Chapter Fourteen
“Look at me,” he said to her, for the second time in as many days.
Her eyes snapped up to his, wide and searching, as he stepped to the side, and then backward, his left hand pressed tight to her lower back.
That was how she needed it, at least right now, in order to follow him—stiff and startled as she was, as though she’d spent the last couple of hours forgetting that the ex-husband was here.
Or that there was an ex-husband at all.
“Just me,” he said, when one of her feet scuffed awkwardly against the gravel as he turned her, further into the circle of the outdoor ballroom’s floor, her back toward the ex now, but he couldn’t bother himself to see if that guy was watching.
He was very busy being bothered by everything else about this situation, and to him, everything else amounted to the fact that he was commanding this woman to look at him from an even more unsafe distance than he would have ever considered possible when he first floated this idea to her last night.
Bell tower! his brain screamed, like an alarm going off. Bell tower, not ballroom!
One side of his face suffused with heat—the normal side, with the normal, human sort of embarrassed heat, not the prickly, inexplicable kind that sometimes lurked beneath his deadened skin, a trick of his nervous system that he couldn’t control, and he prayed it was not too noticeable to her.
That the pink flush would be unremarkable, compared to everything else she’d be able to see from this angle.
He felt it then—on the right side, the normal-warm side—a thin wisp of her breath exhaling against his neck. Deliberately steadying as she managed her nerves.
Everything else was now a much more complicated prospect.
Because Jesus Christ, that breath against his neck.
Ten out of ten, he thought, for once in his life not thinking of the fucking pain scale.
He flicked his gaze up, over the top of her head, caught sight of the ex, his light-eyed gaze lingering briefly on Layla’s back before he turned to the girlfriend with an easy smile, extending a hand but stepping back at the same time.
If he was about to—
Yeah, he was.
What a fucking idiot. A bow.
“What?” Layla said, because clearly his face—his up close face!—had done something in response.
“Nothing,” he said, then shifted his gaze toward Michael and Emily, who were dancing again. For a fleeting second, Michael caught Griffin’s eye as he guided Emily into a turn, and mouthed, Thank you.
“I don’t know if—” Layla whispered, then broke off, swallowing and starting again. “I’m not sure if the solution is turning ourselves into the show.”
“We aren’t,” he said, not whispering, but still keeping his voice low. “They aren’t watching.”
He suspected they both knew that this was at least a partial lie—there was no way that there wasn’t some occasional watching, even if it was just from that security guard, who was probably thinking, Look at these six American assholes, but at the moment, he did not care.
He cared about that fucking guy showing up and ruining all the good work Layla had been doing.
For Michael, obviously.
“We’re two friends,” he said, distracting her. “Dancing.”
He hadn’t had the courage to look back down at her yet, but he could feel her eyes on him, on the normal and not-normal parts of his face, and his jaw ticked in anxious response.
So far, at least, his body felt okay. The left hand chafing where it held her, but not too bad.
His left leg straining uncomfortably with these unexpected movements, but holding up.
Six out of ten, still.
“How do you know how to dance?” she said.
“All rich people know,” he said. “There’s a special school we go to when we make our first million.”
She didn’t laugh this time, and he felt, rather than saw, her eyes drift from his face.
He tightened his hold. Left hand pressing anew against her lower back, damn the chafing. Right hand squeezing her fingers.
Her touching him, too: her small, warm palm on his back, her smooth hand inside his, and nothing, nothing about that hurt. Like she put some kind of spell on those parts of him.
They looked at each other now. Up close, her eyes were more than mud-brown. Chocolate-brown, that was probably the better description, with secret flecks of gold, stolen from a palace. The opposite of ostentatious.
“My mom taught me,” he said, “when I was a kid.”
In their kitchen, first, while a rare dinner she had time to make cooked in the oven.
Him standing in his socked feet on her toes.
Not so much a dance lesson as a game, which was uncommon in their house.
It had been so much fun that he’d always—well, until he got older, bigger, more self-aware—asked her to do it again, anytime she was home and cooking dinner, more relaxed than usual.
She would laugh and complain about how big he was getting, counting out a one, two, three; one, two, three as they moved.
