Page 41 of June
"You're not a fool," I said. Then paused. "Maybe a nerd. A very committed, charming nerd."
He perked up. "I'll take that. Nerds make great partners. We calculate all the ways we could mess up in advance."
"And yet," I said, guiding him through another turn, "you still manage to mess up anyway."
"I know," he said solemnly. "It's my tragic flaw. Like Oedipus, but with jazz hands."
I burst out laughing. "Okay, you win."
"Yes!" He threw a triumphant fist into the air, then immediately tripped on his own foot.
I caught him before he could fall—again—and we stood there for a second, closer than we'd planned, faces inches apart.
His expression softened. "Thanks. For not giving up on me."
I shrugged. "You're not the kind of student people give up on."
"Because I'm promising?"
"Because you're stubborn," I said, grinning.
He grinned back. "Well, yeah. I have to be. I'm trying to impress a woman who pirouettes like gravity isn't even a thing."
That caught me off guard. I felt my cheeks warm. "You're impossible."
"Accurate," he said. "But in my defense, dancing is hard when your usual experience with movement involves plotting orbital trajectories and occasionally forgetting how knees work."
"You're better than you think."
He looked at me, eyes steady behind those glasses, a lopsided smile tugging at his mouth. "I just want to get it right. For her."
I nodded softly. "Tell me more about her? "
His gaze drifted—slow and soft—like he was following stardust no one else could see, plucking memory from a sky only he could read.
"She used to dance in the kitchen," he said, voice barely more than breath. "She'd spin with me in her arms, bare feet on tile, humming old love songs while the pasta boiled over behind her. She never noticed. Or maybe she just didn't care."
His eyes shimmered, lit with something that wasn't quite sadness, but not far from it either.
"Everything she touched felt like music," he whispered. "Even the silence. Even the burnt sauce and the broken timer."
There was a pause, and I didn't dare fill it. It felt like he was holding something fragile—like if I breathed too loudly, it might crack.
He smiled faintly then. "Now... she forgets the songs. She forgets the words, even the names. But if I hum the right one, just the right rhythm..." His hand twitched slightly, like mimicking the beat. "She'll tap her fingers. On her lap. On the armrest. Like something inside her still remembers. Like the music's still there, hidden somewhere the illness hasn't touched."
I felt the ache of it echo in my chest, the kind that doesn't ask for pity—only space.
He looked at me, eyes clear and aching. "I want to give her just a little piece of what she gave me."
My throat tightened. Because that's the kind of love that doesn't fade when memory does.
It hums. It lingers. It dances.
Then—like a string snapping under too much pressure—the door creaked open behind us.
I didn't need to look. Ifeltit—the sudden chill gripping the room, the way Liam's hand stiffened slightly in mine, the invisible noose tightening around my throat.
Aaron.
