Brooks and Sloane Kowalski, who was live-texting the speech to Katya with a running commentary I’ll confiscate later, and said:
His sister taught me that the bravest thing you can do is want something out loud.
Public. Unambiguous. In a room that includes at least ten people who read the social media post and another few dozen who’ve heard the rumors and every single one of them can now look at Luke’s face and see what I’ve been seeing since I was sixteen.
A man who stopped hiding.
That’s new. That’s everything. That’s the thing I’ve been waiting for since Christmas Eve two years ago. When he told me we were better as friends and I realized too late that he was worth fighting for, even when he was too afraid to fight for himself.
He fought tonight. In a bow tie, with a whiskey glass, in front of God and Catherine Brooks’s seating chart.
“You’re staring,” Cici observes.
“I’m admiring the décor.”
“The décor is behind you.”
“There’s décor everywhere. We’re at a wedding.”
The first dance ends. Grayson dips Sienna one more time (the man cannot resist a dip; it’s pathological) and the floor opens for other couples.
Mom is being led out by Ethan, which is either a diplomatic gesture or something that will absolutely piss off Sienna’s mother.
Chase and Sky are already moving together with the rhythm of two people who will use every minute they get together to their full potential.
Sloane appears at my elbow like a weather event. “Your boyfriend just made me cry. In public. At a wedding where I’m supposed to be networking for my future stardom.”
“You’ll survive.”
“Probably. Oh, and hey? About that other groomsman…”
My laugh is a bit too high-pitched. It’s not a slight against Zane as a person, just Zane in the sense of someone’s better-half.
How many women have the goal of thinking they can be the one to domesticate him.
“I’d probably avoid him unless you want to wake up alone and regretting whatever move you try to show off.
Besides, I thought you were saving yourself for Reese. ”
She lifts a shoulder. “She’s married.” And just when I think she’s finally coming around, she adds, “Probably best to get a variety of experiences first.”
“Then Zane might be your type for tonight after all.”
She squeezes my hand once. Hard. “Don’t judge me.”
“I won’t judge you. Ever. You’re my person, Sloane.”
One nod and then she’s gone. I’m already worried about her. For her.
“Em. ”
Grayson. Standing beside me with his suit jacket unbuttoned and his hair already rebelling against whatever product he used.
He extends his hand. Palm up. Open. The same hand that held mine when we were kids crossing a street, that caught a football I threw when I was six and decided I wanted to play whatever Gray was playing, that gripped a hair tie like a tether through every important game I’ve ever played.
“Dance with me?”
“You can’t dance, Gray.”
“I’ve been practicing.”
“Sienna made you practice.”
“Sienna strongly encouraged practicing, which is her version of a non-negotiable directive issued with enough charm that you don’t realize you’ve been managed until you’re already doing the foxtrot in your living room.”
I take his hand. Let my big brother lead me onto the floor. The band shifts to something slower, a song I don’t recognize but that has the quality of something Catherine spent weeks selecting because it conveys familial love without being saccharine.
We find something approaching a rhythm. Not graceful. Not the smooth coordination of two people who know how to do this. More like the comfortable mess of two people who’ve been improvising together since before either of them could spell improvisation.
“Good speech,” he says quietly, looking over my shoulder at nothing and everything. “Luke’s. It was good.”
“It was incredible.”
“Don’t push it.” But there’s no edge. The anger that’s been sitting behind his voice for two months has finally, fully settled. Absorbed into the larger architecture of a man who loves too many people too much to let resentment take up permanent residence.
He pulls me closer. His chin rests on the top of my head the way it has since I was twelve and he was fifteen and already a head taller. “I’m sorry it took me this long.”
“This long for what?”
“To see it.” He swallows. I feel it against my hair. “You and Luke. It was always there, wasn’t it? I just… didn’t want to look. Because looking meant you weren’t my kid sister anymore. And I wasn’t ready for that.”
My throat closes. I press my face into his shoulder because it’s the only way to keep the tears from ruining the makeup I spent way too much on .
“I’m always your sister, Gray. That part doesn’t change.”
