Orion made a sour face, his eyestwinklingagain. “Why would I do that?”
“Right. Silly me. What was I thinking?”
“I paid Professor Wolfe a visit,” he said. “Private lessons, twice a week, for that spring concert.”
My eyes widened. “Really? God, that’s a relief.”
“A relief?”
“Absolutely. You not playing the piano in any meaningful way is like owning a Rembrandt and stashing it in the attic.”
Orion looked away. “Come on.”
I arched a brow. “I’mtryingto pay you a compliment.”
“Well, don’t,” he said, and brightened as a round of cheers went up from the stage. “Ah, there it goes. Our trophy. That’s what I meant by missing it. Someone else just snagged our Best Couple costume award.”
Of course, my stomach fluttered all over again at those words, no matter how impossible it all was.
“We’re not a couple,” I reminded him.
“Sure we are.” Orion indicated his suit and my dress. “We matched without even trying. Our costumes are from the same era.”
“Give or take forty years,” I said.
“Ugh, there is not one romantic bone in your body, is there, Bennett?”
“Not one.”
“We’ll have to work on that too.”
“When is all this work being done? And who is we?”
“We is us. Us is we,” Orion said, his voice growing low. Soft.
At those words, every part of me reacted with a warm, aching need, tinged by low-grade panic. I had to stay in control or else my life would collapse around me. But with Orion, I had no control. My emotions were chaotic, deep, and all of them were running straight to him.
I hugged myself tightly. “Orion…I told you the deal with mymother.”
“Is it bad, love?” he asked gently.
“It’s not good,” I said. “Teetering. She’s either going to haul herself back from the edge or she’s going to fall back into addiction. But so long as she’s having an affair with her married boss, my money’s on addiction. Bad choices beget bad choices.”
I looked over at Orion, so damn handsome and good and…
One of the greats. And I’m going to mess it up.
“I don’t want to make a bad choice that will end up hurting anyone in the end.”
Orion gazed down at me, as Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For” played faintly from the dance floor. He stood up and held out his hand.
“Dance with me.”
“I thought we weren’t going to do this.”
“Do what? Dance?”
I shot him a wry look. “I know what you’re doing.”
