Chapter 15 Bad Memories #2
Jonah and I had been broken up for nearly four months and still, every morning, I hesitated in front of the mirror and checked the hemline or the cut of the neckline to make sure that it was okay.
Some days, I said screw it and wore what I wanted because it made me feel good.
Some days, I hung up the clothes and my dignity and pulled on a t-shirt and jeans instead.
* * *
After those couple hours alone in my room, the noise from the T.V. was shut off, the male mumblings were gone, and there was a knock at my door.
Ethan stood on the other side looking as sorry as ever, but even two hours away from him hadn’t softened my upset.
I still felt it, churning in the pit of my stomach every time I thought of the wash of humiliation I felt at the hands of his words.
Tension mounted between us as I stared up at him, and he stared down at me.
I was the first to speak.
“For five years, I had someone make me feel bad about how I dressed or what I would wear. I’m just starting to get back the confidence to wear what I want, but today …
” As I hit the word, pain reflected in Ethan’s eyes.
“Today felt like one of those days from the last five years of my life… and I didn’t like it. ”
The sorrow outgrew the regret in Ethan’s stare, and his entire expression fell.
“I’m sorry,” he spoke softly.
His eyes sagged from mine to his hands in front of him, and in the span of two seconds—two words—my resolve began to crumble.
Something in his tone gripped onto my heart and begged me to forgive him.
Leaned against my doorframe, looking as brawny and rugged and as much of a man as any man possibly could, it didn’t matter.
He felt small in front of me. He felt like a child who’d been put in timeout and wished he could take back the bad thing that he did just so you would hug him again.
“Julian wouldn’t stop… making comments about you, and when he asked you to get the cup for him just so he could check you out I—” He stopped himself, shutting his eyes and taking in a deep breath. “I just kind of snapped.”
My heart kicked my ribcage when his eyelids rose again to reveal the zero-holds-barred, fierce protection that leveled his eyes.
“I didn’t want him to be able to look at you like that anymore.”
For a moment—a regrettable moment—the impassioned look Ethan held in his eyes made me almost wish that he was speaking to me as a lover and not as a protective brother like I knew he was.
I hated myself for that brief moment. I hated that something in Ethan made me weak in the times where I forgot to catch myself in how I thought of him.
“I understand, but you should have taken it out on him and not me. I don’t think I deserved that.”
“You didn’t,” Ethan was quick to agree. “I should have kicked him out instead, but I just wasn’t ready for how bothered I was by it.”
And he still appeared bothered, even with his leering friend gone. I appreciated that he was looking out for me; I did. But that wasn’t the right way to go about it, and I was satisfied that he knew he was wrong.
I brushed past him, careful not to touch his body with mine. Before I got too far away, I turned around to face him.
“Don’t make me feel like that again, okay?”
I watched Ethan take in my words and understand them before nodding. Satisfied, I turned back around and began to move the furniture in the living room around and back against the walls.
“What are you doing?” Ethan asked.
“Practicing.”
“Your dance routine?”
“Yup.” As I answered him, my voice was clipped and I wished that I was better at hiding my feelings than I really was.
“I could help you rehearse if you wanted,” he offered. I tried to hold down the scoff rising in me at the earnesty in his tone.
“Thanks, but it doesn’t really work like that.”
“Why not?” he pushed. “I’ve seen the dance before. I could be a stand in for Gabe.”
“You really don’t have to.” Please drop it.
“It’s got nothing to do with having to. I want to help. It’s the least I can do to make up for how I handled things today.”
While I wanted to appreciate his sentiment, I was a little bit more than annoyed that he thought our dance was so easy that he could pick it up after seeing it just once, and I realized I had to be honest with him—brutally so.
“It’s not as easy as you’re making it out to be. This dance is hard , and while I appreciate the offer,” I whipped my head back, leveling my eyes on his. “I don’t think you’d be able to keep up.”
