Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“No, no—that’s okay, Maya. Let’s try again.”
Maya stares at her feet like they’ve personally betrayed her, her lower lip trembling dangerously. She’s tangled herself so thoroughly that her left foot is somehow behind her right ankle, a position that defies both anatomy and the basic box step I’ve been teaching for the past twenty minutes.
“I can’t do it.” Her voice wobbles. “I keep going the wrong way.”
“Everyone goes the wrong way at first.” I crouch down to her level, ignoring the protest from my knees. “Do you know how many times I stepped on my partner’s feet when I was learning?”
“How many?”
“About a million.” Slight exaggeration. Possibly. My mother kept count for a while, before she decided the numbers were too depressing to track. “The secret is that mistakes are just practice in disguise.”
Maya considers this philosophy with the gravity of a Supreme Court justice evaluating constitutional law.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It will someday. For now, let’s untangle your feet.”
I guide her back to starting position, my hands gentle on her small shoulders. She’s all gangly limbs and fierce determination, and she reminds me painfully of myself at that age. Too serious. Too hard on herself. Too convinced that anything less than perfection meant failure.
I’m projecting, I tell myself. She’s just a kid who stepped wrong.
But I see the way her jaw sets and the way her eyes dart toward the observation chairs where her grandmother sits with an expression of mild disappointment. I know that look. I grew up under that look.
“Let’s count together,” I say. “One, two, three—one, two, three—”
Maya moves through the steps, hesitant but correct. Her feet land where they should. Her weight shifts at the right moment.
“See? You’ve got it.”
“I didn’t mess up?”
“Not even a little.”
The smile that breaks across her face is worth every moment of patience. She bounces back to her partner—poor Charles, who’s been stoically enduring his role as human practice dummy—and they resume their wobbly waltz.
I straighten up, pressing a hand to the small of my back, and catch Bianca’s eye across the studio. She’s manning the front desk, ostensibly handling registration paperwork, but I know she’s been watching.
She mouths something at me.
I squint. What?
She mimes looking at her phone.
Oh.
Right. The text. The text I’ve been avoiding for the past two hours, the one that’s been burning a hole in my pocket like a radioactive coal.
My mother’s birthday party. One week away.
Mandatory attendance required, naturally—Carmen Solis doesn’t make requests, she issues summons.
This year’s celebration is being held at the Bellamy Cove Country Club, because of course it is, and the guest list apparently includes everyone my mother has ever met, charmed, or intimidated into social obligation.
The text itself was simple.
Mom: Confirming your attendance for the 15th. Plus one?
Plus one.
Two words. Such simple words. Words that have been rattling around my skull since 7:43 this morning, disrupting my focus, tangling my thoughts, making me snap at inanimate objects.
“Miss Izzie?” Amelia tugs at my practice skirt. “Are you okay? You look funny.”
“I’m fine, sweetheart. Just thinking.”
“About Mr. Mal?”
I choke on nothing. “What? No. Why would you—what makes you think—”
“He makes you smile different.” Amelia delivers this observation with the devastating accuracy of a child who hasn’t yet learned tact. “Like this.” She demonstrates, pulling her mouth into an exaggerated dreamy expression.
“I do not look like that.”
“You kinda do,” Maya offers helpfully, abandoning her practice to join the conversation. “My mom says Mr. Mal is Miss Izzie’s boyfriend.”
“Mr. Mal is my dance partner.”
“But you kiss him.”
“I—” How do they know about that? “That’s not—”
“Madison saw you,” Sophie says. “Through the window. She said you were eating his face.”
I’m going to kill Madison. Whoever Madison is.
“Okay, everyone back to practice.” I clap my hands with perhaps more force than necessary. “We have fifteen minutes left and I want to see improvement.”
The children scatter, giggling. I can feel heat climbing my cheeks and feel Bianca’s smirk boring into my back from across the room.
Eating his face. Honestly.
Although—and I will never, ever admit this out loud—the description isn’t entirely inaccurate. That last kiss had been... enthusiastic.
I shake off the memory and focus on corrections. Oliver’s frame needs work. The twins are going the wrong direction again. Amelia is doing something interpretive that bears no resemblance to any waltz I’ve ever seen.
But my mind keeps drifting.
Plus one.
Mal, at my mother’s birthday party. Mal, meeting Carmen Solis.
