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“I was playing to my judge on that one,” I said, reaching up to press his arm tighter to my chest, wanting to be as close as possible. After a lifetime of feeling awkward and prickly around contact with another person, with Sam, I was finding that I couldn’t be held too long or too tightly.
“You really think your mom liked me?”
Sam had been fretting about that from the moment I’d introduced them yesterday at the rehearsal dinner, and he’d inquired about their German shepherd dogs before being corrected that the breed was Australian shepherd.
“They both have ‘shepherd’ in the name,” I’d assured him. “It’s understandable.”
“Yeah, but they lookcompletelydifferent,” Sam had said.
“It’s not like you went golfing with the dogs and then called them German shepherds to their faces. My mom thinks you’revery sweet. Those were her exact words.”
It had been a whirlwind couple of months. My defense had gone amazingly well, save for one sticky question where a professor on my committee had asked me to step through the chronology of true crime publications and I’d ended up on a tangent about my favorite Aphrodite Jones book that was perhaps a little off topic. Sam and I had spent Christmas in Chicago with his family, where his siblings had not pooled their twenty dollars to buy their mother a birthstone necklace, but where everyone was very loud and happy and hugged a lot. It had been surprisingly nice.
Now, I was living with Sam and working on a book proposal while I waited to see if Stiles would request an interview for the visiting instructor job that had just opened up. I’d applied to other jobs, too, in other cities, and Sam said he had no problems packing up and moving anywhere in the country. Despite that, I found myself weirdly hoping we got to stay in Florida. It was nice, living next door to my brother—although the number of times he came over to borrow stuff made me question just what hedidbuy when he went to the grocery store.
“That dude,” I said now, nodding toward a tall white guy with floppy brown hair and glasses. “Doesn’t he look a lot like Dennis Nilsen?”
“Is that a computer programmer from the early eighties?” Sam said. “Because that’s who he looks like.”
“No, it’s the guy who—” I caught myself before I could go any further. Something told me that maybe my brother’s wedding wasn’t the best place to start discussing Scottish serial killers and the inadvisability of trying to flush human remains. “Never mind.”
Sam stood up, holding out his hand. “Dance with me?”
“ ‘Dancing is not a compliment I pay to any place if I can help it,’ ” I said, because falling back onPride and Prejudicequotes was always a good way to get out of something.
One side of Sam’s mouth hitched up. “You can do this slow one with me now, or ‘Tubthumping’ later. Your choice.”
The only thing worse than slow dancing wasfastdancing, so I put my hand in Sam’s and let him pull me to my feet. The song had already started, and there were other couples on the floor as Sam rested his hands on my waist. I’d never quite known what to do with my arms while dancing—even at live shows, I just nodded my head and kept my hands in my pockets. Did I rest them on his shoulders?
“Around my neck,” Sam said. “It’s basically just a socially acceptable way for us to hold each other for four minutes. You do have to sway a little bit, to get away with it.”
It was easy to find the rhythm with Sam, actually. Nice, to feel his hands warm on my hips, to be close enough to see a small nick on his neck from where he’d shaved, to look into his eyes, so blue they took my breath away.
“It’s not so bad,” I said.
Over his shoulder, I could see Conner and Shani dancing together. I’d never seen my brother look so happy.
“I could see doing this, at some point,” I said. “Getting married, I mean.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure,” I said, linking my hands tighter behind his neck, letting my fingers play with the hair at the nape of his neck. “Someday.”