I turned away from him, a sly smile creeping up my face. Before that smile could fully form, a sudden gasp ripped it apart as a hand locked around my wrist and tugged me back around. My body spun a full 180 into a wide chest, and the pressure of hands clamped down on both sides of my waist.
My thudding heart ripped my stare up to the man who held me, alarm bells and panic sirens going off left and right in my head as he spoke with as much dominance as was in his eyes.
“Trust me. I can keep up.”
Oh shit.
I was working somewhere between impressed, shocked, and regrettably aroused, so finding my next set of words was a crapshoot. Ethan’s eyes dropped to my lips as they tried to form words, and the ability to talk went right out the door.
There was a twitch against his lips, and I could tell he was fighting off a smile as he watched me flounder. Lucky for me, he didn’t call me out on my inability to speak. He just raised his eyes to mine and moved his hands around my waist so that my back was against his front—
—In the exact position that mine and Gabe’s dance routine began in.
I guess he really was paying attention .
His fingers felt like sparklers across my skin as he guided my right arm up and draped it over his shoulder.
On instinct, my hand found the back of his neck like it was Gabe’s and held on.
The sparklers were now in his breath as it fanned across my neck and a responding gasp racked through my chest.
Ethan dipped his head next to mine, his deep tone unfurling my worst self.
“Whenever you’re ready.”
“Um, okay,” I stammered. How the hell was I going to get through this? “You can help with hand and feet placement and some positions. Probably not any lifts.”
“You don’t think I could lift you?”
“No, I do. It’s just that these lifts are complicated—”
“They didn’t all look complicated.”
I let out a loud breath, already overwhelmed for so many different reasons, all involving this man. “Let’s just start easy, okay? Go to third position-er-sorry. I mean—”
And then, without me having to explain what third position was, he placed his feet exactly in third position. I blinked, dumbfounded and staring at his perfectly placed feet.
“How’d you… how’d you know?”
One of his hands abandoned my waist to graze his fingers over mine that held the back of his neck.
Taking his signal, I loosened my grip, a breath sticking in my chest as elegant fingers enveloped mine.
His touch was so gentle, and I had to mentally check my face out of the dazed condition I knew it was in as Ethan spun my body underneath our arms, bringing me into his chest and face to face.
And then he smiled the gentlest smile down at me. “My sister was into dance growing up and my mom made me walk her to her dance classes twice a week since the studio was right down the road. Mostly, I’d just watch the clock or sometimes the hot dance instructor.”
I half scoffed, half laughed but didn’t interrupt.
“The studio didn’t have any guys in the program and one year, they did a short production of Swan Lake and they needed at least one guy. So…”
“ You were in Swan Lake?”
Ethan’s expression grew proud. “You’re looking at Prince Siegfried himself.”
“Oh my God!” Laughter started in my chest and I didn’t know what else to say. Ethan shrugged, and whether or not he noticed it, he’d begun to sway us back and forth in a slow dance.
“Turns out I had a knack for it. They made me lead in their summer productions the next two years.”
“Wow…”
“Yeah. I’m pretty amazing.”
“That’s not what I—” I broke off, shaking my head. “So what do you remember from our dance?”
“Well,” he began. “There was a lot of floor work which we don’t have the room for.”
That and it would be super, super inappropriate to rehearse with you.
“Aside from that and the lifts, I remember you did some fancy footwork around him.”
“Mhm,” I hummed out, slowly shimmying my way back enough to place my hands on his shoulders. His big, broad shoulders…
Focusing on the dance in my legs and not the muscles in Ethan’s body, I moved through the motions of the dance, my feet pointing and swirling around Ethan’s stationary legs.
Repeating the dance combinations two and then three times, I began to hear music notes in my head and surrendered my eyelids to the soul of the song.
I watched the music notes dancing in front of the black backdrop of my eyes. Graceful, curvaceous, and pastel colored music notes circled my mind and made sure I never danced alone. I smiled at the notes. The music was my friend and sometimes, my only friend.