Mal, subjected to the particular brand of elegant scrutiny that my mother deploys like a precision weapon.The thought should terrify me.
It does terrify me, in a distant, theoretical way.
But underneath the terror is something else.
Something that feels suspiciously like.. . want.
I want him there.
The realization hits me like a missed step—sudden, disorienting, and impossible to ignore. I want Mal beside me when I walk into that country club. I want his hand at the small of my back, his voice in my ear, and his steady presence anchoring me against the storm of maternal judgment.
When did that happen?
The flood? The children’s dance class? Or simply waking up this morning with his arm draped across my waist, his breath warm against my neck, and his face soft with sleep. He’d looked human. Vulnerable. Mine.
That last thought had terrified me so thoroughly that I’d pretended to still be asleep until he stirred, then performed an elaborate charade of just waking up, as if I hadn’t been lying there for twenty minutes cataloging the way morning light caught the planes of his face.
“Miss Izzie?”
I blink. Maya is standing in front of me, head tilted.
“Class is over.”
It is. The music has stopped. Parents are filtering in through the door. I’ve been standing in the middle of the studio like a statue, lost in thought while children danced around me.
Get it together, Izzie.
“Right. Yes. Good work today, everyone.” I clap my hands again, pulling on my professional smile. “Remember to practice at home. Same time next week.”
The exodus begins. Children collect belongings. Parents exchange pleasantries. Bianca handles checkout with her usual efficiency while shooting me meaningful looks that I steadfastly ignore.
By 3:15, the studio is empty except for the two of us.
“So,” Bianca says.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I was about to ask if you’ve responded to your mother yet.” She perches on the front desk, swinging her legs. “Totally work-related inquiry.”
“I’m still deciding.”
“Deciding if you’re going, or deciding if you’re bringing your hot demon boyfriend?”
I wince. I haven’t discussed Mal’s... nature with Bianca. But she’s observant, and the incident with Nix during children’s class was hard to explain away as a “trained exotic pet.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“He slept at your place last night.”
“How do you—” I stop. Small town. Of course she knows. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like what you’re thinking.”
Bianca’s eyebrows climb. “You had a gorgeous man in your bed and you just slept?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“From you? Yes. Isadora Solis, who schedules bathroom breaks and hasn’t taken a day off in three years? Yes, it is extremely hard to believe that you’d waste a perfectly good overnight guest on actual sleeping.”
“It wasn’t a waste,” I snap, then do my best to soften my voice. “It was... nice.”
The eyebrows climb higher. “Nice.”
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Your face is saying plenty.”
Bianca’s expression softens into something approaching genuine affection. “Izzie. Bring him to the party.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Sure it is. ‘Mal, would you like to come to my mother’s birthday party?’ See? Simple.”
“You’ve never met my mother.”
“I’ve heard enough.” She hops off the desk. “Look, I know Carmen is... a lot. But you’ve been dreading this party for weeks, and now you have someone who actually wants to be in your corner. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?”
“Because...” I trail off, searching for the real answer beneath all the rationalizations. “Because it means something. Introducing him to her. It makes us real in a way that’s hard to take back.”
“And that’s bad?”
“It’s terrifying.”
Bianca considers me for a long moment. Then she reaches out and squeezes my arm.
“Terror isn’t the same as wrong,” she says quietly. “Sometimes the scariest things are the best ones.”
She heads toward the back office before I can respond, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the faint scent of children’s fruit snacks.
A short time later Mal arrives for our afternoon practice session. He’s wearing dark jeans and a charcoal Henley that does unreasonable things to his shoulders, and he’s carrying two cups from the coffee shop down the street.
“Cortado, one sugar,” he says, handing me one. “And before you ask, yes, I remembered that you only take sugar on Tuesdays and Thursdays when you have back-to-back classes.”
I stare at him. “How do you know my coffee schedule?”
“I pay attention.” He says it simply, without pride or expectation. “Also, Bianca may have mentioned it.”
“Bianca has a big mouth.”
“Bianca is a treasure and I’ve already promised her backstage passes to something appropriately impressive as a thank-you gift.”
“Backstage passes to what?”
“I’ll figure that out later. The important thing is the gesture.” He sips his own drink—something dark and complicated that probably has a pretentious name. “You look stressed.”
“I’m not stressed.”
“Your shoulders are approximately three inches higher than normal and there’s a tension line between your eyebrows that I’ve learned to associate with impending disaster.”