I blinked. “You live in a penthouse.”
“I’m aware of the irony. The trick is never looking down.”
“That’s not a trick. That’s denial.”
“Denial is an underrated survival strategy.”
I laughed. He looked pleased – the kind of pleased that comes from making someone laugh who you weren’t sure would.
“Your turn,” he said. “Something I wouldn’t guess.”
“I have terrible taste in men.”
“I’m sitting right here, Marlowe.”
“I said what I said.”
He pressed a hand to his chest in mock injury, but his eyes were laughing. “Tell me about the terrible taste. The ex. Sterling.”
I hesitated. Sterling was a wound I’d barely started cleaning, and talking about him felt like pressing on a bruise. But we’d agreed: real.
“Sterling was everything I thought I wanted. Charming. Confident. Beautiful, in that way certain people are beautiful – like a storefront. All display, perfectly lit, and behind the glass…” I trailed off. “Nothing. Nothing that was for me, anyway. I was a prop. A girl who made him look good, who’d say yes to things she shouldn’t have to say yes to. And when I finally said no – when my brother called and I left his party – he told me I didn’t love him. And then he told me he was sleeping with my best friend.”
“Was he?”
“No. He lied. Because lying was cheaper than losing, and Sterling would rather destroy than be denied.” I shrugged, but the motion cost more than I let show. “I found out the truth from Priya. She never touched him. He invented the whole thing to punish me for leaving.”
Caelum’s jaw tightened. Not theatrically – just a single, involuntary contraction, the physical response of a man who was angry on someone else’s behalf and trying not to show it.
“He doesn’t deserve to be discussed at this table,” he said.
“Agreed. He doesn’t even deserve the calories it would take to pronounce his name.” I lifted my wine glass. “To better choices.”
“To better choices,” he echoed, and we clinked glasses, and the sound was small and bright and felt like a punctuation mark at the end of something old and the beginning of something new.
The music had been shifting underneath our conversation – softer, slower, the piano drifting into a melody that pulled at something in my chest. Around us, beyond the curtain of vines, I could see other couples rising from their tables, moving toward the dance floor, drawn by the music the way moths are drawn by light.
Caelum set down his glass. Extended his hand across the table, palm up, open.
“Shall we?”
I looked at his hand. I looked at his face. I thought about the girl I’d been three days ago – the girl in a seven-dollar dress, tugging at the hem, hoping to be enough – and the woman I was now, in a black dress I hadn’t paid for, at a table I hadn’t earned, with a man I hadn’t chosen but was, moment by moment, choosing to let in.
“We shall,” I said.
And placed my hand in his.
We danced.
I should say: we tried to dance. The first thirty seconds were a negotiation – his hands on my waist, uncertain of their welcome; my palms on his chest, unsure how much pressure constituted intimacy versus structural support. We shuffled. We adjusted. His foot found mine once, and the apology that followed was so earnest I nearly laughed.
But then the music did what music does – it dissolved the distance between intention and instinct. The piano found a melody that moved like slow water, and our bodies, as though receiving instructions from somewhere older and wiser than our brains, began to follow it. His hands settled on my waist with a confidence that hadn’t been there moments ago. My palms flattened against his chest, and through the fabric of his shirt, I could feel his heartbeat – steady, a little fast, the rhythm of a man who was trying very hard to appear calmer than he was.
“You’re a good dancer,” he murmured near my ear, and the proximity of his voice – warm breath, low register, the vibration of it traveling through the small space between his mouth and my skin – sent something electric down my spine.
“So are you,” I said, which was generous, given the foot incident, but the spirit of the statement was true: whatever we were doing, it felt right. We moved together the way two people move when they’ve decided, without discussing it, to stop fighting the current and let it carry them.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.