“I know. But the kid part does. And you’re…
” He clears his throat. Takes a breath that shakes in a way I’ve only heard from him twice in my life—the day he told me about our father’s offer his sophomore year, and the day he told me he was asking Sienna to marry him.
“You’re someone’s person now, Em. Not just mine. ”
“I’m still yours too.”
“Yeah. But differently.” He pulls back. Looks at me like whatever he’s about to say is important.
That this is hard for him. “He’s a good man.
Infuriating and emotionally constipated and genuinely terrible at tying bow ties.
But good. And he loves you, Em. The real kind.
The kind that makes you do stupid, career-endangering things because you can’t help it. The kind that—”
He stops. Looks over my shoulder. “Do you know he paced outside the groomsmen’s suite for eleven minutes until I finally told him just to come in?”
“He paced?”
“Eleven minutes. Probably counted each step while he did it.”
I laugh. It’s wet and messy and I don’t care. “That sounds like Luke.”
“That sounds like a man who was terrified I’d uninvite him.
” Grayson’s hand finds the back of my head.
Holds me there. A brother holding his sister the way he’s been holding her together since their father decided he had better places to be.
“I wouldn’t have. For the record. I was never going to uninvite him. Even when I wanted to break his jaw.”
“I know.”
“Because he’s my family.” Gray pulls back. Cups my face in both hands the way Mom does. “And so are you. And I’m learning that family means letting people make choices I wouldn’t make. And trusting them to know what they’re doing. Even when it scares the hell out of me.”
I cover his hands with mine. “I know what I’m doing, Gray.”
“I know you do.” He pats my head, careful not to mess it up. “Now go find your man before he starts reorganizing the dessert table by frosting color.”
I laugh again. Harder this time. Because Luke absolutely would.
“Go,” he says. And then, quieter: “Be happy, brat.”
“No promises.”
“That’s my line.”
“I learned from the best.”
I’m four steps away when I see him .
Luke.
He’s standing at the edge of the dance floor with a glass he’s forgotten to drink, his bow tie still perfect, his expression holding something that looks like hope cautiously testing its weight.
I catch Grayson’s eye over my shoulder. He gives me the smallest nod.
Then he walks to his wife. Pulls her onto the floor. And the music keeps playing. The world doesn’t end .
I cross the remaining distance to Luke. Take his hand. Don’t ask permission. Don’t wait for him to offer.
He sets his glass down. Leads me onto the floor with the easy authority of a man who’s spent months leading me in other contexts, and the hand that finds my waist, fingers pressing against the silk over my hip, settling exactly where they always settle—
“I know,” he says before I can comment. “It’s where my hand goes. Always.”
“Maybe I designed it that way.”
“You designed a tattoo at eighteen to be a homing beacon for a man’s hand?”
“I designed a tattoo at eighteen because I believed in someone. The hand thing has become a very nice bonus.”
He pulls me closer until my head is against his chest and his chin is in my hair and we’re barely moving because the dancing was never the point.
“Lake Placid in five weeks,” he says. Against my hair. Into the space that belongs to us.
“Yep.”
“Nine months.”
“Could be less. If I don’t make—”
“You’ll make the team.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’ve watched you play for seven years. I compiled forty hours of footage. I know.”
I smile against his chest. Feel his heartbeat under my cheek. Steady and sure and mine.
“I’ll come home,” I tell him. “Every chance I get. Christmas. Between tournaments.”
“I’ll visit. Already looked at flights to Lake Placid as well as Colorado Springs.”
“Of course you did. ”
“I have a spreadsheet.”
“You have a spreadsheet for visiting your girlfriend at Olympic camp?”
“Shows our projected game schedule and my availability alongside current flight cost. There’s a pivot table.”
“I love you so much it’s actually concerning.”
He laughs. A sound I’ve been collecting for way too long, storing away with every moan and whisper and broken confession. The sound of Luke Anderson happy.
Hours later the reception has thinned. The dance floor holds a few determined couples, all in various states of inebriation.
