Page 44 of Time for You
“But?” Daphne prompted, because she could tell by the way Ellie was looking between them, she wasn’t done.
“But if neither of you guys can figure out why you’re suddenly so pissed at each other, that’s not my problem,” Ellie said, and walked back into her room, leaving Daphne and Henry sitting with a stack of undecipherable math equations and more questions than Daphne had ever had in her life.
With each day that passed, it was getting harder and harder for Daphne to ignore the truth.
She had feelings for Henry. Real ones, not just the passing “oh, that’d be nice” way she felt about dating in general. She wanted to talk to him when she got back from a shift, craved hearing about his day, wanted to hear him excitedly explain how he’d learned to use the internet to find a new recipe. It was mundane, simple things, like the way he’d rub the back of his neck when he was thinking, or drum hisfingers on the counter while flipping through a stack of cookbooks Ellie had rounded up from her aunts. Henry was getting to be a fairly good cook, and kept throwing himself deeper and deeper into it, wanting to try newer things, harder things.
“Do people dance anymore?” Henry asked, but Daphne was only half listening. She was working on a crossword and was stuck on eleven down (An escape, sort of) while Henry read some mystery novel he had swiped from Helen’s.
“Hmm?”
“Dancing. Do people dance?”
“I mean, yeah, you’ve seen our movies, and we took you out one night. We dance.”
“Not like that. Proper dancing. Real dancing.”
Daphne put down the crossword puzzle book that Ellie had gotten her for Christmas, using her pen as a bookmark. “And what, pray tell, isrealdancing?”
“Waltzing. Doesn’t anyone do that anymore?”
“I mean, I know people do. But a lot of us don’t know how to do much more than swaying.”
“They don’t teach it in school?”
Daphne wrinkled her nose. “I had to learn square dancing in school, if that counts?”
Henry’s brow furrowed, and a curl fell across his forehead. “Square dancing? Do you—make squares?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Daphne said. “But to your question, no, we don’t really learn dancing in school. I’m sure there are places to learn, but you’d have to seek them out.”
“I see,” he said, returning briefly to his book. “Actually, no, I don’t.”
“Look, education here is really underfunded and—”
“It’s not that. It’s more that dancing is an art, and it’s sad that more people don’t care.”
“It’s less that we don’t care, and more—I dunno, we don’t really have time.”
“Pardon my observation, my lady, but it seems you here in the future have nothing but time.”
“Um, we’re super busy?”
“In some ways. But with all this technology, you really do have more time—you just spend it differently.”
“And what, you think we should use it learning to dance instead?”
“I think you’re unhappy. And would be happier doing other things.”
Daphne chewed on her lower lip, because Henry was looking at her the way he did sometimes, like he was seeing right into her heart and recognizing something she didn’t want to look at. “You’re unhappy, as in, you thinkI’munhappy? Or just twenty-first-century people in general?”
Those impossibly blue eyes bored into her. “That depends, Daphne. Are you happy?”
God, sometimes she wished she hadn’t made him switch to calling her that.Miss Griffinwas irritating, but it had a distance that didn’t make her stomach flip over the wayDaphnedid in his lilting Scottish accent. She swallowed hard and reached for the Doctorsona mask she used at the hospital, the one that kept her feelings from showing. “Are you offering to teach me how to dance?” she said instead of answering.
As usual, she didn’t fool him, but he accepted her dodge with grace. “Do you have anything that’s a waltz?” he asked, standing up.
Ellie had a stack of vinyl records that she had gotten from an uncle, and a refurbished record player sitting in the corner. Henry had gotten into the habit of using it from time to time, since it was technology that was vaguely familiar to him in a way computers simply weren’t.
