Chapter Fifteen
The dance practice was one of the Busy Bees’ ideas.
It was a kind suggestion, but the thought of it nearly broke Lottie’s heart before a single note was played.
There would be dancing at the Independence Jubilee.
Of course, there would be. The residents of Wild Rose Ridge seemed able to find a reason to dance for nearly any occasion, and the town had no shortage of fiddlers, accordion players, or men willing to pick a banjo until everyone within hearing surrendered.
What it did lack was practical instruction.
Cornelia Montgomery had taken it upon herself to open the meeting hall to anyone who wanted to learn a few steps before the Fourth.
The first session had produced far too many men and not nearly enough women, so a request had gone out for the men to bring mothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, or any willing female relation with enough patience to survive trodden toes.
The benches had been pushed against the walls, clearing the floor.
The lamp wicks were raised high, flooding the room with warm light.
Jeremy Stafford fiddled from his wheeled chair with surprising sweetness, and the people of Wild Rose Ridge stumbled and laughed their way through reels, waltzes, and the Virginia reel amid a great deal of merriment, shouted apologies, and injured dignity.
There was no age requirement, which was how Lottie found herself watching a brawny logger solemnly turn his little sister through the steps, while the child corrected him with great authority.
Lottie loved to dance. She had not danced in years and years. There had been no dancing of any kind in the thin, cold Chicago room. There was no music, and no room for it.
Mr. Stafford’s fiddle went straight into Lottie’s feet and made her, for an hour, a simply and uncomplicatedly happy girl again.
She kept glancing toward the doorway, where Cecil Peterson stood with his broad back against the frame and his arms folded across his chest. His face was shut tight as a fist, watching the whole bright scene, and not once coming beyond the doorway.
She went to him between dances, flushed and breathless and bright-eyed. “Dance with me. Just the once. Cornelia will teach us both the steps. She’s endlessly patient. She taught half the camp their letters this past winter, she can surely teach two grown people a reel—”
“No,” he said. Flat. Final as a dropped stone.
“Cecil—”
“No.” Lower, and harder. “I’ll not make a spectacle of myself, lurching and stumbling about a dance floor with a bad hand and worse balance for the whole town to point at and laugh over.
The blizzard took more than two fingers off me, Lottie; it took something out of my footing too, some sureness, and it never came all the way back.
“I would probably go down hard in the middle of a reel and take you down with me. You’d crack your head on the floor, and then where would we be?” His jaw was set like granite. “You’re made to dance. Anyone with eyes can see it. Dance with the others and let me be.”
She had no retort, apart from spinning on her heel with a flounce of her skirt and returning to the dance floor.
She could not make him, and there was no forcing a thing like that.
A redheaded logger asked her to dance, followed by the not-so shy Luke Hardy who was dancing with his mother.
When it was Olsen’s turn, he counted the steps out loud in a booming whisper.
The entire time she felt Peterson watching her from the doorway, his arms folded, his face a shut wall, and she danced for him.
Only and entirely for him. He still wouldn’t enter the building, and the joy of the music curdled slowly to ash in her chest with every turn.
The cruelest moment of the evening came when a young hand named Tucker—not Cornelia’s Tucker, but a smooth-faced boy newly off the summer boat—asked her for a waltz.
Tucker was cheerful, easy, and entirely innocent of the role Lottie gave him.
He held her properly, though perhaps a shade too close. He made her laugh, and perhaps she laughed a shade too brightly.
Part of her wanted Cecil to see it. Part of her wanted him, just once, to know what it felt like to watch someone he cared for choose distance while another person stepped gladly into the open place.
It was not kind.
She knew it even as she smiled at Tucker and let him turn her across the floor. She was tired of standing at the edge of Cecil Peterson’s fear, waiting to be chosen by a man who kept proving he wanted her and then punishing them both for it.
She was eighteen years old, and her heart was breaking slowly. Deep inside, she wanted, fiercely, childishly, for him to hurt the way she hurt. If he hurt just enough, he might do something about it.
It worked, and it did not work. Both at the same time, which was the worst possible outcome.
She saw his face change across the bright room. His face cracked open, and then was replaced by something dark, wretched, and entirely unmistakable moving behind his eyes as the laughing boy turned her under his arm.
It was jealousy. Raw and plain.
For one wild leaping moment her foolish heart soared, because there it was at last: proof that he wanted her. Cecil Peterson could not stand to watch another man’s hands on her! He was jealous as fire.
Then she saw the rest of it land on him, in the very next breath, and saw the jealousy curdle at once into something far, far worse than jealousy.
How she wished he would storm in the room and call out “I must go and claim you this instant!” Instead it was, “Look how easy she laughs in the arms of a whole man. Look how she ought to be held—turned round a floor by two good hands which never fear going down. To be held by a man who can give her dancing and children and a whole unmarked life.”
She imagined hearing his voice say those words, and then the noble, ruinous conclusion appeared on his face.
It would never be him.
He left before the waltz was even over. Lottie saw him, his great shoulders hunched, slip out the door and into the dark without a single word to anyone.
She finished the dance because she could not in courtesy do otherwise, and thanked the laughing oblivious boy, then excused herself.
She stood in the empty doorway where Cecil had been standing, looking out into the dark where he had vanished, and felt the whole bright evening turn to cold ash in her mouth.
“He’s not angry with you,” a quiet voice said at her shoulder.
Lottie did not turn. If she looked at Cornelia, she might cry, and she had already laughed too brightly once that evening. She would not add weeping in a doorway to her list of mistakes.
Cornelia came to stand beside her, close enough her sleeve brushed Lottie’s. “Whatever you are thinking, set that part down. He is not angry.”
Lottie stared into the dark where Cecil had vanished. “Then why did he leave?”
“Because he saw you dancing with a man who could give you the very thing he believes he cannot.”
The words went in clean.
Lottie’s throat closed.
She had wanted Cecil to mind. Only a little. Only enough to make him step forward instead of forever stepping back. She saw it now. The awful shape of what he was feeling. He had not looked at Tucker and seen a rival.
He had seen proof.
Cornelia’s hand settled on her arm. “Be careful now. A frightened good man can do a great deal of harm while trying to be honorable.”
Lottie pressed her fingers against the doorframe until the wood bit into her skin. “I hurt him.”
“Yes,” Cornelia said gently, “but he was already hurting.”
The music inside turned merry again, bright and thoughtless, and Lottie could hardly bear the sound of it.
“He was supposed to come after me,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“He was supposed to choose me.”
Cornelia squeezed her arm once. “Perhaps he still will, but not tonight.”
Lottie stared into the dark and felt the truth of that settle hard in her chest.
Cecil had not left because he felt nothing.
He had left because he felt too much, and every bit had convinced him she would be better off without him.