Grayson and Sienna left thirty minutes ago. The send-off had both sparklers and actual fireworks shooting off from somewhere nearby. But they had nothing on the look my brother was wearing before he tugged Sienna inside the waiting car.
It’s a look I’ve seen on his best friend. My brother trying to figure out if he was still in a dream, or if this is real life.
Chase and Sky left an hour ago, probably to capitalize on their night alone together at a hotel. Zane is at the bar telling a story that involves hand gestures dramatic enough to qualify as interpretive dance.
And I’m on a settee near the French doors that open onto the terrace.
With my feet in Luke Anderson’s lap.
Full circle .
Not a couch in front of a TV playing The Grinch.
Not the worn leather of Mom’s living room at Christmas.
A silk-upholstered settee in a Connecticut manor house with fairy lights strung through the garden beyond the glass.
And the remnants of a wedding that cost more than Luke’s annual salary scattered across tables that Catherine’s team will have dismantled by 8 AM tomorrow.
But the position is the same. My feet tucked against his thigh like they belong there. Him on the other end. The warm, unconscious domesticity of two bodies that found this arrangement years ago and never improved on it.
Except everything is different .
His hands are on my feet. Not resting near them. Not accidentally brushing them. Actively, deliberately, applying pressure to the arch of my left foot with a focused intensity that suggests he’s using foot massage as a love language.
“The shoes were a mistake,” I tell him, gesturing to the heels I abandoned two hours ago and am still regretting not removing them sooner. “Sienna told me they were comfortable. She lied.”
“Sienna doesn’t lie. She strategically omits information.”
“She omitted the information that these shoes would make me want to amputate below the ankle.”
“You looked incredible in them.”
“I look incredible in everything.”
“True.” His thumb presses into a spot that makes me groan in a way that is not appropriate for a post-wedding lounge. “But especially in those.”
“Sweet-talker.”
“Stating facts.”
I close my eyes. Lean my head against the settee arm. Feel the warmth of his hands, the steady rhythm of his thumbs working circles.
“You’re doing it again,” I murmur.
“Doing what?”
“Smiling. With your whole face.”
I feel him pause. “Maybe I like smiling.”
I open one eye. Look at him across the length of my own legs: rumpled bow tie, jacket discarded, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Looking at me with eyes that are the blue-gray of ice at midnight.
Happy.
Still an inadequate word. But it’s the closest one we’ve got.
“I was thinking,” he begins, “about the first time.”
“If you’re about to reminisce about our sexual history while rubbing my feet in a public venue, I’m going to need you to lower your voice.”
“The first time your feet were in my lap. Christmas Eve. Two years ago.” He pauses his massage. Looks at me with something raw and honest and new. “Grayson asked about Drew. You said he was nice. And I clenched my jaw so hard I thought I’d crack a tooth.”
“I remember.”
“I sat there for four hours wanting to pull you into my lap and being too afraid to move.”
“I sat there for four hours wanting you to.”
“And now...”
“And now you’re rubbing my feet after dancing with me at my brothers wedding and the world didn’t end.”
“The world didn’t end,” he repeats. Like he’s testing it. Making sure it holds.
“It didn’t end, Luke.” I sit up. Pull my feet from his lap. Climb across the settee until I’m beside him, tucked under his arm, my head on his shoulder. “It’s just getting started.”
His arm comes around me. His lips find my temple. The kiss that means good morning and goodnight and I’m here and always . The one that used to be stolen in corridors and kitchens and the cab of a truck on the shoulder of I-95.
“Ready for bed, baby?”
“More like ready for you.”
His groan is quiet as he guides me up. “That’s all you needed to say and we could have left hours ago.”
“Seriously?” I pout.
“Seriously.”
“Fine. Then take me and my destroyed feet home now because I have plans for you that require significantly less clothing and significantly more of that thing you do where—”
“Emma.”
“To public?”
“I’d rather talk when we’re somewhere I can react to your words,” he pulls me toward the door. “Ready?”
“Always,” I say.
He smiles. With his whole face.
And we walk out into the night, where the air smells like April and possibility and the specific, devastating perfume of two people who played with fire for seven years and finally, after everything, let it burn.