“I took the lessons, too,” she said in answer, an honest confession, and he could tell it cost her something—to admit that something about Michael and Emily had been cut from a cloth she’d already worn, with a guy who was only a few steps away, now doing the dance with someone new.
He nodded once in acknowledgment, thought he could feel the delicate skeleton inside her trembling, despite the way she held herself upright, following his steps smoothly.
So he kept talking. Honestly.
“I suppose most people would say it’s a not-job. My…job, I mean.”
He watched the long line of her pale throat bob in a swallow, her face still tipped up to his.
“I can’t work…uh. Regularly. I am not reliable. As an employee.”
She didn’t ask why, but he knew she probably knew. She was a doctor. She was up close to him now. He’d bet she had read papers about people like him.
“My last couple years of college, I made something. Designed something, I guess it’s better to say, with the help of a couple of my professors. It’s boring—a building material that turned out to have a lot of applications.”
“That doesn’t sound boring,” she said, tilting her head slightly, that little swoop of hair she always had in front moving with her. She was not looking at anything else but him, which was exactly the point of this, but also, he wondered if she could feel his skeleton shaking now.
“I have money from that,” he said, overly blunt, as though he could stop the shaking himself if he acted more and more unbothered.
Even though holding her like this was the most bothersome thing he had done in years.
And that counted the plane ride here. The hotel, this whole entire thing.
“Because I hold the patent,” he said, briefly stopping to clench his teeth.
Somehow, without noticing, he’d moved the hand on her back up, and he thought he felt a brush of her hair on his wrist. But his left wrist was an unreliable place, a mysterious terrain of damage, and he couldn’t be sure.
It could be a phantom, a figment, a harbinger. His pretend-brain back again.
“And have stake in the manufacturing company that came from the patent,” he rushed out, trying to shut it down. “My professors—well, they’re not professors anymore—they’re the ones who really run it.”
“Are they billionaires?” she asked, and he sort of wanted to smile. She really had a burr up her ass about billionaires, which was fair enough.
“No.”
“Hm,” she said, a deliberate imitation, and he liked it—the mocking sincerity of it, the friendship-feeling of it.
By now, he doubted there was a need for this—a few brief turns and they would’ve done what was needed to dispel the tension of that first moment—the ex arriving, Emily’s crestfallen face, Michael’s back-to-being-nervous one.
But he didn’t let her go.
“I also help manage my mom’s farm,” he added, which was an extremely unnecessary detail, and he realized, as soon as it came out of his mouth, that he was no longer doing this to distract her.
He was doing it to correct her.
To let her know that she had the wrong idea about him.
That he was not some rich, dissolute asshole who did nothing all day in a gold-paneled house with gold-covered furniture.
That he was a person who once had ideas, and good ones, at that.
That he still did things, mostly small things, but still.
Things. That he used his money to buy his mother a farm, that he helped her, that he was the sort of person who knew what he owed to other people.
That he’d even—
“Griff,” interrupted Michael.
He and Layla stilled—a slowing step into a stop, then both of them backing away from each other.
The contact lost piece by excruciating piece: her right hand slipping from his back, his left hand sliding across her back, then her side, until it met the air again, the nerves jangling painfully in the aftermath.
Michael was smiling. He still had Emily in his arms, because that was a very normal thing for a groom and his bride, touching each other casually and constantly.
Out of the corner of his eye, Griff saw the ex release Samantha into a spin and heard her giggle, which was also very normal, he supposed, for a boyfriend and girlfriend.
The heat was back in his face again, a shamed sort.
Look at me, that’s what he had been doing, telling Layla those things about himself. Not a distraction for her, but an invitation from him. A worse sort of looking than she could do even with her gold-flecked eyes so up close to him.
There was no point to that sort of looking.
“Have I ever seen you dance, man?” Michael said.
His expression was lit up in a way Griffin hadn’t seen in a long time, at least not in relation to him.
A clean-slate hopefulness. Like opening his front door and seeing Griff standing there with two old lightsabers that he’d found in a neighbor’s trash.
Griffin shifted on his feet. “Not sure you could really call that dancing.”