Chapter 4 The Away Connection #3
For you and me both, friend. “My friend Viv said you got divorced.”
He nods, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk a few feet ahead of us. “Yeah.”
“Was she a dancer, too?”
“Yes,” he says, glancing at me again. “She was not my partner when I was competing, but she was part of the scene. She still is, as far as I know, which… She doesn’t come to Manhattan Swing Workshop, but if I go to events around the city, there’s a good chance she’ll be there.”
“Ah.” I understand that feeling after a divorce, that there are certain places that aren’t safe anymore. “So you’ve been avoiding her?”
“I was avoiding the entirety of New York.” He looks a little rueful. “But I love this place. It’s nice to be back.”
“The city or the dancing?”
“All of it.” He holds the door as we enter the coffee shop together.
“So who did you dance with when you competed?”
“That was Eliana Macri. I dated her for a while, but she eventually switched to dancing with someone else. About six years ago. They are doing well, too. Probably top five in the country.”
“That’s impressive.”
“Yeah. She picked the better partner, clearly.” He shrugs, like it doesn’t bother him, but the words give him away. It hits me that his former dance partner left him for someone else, a few years before his wife left him for his brother.
“Clearly she did not pick the better partner,” I say. “Because you’re amazing.”
He smiles. “I’m not sure you’re experienced enough to judge that, Ms. Marceau.”
“You know my last name.” It is also Nick’s last name; I haven’t quite gotten myself organized to change it yet.
“It didn’t require masterly detection skills. I looked you up on the company website.”
I smile. “When did you do that?”
His eyes are twinkling again. “I don’t think I’ll tell you that.”
We stand there for a moment together in line, scanning the menu. After a moment, I get my courage to say what I planned to tell him when I first arrived.
“I just…” I look at the floor. I’m not sure why this is so hard to say to him.
“I came today because I wanted to prove that I was serious about being interested in you. What I said to Vivi was... I didn’t mean it, and I guess I wanted to show that I was willing to humiliate myself for an hour to make it up to you. ”
“Just an hour?” There’s that smile again.
“Oh, did you want me to humiliate myself for longer?”
He grins and steps forward to give his coffee order and then buys me mine.
We stand together against the wall of the tiny coffee shop waiting for our orders as he looks at me again. His eyes are a complicated hazel color—a warm green with a ring of warm brown in the center—and he has a way of fixing his gaze on me that’s both intense and incredibly hard to read.
“How about this?” he says. “I would like to take you out. But if we’re going to do that, you have to stick with West Coast Swing. At least for a month. You can’t just take a one-hour lesson and quit.”
“You want to see me embarrass myself more?”
“I didn’t say you had to take my class. I just want you to stick with it.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “Maybe I think you’re a good dancer.”
“I am a terrible dancer.”
He smiles. “No. The terrible ones have no rhythm and that is almost impossible to teach. You have a sense of how music works. It’s visible in the way you move. You like music.”
“Well, my ex-husband was a musician.” I consider what he’s said. I’ve never thought much about my relationship with music. “I used to love going to shows and dancing around for hours, but then I guess I started to associate music with my ex-husband, who never showed up when he said he would.”
“Don’t let him take music from you. I let my ex-wife take a lot of stuff that I used to love. It’s one reason I came back to the city, to reclaim the stuff that I accidentally gave up in the divorce.”
He’s right. I used to love bands and rooms full of people before I associated them with a man who dropped in and out of my life like a signal from the world’s weakest radio station.
I take a breath. “Okay. I’ll stick with it for a month. Maybe I can sign Hannah up for karate classes or something at the same time. She’s been hounding me for martial arts lessons.”
“She sounds fierce.”
“You have no idea. She’ll probably be Brooklyn Borough President by the time she’s twenty-one. She has opinions on everything.”
We grab our coffees and walk to the door.
“I remember your daughter, actually,” he replies as he holds the door open for me.
“You do? That was years ago.”
“She was funny. Dark, curly hair, right? She reminded me of you.”
“You didn’t even know me back then.”
“I noticed you,” he says. “But I was married and I assumed you were, too.”
“No, I was already divorced.” I consider what to say. “Hannah is a great kid with an unreliable dad, and I try to shield her from that fact, and that makes her hate me.”
Ollie nods slowly, taking this in. “Why would she hate you?”
“Because he doesn’t show up, and I pretend it wasn’t his fault, and then I’m the bad guy who’s mad at her perfect dad all the time. Sorry, you don’t need to hear about that. Angry ranting about exes is the third date, right? Or is it the fourth? I’m rusty.”
He laughs. “You’re not ranting, you’re telling me about your life.”
I smile, charmed in spite of myself. “My subway is that way.”
He walks down the street with me and then pauses when we reach the subway entrance. We stand there for a moment, sipping our coffees, looking at each other.
“Laura, may I take you on a date?”
“So formal.”
“I stopped asking women if they wanted to ‘hang out’ when I was a senior in college. Too many misunderstandings. I once showed up to a movie with flowers, and she’d invited her actual boyfriend along.”
“Oh no.” I laugh. “Just so you know, I’m sober.” The words pour out of me, unplanned. “I’m the kind of sober where I count how long I’ve been sober.”
He nods. He doesn’t look upset, just thoughtful.
“I count in years, not days, just to be clear. This is not new. But I need to make sure that you’re okay with that.
It’s fine to have a drink around me, and I can go to bars, but I can’t be around people who get wasted.
And I can’t have it in the house. Not that we’re talking about moving in together.
” Now I’m really embarrassed. “I just wanted to warn you, so you could think about whether you’re okay with that. ”
“I have absolutely no problem with that,” he says. “It’s not a big part of my life at all.” I feel a wave of relief, but then he looks away. “I feel like this is where I should confess something to you.”
There is a long, ominous pause. “Yes?”
“After my divorce I am not entirely sure I trust women. I’m not entirely sure I trust anybody.”
“Oh.” The words are not just a flashing red warning sign; they are one of those fifty-foot billboards in Times Square. It’s not even that he has that feeling. It’s that he feels it enough to need to tell me about it.
“I’m trying,” he adds softly. His hazel eyes look serious. “Just promise me one thing, okay? If you want to get back with your ex-husband, that’s fine, but—”
“I don’t.”
“I heard you at the party. And I heard something about you leaving the firm last summer to be with him, and no one knew whether you were coming back. So if you are in some on-again, off-again thing with him…”
I shake my head. “We’re definitely off-again. I mean, we’re definitely off forever.”
He looks a little skeptical, but he nods once. “Okay,” he says. “Then we can give this a try.”
He takes my hand in his and squeezes it, and I feel a warmth spread from my palm up my arm and all the way into my chest. He looks right in my eyes as his thumb slides gently across my wrist. “And don’t be afraid to tighten that grip a little.”