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“I’m sorry.” The words were spilling out into the silence where a song used to be. “I really wish I could dance with you.”
“Nick.” Her eyes sparkled. “We’ve been dancing for weeks.”
He struggled for words. “That’s not … I know what you’re saying, but …”
“You know more than that.”
He looked at her blankly. “What?”
“I think you can feel it. Our rhythm.”
His mind raced back through the last few months. She couldn’t be talking about what he’d felt when he’d fallen into her arms at the bar or when he saw her walk into his kitchen in his robe. He replayed their karaoke Fridays, their texts, their lunches at the diner.
“You mean our sparring?” he said.
“Sparring?”
“Yeah.” Damn it. She’d been thinking of something else. “Fake boxing. Like when Rocky was training, he’d spar with someone in the ring. Not to beat the other person, but to make him better.”
“And I make you better.”
“Yeah.” She was biting her lip again, and he was flustered. “You surprise me. Knock me off-balance. It’s good, though. You keep me paying attention. I throw something your way, you throw it right back.”
“Give and take,” she said. “Reacting to me.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s dancing.”
“Okay.”
She was going for her phone again. “Did you know Sylvester Stallone wrote out the entire fight with Apollo inRocky?”
“What?”
“He wrote out every punch, like a screenplay. He choreographed it, Nick. Called it a violent ballet.”
“He did not.”
“He did.” She smiled. “I watched a documentary.”
For an instant, he forgot to be terrified and smiled back. “You did that because of me?”
Hayley put down her phone. A much slower song started playing, one he recognized from junior high. Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply.” She walked along the wall until she was standing across from him.
“Come here,” she said. Then, when he managed to obey her, “Turn around so your back is against the wall.”
He did. Hayley stepped toward him, swaying with the rhythm, until there were mere inches between them.
She said, “You know how to dance to this, don’t you?”
He coughed a nervous laugh. “This is not a good idea.”
“C’mon. I bet you were the king of the slow dance.” She picked up his right hand and guided it to the bare skin just above her hip. “That hand goes here.”
His heart was pounding. His mouth was dry.She’s got a boyfriend, she’s got a boyfriend, she’s got that asshole boyfriend …
“Can I have your other hand?” she asked.
