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By early evening, the Ball was in full swing. Seder began at sunset, which wasn’t until almost eight o’clock, so there was plenty of time for socializing. Silk and taffeta and satin swished through the Carrigan’s great room in a luscious song, cousins and aunts and uncles as far as the eye could see. She’d been offered management positions at Rosenstein’s Bread and Pastries by four different relatives tonight. Every time she looked up to find Levi watching her, she almost considered taking them up on it.
She bristled. She, Noelle, and Miriam had slain dragons to keep Carrigan’s, and no one was going to drive her out, especially not Levi Blue Matthews. He might look delicious in an emerald satin smoking jacket with matching yarmulke, cigarette pants, and smudged eyeliner, but he wasn’t looking deliciousfor her. He was here to settle business. Carrigan’s was an annoying stop for him on his skyrocketing career and she wasn’t interested in his deliciousness. She was absolutely not going to climb him like a lanky green tree, even if her hormones felt otherwise.
He must have seen the heat in her eyes because he stole toward her through the crowd, leaning down to whisper in her ear. “You can’t look at me with those eyes, Hannah. It gives me ideas. Ditching all these people and finding a quiet place to be alone kind of ideas. Which I would support, but we should probably have a conversation first.”
Four years, a couple of continents, one dead matriarch, thousands of tears, and the shattered remains of her heart lay between this moment and the last time they’d spoken to each other, unless you counted yesterday’s five-word exchange, and this was what he chose to open with. As if they were picking up where they’d left off, except where they’d left off was her telling him to never come home again. As if he could just turn her on and they could forget everything else.
That’s how they’d always handled things before. Relying on their physical connection to say the things they couldn’t find the words for.
She deliberately kept her gaze over his shoulder, refusing to meet his eyes. She thought about lying to him, but it would never work. It never had; he knew her too well.
“We’re not having sex or a conversation, Blue,” she said through gritted teeth. “I don’t know why you’re here, but we’re going to celebrate our peoples’ freedom from bondage, then we’re going to ignore each other until you leave again, and then I will be personally free from the bondage of you.”
“You don’t know why I’m here? Really?”he growled in her ear, low enough that no one else could hear, sending goose bumps down her spine. “I’m here for you. To fix things with you. And I’m not leaving again until we’ve settled things between us. With sex or a conversation, preferably both.”
She was going to ignore how he was whispering in her ear that he wanted her back, because if she acknowledged he’d said it, she would never get through this night.
“Go talk to your siblings, Levi. They haven’t seen you for four years.” She gestured to where the twins were chatting with some of her cousins.
“They hate me.” He pouted.
“So do I,” Hannah pointed out. “But Esther and Joshua are not trying to throw a massive event at their place of business, so they can deal with you for a while.”
“We’re not done,” he said, and walked away.
Of course they weren’t. She’d told herself they were. But then he’d walked through the door, with his long lithe legs, swooping hair, and sexy beard, and shattered her careful illusions. She’d missed him every moment, even as she’d been praying to never see him again. Everything about him still set her nerves on edge, made her feel like the volume on her life had been turned up to eleven.
She shook her head, trying to dislodge him. He’d been living rent-free in there for far, far too long. No, they weren’t done, but she couldn’t think about that now. This was an event, and she was in charge.
She went to find her cousin, so they could get everyone seated.
She didn’t find Miriam, who’d been carried off under a wave of matchmaking aunts wanting to know if they could help plan her wedding to Noelle, although they weren’t yet engaged. Hannah could have saved Miriam, but she suspected Miriam had been waiting for this kind of familial attention all her life and was basking in it. Miriam’s dad had been emotionally abusive and had kept her away from the Rosenstein relatives. It was only since she’d come back to Carrigan’s last year that she’d been able to reconnect with them.
Instead, she found Noelle.
“I need you to distract me from obsessing about Blue,” she told her best friend.
Noelle raised an eyebrow. “How is this night different from all other nights?”
“Did you just make a Passover joke?” Hannah was both delighted and distracted. “NoNo, I’m so proud of you!”
“Your cousin Ephraim is hoarding a bottle of Manischewitz, your aunt Talia wants to know who’s single, and the younger kids got into the stash of Cass’s boas, so there are pink feathers all over the floor. I feel we should eat,” Noelle told her. “Is that distraction enough?”
“That’s exactly what I expected to happen. And eating? Oh, honey, you’ve only ever been to reform seders, haven’t you? We’re not going to eat for several hours.” Hannah laughed when Noelle’s eyes went wide.
“Sometimes I wish I could still drink,” Noelle muttered, wandering off to round everyone up so they could begin seder. She wasn’t serious; Noelle had been sober for more than a decade, but Hannah understood how her family could make someone feel that way if you weren’t used to them.
Eventually everyone was seated, and the seder began. The Haggadah they read from had been passed down through generations of Rosensteins. The youngest cousin had learned to read since last year, so it was her first time reading the questions. She had obviously been practicing and just as obviously had a flair for the dramatic.
She stood up on her chair, cleared her throat for silence, and asked in her biggest five-year-old voice, “WHY on THIS NIGHT do we RECLINE?”
Then she almost fell off the chair trying to act out reclining.
After, the plagues went on seemingly forever. She could see Noelle starting to fidget in her chair. Hannah hid her giggle behind a napkin.
“Stop laughing at me!” Noelle whispered. “Let my people go!”
Ziva, Miriam’s mother, kicked them both under the table to get them to behave, which only made them giggle even harder.
