The Last Foot of Space
Fuse
The button-down feels wrong. Too stiff in the shoulders. I've worn it twice since I bought it and both times I wanted my cut back inside an hour.
Ash leans against the bar at the clubhouse, watching me check my reflection in the dark window for the third time.
"You look like you're going to your own funeral."
"Shut up."
"I'm just saying. Big bad Fuse, two-stepping at a street dance." He grins. "Somebody bring a camera."
"Nobody's bringing a camera."
"Crew already asked if there's a dress code." Ash isn't done. Probably won't be done for weeks. "Bishop wants to know if you're wearing the boots or borrowing Holt's Goodwill funeral loafers circa 2010."
"Tell Bishop to mind his own."
"Tell him yourself. He's right behind you."
He's not. I check anyway. Ash laughs the whole way out the door, and I let him have it, because he's not wrong about any of it. I'm nervous. I'd rather take a beating than admit that out loud.
The dance is already loud by the time I get there. String lights strung pole to pole down Main. A band working through a song with too much fiddle. Half the town's on folding chairs. The other half's on the makeshift floor somebody laid down outside the hardware store.
I find a spot near the edge and wait.
Tell myself I'm not waiting. Doesn't convince me.
Twenty minutes in, I've almost talked myself into believing she's not coming. Then her SUV pulls into the lot across the street. She sits in it a long minute before she gets out.
She's in a green dress I've never seen. Hair down instead of up in the knot she wears at the shop. For a second I forget how to do anything except look.
My whole chest goes tight in a way that's got nothing to do with nerves anymore.
I've seen her a hundred mornings in an apron with flour on her wrist and her hair falling out of its knot.
Somehow that never once stopped hitting me, and now this—legs I didn't know existed under months of mom jeans, collarbone bare, the dress doing something to her waist I'm going to be thinking about for the rest of the night.
I have to plant my boots and lock my jaw just to keep from crossing the street before she's even decided to. I run a hand down my face once, hard, like I can physically reset whatever just short-circuited in me.
Get it together.
She crosses the street like she's bracing for impact.
"You came."
"Don't make it weird."
"Wasn't planning to."
She crosses her arms, scanning the crowd instead of looking at me. "Rose is with my mother. Told her I needed a few hours."
"Good."
"Don't read into that."
"Wasn't planning to," I say again, and she almost smiles before she catches herself.
The band kicks into something slower. Couples drift toward the floor. I don't ask her to dance because I already know what she'll say if I make it a question.
I hold out my hand.
She stares at it.
"Give me one good reason."
"You've been standing over there working up the nerve to walk across this street." I don't drop my hand. "Woman doesn't get dressed like that just to spend the whole night making sure nobody catches her looking."
Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out of it for a second.
"That's—"
"Observant. I know."
"I was going to say presumptuous."
"Can be both."
She doesn't move right away, but her shoulders give, the fight going out of them an inch at a time.
"One dance."
"One dance," she agrees.
Her hand disappears into mine—small, cool, and the size difference alone does something to me I don't have a word for yet. I pull her in and the whole rest of the street drops away for a minute. She steps on my boot once, laughs at herself, doesn't apologize for it.
"You're terrible at this," she says.
"Never claimed otherwise."
"Why'd you ask, then?"
"Wanted an excuse to hold onto you." Plain. No dressing it up. "Figured a bad dancer's better than no dancer."
She doesn't have a comeback. Just looks up at me, shoulders dropping the half inch they never do at the shop.
She stumbles again on the turn and my hand lands low on her back to catch her—flat against the curve of it, closer to the small of her spine than I meant to land.
I don't move it right away. Neither does she pull off it right away.
A beat passes where we both notice exactly what that hand is doing there, and neither of us says a word about it.
Her breath changes. Just slightly. Enough that I feel it against my chest.
First time we've been just two people. No counter between us. No patch, no grief standing in the doorway. Music and bad footwork and her hand in mine.
I'd take a hundred more nights exactly like this one.
Across the street, past the edge of the lights, somebody's watching.
I clock him without turning my head. Cut I don't recognize—no colors I know, no patch angled toward the light so I can read it.
Standing too still for a man who's supposed to be passing through.
The cherry of his cigarette flares once, brightens, dims, and he doesn't move otherwise.
Doesn't check his phone. Doesn't talk to anybody. A man watching, not waiting.
I don't say anything. Don't want to spook her, not tonight. But I file the face away. The build. The way he's positioned himself just outside the light where he thinks nobody'll notice.
I notice everything. Old habit. Useful tonight.
When the song ends, Nora steps back first. Puts space between us before I have to. "I should head back."
"I'll walk you."
She doesn't argue.
We walk in a silence that isn't uncomfortable. Full, instead. The kind of quiet that says more than either of us is willing to. At her vehicle she turns to face me. For a second I think she's going to let me close that last foot of space.
Instead she steps back. She pulls her phone out instead, holding it toward me screen-first.
"Despite the fact that you’re a bad dancer, you can put your number in." Like offering it has a cost. "Before I talk myself out of this and you never hear from me again."
I take it, type mine in, hand it back. "Under what name."
"Whatever you want. Long as it's not Leatherman."
"Might keep Leatherman. Feels earned by now."
That gets the almost-smile again, the one she keeps trying not to give me.
She pockets the phone. "Goodnight, Fuse."
"Night."
She climbs in, starts the engine. I watch her taillights all the way down Main until they disappear around the corner.
Then I turn back toward the spot where the man in the unfamiliar cut was standing.
He's gone.
The cigarette's still burning in the gutter where he dropped it.
The feeling isn't.