Page 62 of My Favorite Lost Cause
His laughter is quiet. “Ouch.”
“Speaking of which, where is your new friend?”
“She isn’t myfriend. She’s the daughter of the property developer. I was trying to get some intel, but she seems to know even less than I do, so I told her I needed to look for you.”
Do I believe him? I’m not sure.
Does it matter? Probably not. I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. “You can go back to her,” I reply. “I can’t dance anyway. These shoes are killing me.”
He extends a hand. “Take them off, Maren.”
“I can’t. Once I take them off, I’ll?—”
He reaches down and plucks one off before the sentence is complete. I sigh in relief and the other one is removed too. He tosses both toward the porch railing.
“Come on,” he says. “We’re dancing.”
He’s pulled me to my feet before I’ve had time to object and closes the distance between us, placing one arm around me while his right hand clasps my left.
I blush as I smile up at him. “Are we waltzing? I’m not sure I know how.”
“Me neither,” he grins. “But I bet we can fake it pretty well.”
I laugh. “I know you have a joke about Harvey in there somewhere.”
He begins to move me over the smooth, painted wood porch, but there’s no smirk as his eyes meet mine. “I’m not thinking about Harvey right now.”
My heart thunders in my chest. This version of Charlie—the one who only has eyes for me—feels like the real version.
And this version of me—the one who’d die happy if he was the only thing she could see—is the realest version of me.
I love my family. I love my friends. I love the dogs.
But none of them are precious to me the way he is.
We move to the song as if we intuitively know how to do this. I close my eyes and stop thinking entirely, allowingmyself to soak up everything about this moment: floating across this porch as if I’m weightless, my skirt swirling and airborne. The heavy press of the honeysuckle climbing up the trellis. The kiss of balmy air. Charlie’s hand on my back.
He and I could exist in any time, and it would still be exactly like this: inappropriate and yet entirely right. I picture his hand around my jaw, the way he’d look just before he kissed me, and my eyes open to find that’s exactly the way he is looking at me, with his nostrils flaring and his eyes on my mouth, and?—
A door slams in the distance and we immediately stop dancing, as if that door was an alarm waking us from a dream we shouldn’t have been having. His hands fall away, guilty, and he takes a single step back. “There,” he says, running a hand through his hair, “at least you got one dance. Should we head home?”
“Yeah,” I reply breathlessly.
He hands me my shoes and I swing them off the tip of my index finger as I walk down the stairs. “Put them on, Maren. There might be broken glass.”
“I can’t. Once you take off shoes that were too small, your feet swell to twice their previous size. That’s just science.”
He grins. “I’m curious about what scientific rule you’re referring to.”
“I am too, since I was terrible at science.”
“Climb on,” he says, glancing over his shoulder as he steps one stair below me. “I’ll give you a piggyback.”
I wrap my legs around his waist. “Excellent. This is just the outcome I was hoping for.”
He laughs and starts walking toward the car, his hands banded around my calves to keep me in place, my voluminous dress spilling off to our sides. I rest my head on his shoulder and smile wide. Somehow it feels as if I got the night I wantedafter all, the sort of night I’ll never get again if I wind up with someone like Andrew.
It’s only once I’m back in the cottage, alone, that I realize I just lived out Margaret’s exact dance with William. On the very same porch.
