Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
I flick the camera off as I melt back into the music, listening for its pulse.
Patsy’s singing one I don’t recognize, something about cigarettes in an ashtray, and the more I track the lyrics, the more I try to tune them out.
Too on the nose. Flipping through the random strings of choreography that live in my head, I settle on something that fits the slow, crooning tempo, a combination I taught my freshmen last fall.
As the song ends, I move the needle back to replay it.
Charlie stands, leaning against the desk, arms crossed over his chest and a cocky smile looking far too comfortable on his face.
Letting a deep breath fill every space between my ribs, on the next twang of the steel guitar, I move.
Slow at first, teasing into the song, this last minute thrown-together performance.
My shoulders roll back as I settle into my center and sweep my feet together, arms arching above me as the melody lifts.
My leg extends, spine curving as I throw my head back.
My foot comes back to the ground, graceful as I can be in my bulky sneakers, and my left foot glides forward, kissing my heel.
Rounding my arms, I push up off the grimy cement, claiming Charlie’s blue eyes as my spot.
My right leg lifts and I spin, whipping my head around.
Sharp as the blade of a knife, agony shoots through my hip and down my thigh. It sucks the breath from my lungs as I wince and fall out of my stance, losing my footing from the shock of it. I gasp, clutching my failed joint as I stumble forward, and two long arms wrap around me.
“I got you,” Charlie murmurs. “Are you okay?”
I clench my fist in his shirt, like I can channel that sting out of myself and into the fabric. “Fine,” I grit out as the tip of my face burns with the self-pity my eyes refuse to leak. “Stupid injury.”
“You’re okay.” His lips crush against my hair. “You’re okay. I got you.”
The stabbing dulls into a throb as I catch my breath in Charlie’s arms, crumpled against his chest. I want to scream.
I want to break something. Fuck my hip. Fuck my broken body.
Fuck this labral tear that still haunts me, refusing to heal.
Fuck the resting, the not resting, the physical therapy, the aqua therapy, the steroids, the acupuncture, the red light therapy that didn’t do shit.
Fuck all the money I’ve wasted trying to fix my broken body.
“That’s why I can’t dance anymore. Not really.” My voice breaks alongside the rest of me, and I burrow into him, losing myself in his woodsy scent. I should’ve known this would happen—my hip has been aching since we ran across the soaked grass. I’m too goddamn stubborn for my own good.
Charlie squeezes me tighter, and his voice is rough when he says, “Good thing I still can.” One of his arms wraps around my waist, the other sliding down the side of my body, and he lifts me, positioning my feet on top of his. “Can’t promise I’m as good as you, though.”
In perfect timing with the music, he shuffles us twice on a right angle, once on a left, then backward, turns, then repeats it again, moving us around the room with ease.
“This okay?” he murmurs. “Doesn’t hurt?”
“No,” I answer. “It’s good. I thought you didn’t know how to dance.”
Recognition flickers in his eyes as he positions us in a relaxed waltz stance. The night I kissed him. “Not like that. And I never took you as the two-step kind of girl.”
“I was a dance-with-my-husband kind of girl,” I whisper.
That softens him. “I guess I always felt a little intimidated. Dance is your thing. I never thought I’d be a good enough partner for you.”
It’s a simple admission, but it sinks like a hundred-ton rusting anchor in my gut.
“I get that,” I say, more honest than he even realizes. My knees weaken under the weight of the complex swamp of emotions I’m wading through: frustration and affection and despair, and so much regret it makes me dizzy.
I lean my cheek against his chest. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be perfect. As long as you were on the floor with me.”
The vinyl transitions into Walkin’ After Midnight as he takes us in another circle of the small space and reality crashes into me like a meteor—fiery, hot, destructive.
A year of biweekly therapy and I can’t not recognize the hypocrisy in my own words, promising Charlie he didn’t need to be perfect as long as his mess was with me, when two years ago I never would have believed that about myself.
Even now, I find the idea hard to chew on.
Someone like him deserves grace. I’m not sure I do.
Especially not after how I handled everything.
I was thrown into the deep end, no flotation device, no lifeboat, just me and my own knack for survival.
