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He guided me through the other couples with the effortless ease of someone who’d grown up dancing this way and didn’t have to think about it. His full, rapt attention was on my face.
“Here, I’m the token poor girl,” I said. “Back home, I’m the snob who thought she was too good for that place. I live between worlds. No matter where I look, I find that I belong nowhere.”
His lips pressed together.
“Maybe it was a mistake to come home,” I murmured, staring at the buttons on his shirt.
“No.”
I lifted my head.
“I mean—” Pink tinged his cheeks. He looked over my head toward the dancing crowd, then back at me. “I can’t pretend to know your difficulties, Shay. I can’t change how people perceive you. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t glad you came back.”
A smile pushed through my melancholy.
“I thought about you,” he said so quietly I barely registered it.
“You did?”
He nodded. “More than I should have.”
My body moved involuntarily, shrinking the distance between us by a few inches. He responded by dipping his hand lower on my back.
“You weren’t a token poor girl to me, Shay. You were—” He released a small breath. “Before the ball, I thought about approaching you so many times. I liked you so much, and everything you did made me like you even more. All those classes where we sat side-by-side, competing with each other. The way you’d glow when you beat me. Those projects we worked on together. The cross-country meets. The arguments I started just to watch you get flustered. I was waiting for a sign from you. Anything to show you were interested, too. The night of the ball, you touched my hand, and I thought—I thought it was an accident at first. But then it happened again.”
I locked onto his eyes, my chest pulling in air far more quickly than necessary. “I remember.”
“To everyone else, I was always the Shepherd Boy. People expected things from me and always seemed to be disappointed. I was smart, but annoyingly so. Social, but too quiet. I was tolerated because of my name and my money, but I didn’t fit the mold. I never felt like that with you. When I was with you, things were easy. You didn’t expect me to be anything except me. Those minutes with you in my arms were the first time things ever felt right. I got carried away, and it seemed like you hated me after that. But I couldn’t stop thinking about you. About the way I felt about you. The way I felt with you. I had so many apology speeches in my head, but none of them did justice to how sorry I was. And then I lost my chance because you were gone.”
“Cam—” My voice cracked.
“And you never came home.”
My hand on his shoulder moved to his neck, my fingers twirling into the burnished locks of his hair. “I didn’t have the money to come home.”
He blinked, shocked. Had that possibility never occurred to him? It took him several moments to recover. “I guess it was sort of cocky to think it had something to do with me.”
I let him have a small grin. “Maybe it had a little to do with you. You were the first boy I ever liked, the first boy I ever kissed, and you told your friends I was trailer trash. I was devastated. It was like having all my worst fears confirmed. I stayed away so I didn’t have to face it.”
His eyes squeezed shut. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay—”
“I really didn’t mean to get into all this right now.” He exhaled a slow breath. “I guess I’m saying all the things that built up in my head. The things I never got to say.”
My heart jolted as he dipped closer to me, secreting the next words that fell like honey from his mouth. “I should have moved on from you, but I couldn’t. I never stopped thinking about you, Shay. I see you. I’ve always seen you. This glittering world you feel like you don’t belong in? It’s all just smoke and mirrors.”
My vision darkened around the edges so that his face was the only visible thing. In the middle of the dance floor, we stopped moving, but the surrounding couples continued to sway.
He let go of my hand to cup my cheek. “Maybe you never felt like you belonged because you were looking in the wrong places.”
“What do you mean?” I whispered.
“I’m right here, Shay.”
My heart lodged in my throat.
The music ended, and people turned to clap. We separated like magnets pulling apart, each of us straining to reattach, even as our eyes remained locked.
