The kind of song that clears the fast dancers off the floor and replaces them with couples who have been waiting for exactly this tempo. Wyatt goes back behind the bar. Remy disappears toward the dance floor with the focused intention of a man who has identified someone worth dancing with.
Silas refills his drink with the contentment of someone who has no intention of dancing and is completely at peace with that.
June looks at me across the table.
I look at my drink.
She looks at Beckett.
He's watching the dance floor with his elbow on the table, relaxed, present, the top button of his shirt undone, his hat pushed back slightly. He looks like a man who belongs in a place like this, which six weeks ago I would not have predicted and now cannot imagine being any other way.
June kicks me lightly under the table.
I kick her back.
Beckett turns from the dance floor and looks at me with that expression that has become one of my favorites, warm, direct, a question in it that isn't pushy about being answered.
"Dance with me," he says.
It's not quite a question. Not quite a command. Somewhere in the easy middle ground that is very specifically him.
"I don't dance," I say.
"You live in Texas and work on a ranch and you don't dance?"
"Those things are not related."
"Laney." June's voice is gentle, amused, the voice of a woman who has been my closest friend for four years. "Go dance with the man."
"Stay out of it, June."
"I am so far into it," June says pleasantly. "I have been into it for weeks. Dance with him."
Beckett stands and holds out his hand across the table with the patient certainty of a man who has learned that waiting me out is a viable strategy.
I look at his hand.
I look at June, who has the expression of someone prepared to sit here all night.
I look at Silas, who is looking at the middle distance with elaborate neutrality.
I take Beckett's hand.
The dance floor is warm and close, full of Silver Ridge moving slowly to something with a steel guitar that understands exactly what it's doing to people.
Beckett settles his hand at my waist with the ease of someone who has thought about this before, pulls me in close enough that the distance between us is no longer a practical distance.
I put my hand on his shoulder.
We move.
He's not a bad dancer. That shouldn't surprise me anymore, the way he applies himself to things, but it still catches me slightly off guard. He leads without being aggressive about it, reads my movement, adjusts.
We find a rhythm inside of thirty seconds that feels natural in a way that has become characteristic of how we do most things together.
"You said you don't dance," he says close to my ear.
"I said I don't dance. I didn't say I couldn't."