And like a feral animal might chew its own leg off to escape a trap, I severed the one connection that meant everything to me because it seemed like the only way out.
So many of my sessions with Christine revolve around what happened two Thanksgivings ago—the way I handled it, the way I bungled it, the way I regretted everything, the way I didn’t know how to or believe I was ready to fix any of it.
Not to mention the emotional fallout of everything back in Kansas.
Would Charlie understand if I told him the truth? If I told him I left because I was protecting him?
“Hey, Winnie?” Charlie interrupts my emotional reverie, voice smooth as silk as it vibrates from his chest beneath my cheek.
I hum in response because I don’t trust my raw throat.
“That stuff you said about going home—about being back in Kansas? I wish . . . I’m sorry if you thought you couldn’t tell me that kind of stuff. You could have. I wish you did.”
Charles Anthony Rosenhoth is the antithesis of everything I’d been taught up until the day I met him. He’s so earnest, so open, so willing to tackle the hard shit.
“I’m not sure you would’ve understood,” I admit, pulling back to meet his eyes. “You come from such a normal family.”
He squints at me like it bothers him I said that, and I recognize the impulse.
That bone-deep feeling that no one actually knows what you’ve been through, and how dare they assume.
I’m sure he has plenty of stories I’ve never heard, but I’ve filed away enough evidence from the stories he’s told me, the numerous family dinners I attended, and every holiday at his parents’ house.
We come from different worlds, whether he can admit that or not.
He ditches the pattern we’ve been tracing across the floor and sways us in a lazy circle as he studies my face. “Have you ever thought maybe that’s exactly what you need?”
His question takes me aback. I expected a tongue-in-cheek quip about the things I don’t know. Brain glitching, all I echo back is, “What?”
“Fresh perspective. From someone who did grow up differently than you. Someone who could look you in the eyes and honestly say what happened wasn’t normal. And that you deserved better.”
You deserved better. Five syllables—a chisel straight to my heart, splitting it in two. A lump swells at the base of my throat as I search his face for an answer of where that came from.
He’s so eerily close to grasping the right straw, I have to stop myself from asking what he knows—if he’s been secretly emailing with Christine on the side, breaking all kinds of HIPPA laws to extract information on me. My family is the one thing I never really talked about with him.
My hands slide from his chest to wrap around the back of his neck, brushing against the hair at his nape. “So, you think if I’d talked to you about it, it would’ve been easier for me?”
“Can’t say for sure.” His forehead tips forward to rest against mine. “But I do know hard things feel a lot easier when you have someone in your corner looking out for you.”
“You would’ve looked out for me, Charlie?” It comes out breathy and soft and more vulnerable than I intended. His hold on my hips draws me closer.
“If you’d let me, yeah.” His whisper is laced with what’s left of the moonshine we drank hours ago, and I breathe it in, stealing a taste. “There’s a lot I would’ve done if you’d let me.”
A lump swells impossibly large in my throat. “I have a lot of bruises.”
“I could’ve kissed them better.”
I’m all pulse and self-reproach as he looks at me so intensely it’s as if he can see the wave of nostalgic memories playing in my head, set to our soundtrack of Patsy Cline. What might’ve been different if I’d let him try?
His face tilts, nose grazing mine. My lips part on a wispy exhale. Slowly—so slowly—his hand smooths up my back, and I study the way his throat bobs, the way his mouth mirrors mine. I’m drowning in this tension that’s been pulling us together for hours.
His chin inches forward. Hesitant. A quivering breath fans over my chin as my fingers delve deeper in his hair.
Pressing up on my toes, I inch forward too, our top lips brushing and his hand flies to cradle my neck.
Does this count as a kiss if we stay here forever, suspended in time?
If we promise not to move, at least until Patsy croons her last verse?
If neither of us closes this infinitesimal gap, can we ever consider it a mistake?
Would it be one? A mistake?
There are no more excuses. No moonshine or meddling ghosts for us to blame. This ravenous want—no, need—I have for him, is all me. All us. And Charlie knows it. Because he’s pulling me in too.