“You’re beautiful when you’re dancing.”
The low-pitch of his voice hit straight through my heart like a punch, and I closed my eyes even tighter.
I didn’t want to see whatever bewitching expression he was wearing while he said those words he shouldn’t have to me.
I couldn’t. My mind would run away with them to a place that was entirely fiction and entirely wrong.
Silently, I begged him to stop there, to not say anything else that damning to my defenses. He was ignorant to the sordid effects it had on my body and I needed it to stay that way.
“You lose yourself in the moves and stop trying so hard to be what you think you should be. You’re just you .”
Each utterance from this man made it harder to breathe past the tension centered in my chest, pressing down until my ribs felt like they were going to crack right in half. I pushed my hands against his chest, putting space between us so I could breathe.
I only got a couple feet away before feeling his fingers imprint around my wrist and tug me back.
My body went helplessly, a soft cry slipping from my parted lips as I snapped back into his chest. On cue, my left leg anchored around his hip and his hand landed on my bare thigh.
“This is in the dance, right?” Ethan asked, caution straining his tone.
His hand on my thigh was fire, scorching and branding his touch into my skin forever. The pain it caused intensified as each of his fingers dug into my flesh, squeezing the flames so deeply, they melted my walls and flooded my core.
“Dip me.”
I prayed that my command didn’t come off as desperate or as breathy as it sounded to my ears.
My heart ran wild in my chest and I swallowed hard, trying so damn hard to not think about his hands all over my body.
Being like this with Ethan was wrong. Feeling like this about Ethan was even more wrong.
He did as I said, dipping me back, our eyes latched onto one another’s in a connection that made the fire in my veins burn hotter by the second.
I let my head fall, severing our fixed gazes in a lousy attempt to help myself.
He dipped me down so far my hair brushed the floor; the only thing keeping me from crashing to the ground was Ethan’s strong hand, which was fanned out across the expanse of my arched back.
This move was in the routine. Ethan was right about that, and I’d done it with Gabe a hundred times before, but it had never— not once —felt like this. I shouldn’t have let this happen. I should have tried harder to say no to Ethan when he suggested he help me. I was so stupid to let this happen.
All frantic thoughts slammed back into the present when Ethan’s hand began to move up along my back.
It slid until his hold cupped the back of my neck, and I felt his fingers get lost in my hair.
An unintended cut of breath passed through my lips at the feeling, and I shut my eyes to try and forget how good it felt.
I kept my eyes shut all the way back up, focusing on my breathing and losing the fight to get it under control. It was untamed and obvious in how affected I was by this interaction. Everything inside of me was trembling from my heart to my stomach to my disintegrating self-respect.
My heart tripped over its next beat as soft fingers touched the side of my neck, and the patch of his thumb brushed the edge of my jawline.
“Are you okay?”
His voice was so much closer than before and somehow richer, too.
I so badly did not want to open my eyes, but if I didn’t, I’d give myself and my inappropriate feelings away in a snap.
My eyes fluttered open and the sight that I was met with solidified everything I was feeling and fearing in one second flat.
Ethan was waiting for me with eyes that undid the best parts of me so that they fell away and left only the worst, most unforgiving parts of me standing.
The tension balled up in the center of my chest exploded, pulsing out and starting my heart with a new rhythm.
A rhythm that beat two syllables—one name.
He was so beautiful, and so was the way he was looking at me.
He wasn’t even meaning to, but the intensity in his stare tangled around my resolve and squeezed until it broke and revealed the reprehensible lie underneath.
He was an undoing I never expected and was terrified I would never recover from.
“Yeah,” I managed to lie. “I’m just a little tired. I’m gonna go lie down.”
And then I peeled myself from him and walked away, back to my bedroom, hating myself more and more with each step as the realization I had moments ago refused to relent.
I had a huge crush on Ethan.