Page 29

But now, it’s like every day we spend together, every day the sun shines brighter and longer, burning off the last vestiges of our cold, lonely winter, he’s seeming to come alive again. I think I am too.

“It’s a Saturday morning, and she’s here before anyone else,” he says, drawing my attention back to our conversation. “How did she even get in?”

I avert my gaze, turning back to face my student. “I gave her a key,” I mumble.

Beside me, Beau laughs.

I feel it in my chest, like warmth seeping into me.

“Tonya isn’t going to be happy about that.”

Tonya hasn’t questioned any of my professional decisions, and I doubt she will start with this one.

After I moved home, broken and jobless, she showed up at my house and told me I was taking a job at the studio.

I was at my darkest point then, just a few weeks after I’d asked Beau to leave, barely making it a day without a panic attack.

I didn’t think I’d be able to do it—teach the sport that was supposed to be my career.

And I told Tonya that, but she ignored me, told me to be at the studio the next morning for class.

I taught my first class the next morning, met Maya and all the other students that were looking at me like I was a goddess, and then locked myself in the bathroom, heaving and gasping for breath, feeling like the world was caving in on me.

I did that every time I taught for the first few weeks, and the first day I didn’t, I decided to celebrate by going to the bar in town, the one Beau and I had frequented so many times.

I wanted to be close to him in some sort of way, to celebrate my accomplishment in a place where I could feel his presence.

I hadn’t counted on the way everyone would look at me, like I was gum on the bottom of their shoe, because I had hurt their golden boy.

Except when I got there, it didn’t feel much like a celebration at all.

And then he showed up, looking angry and raw, and I finally understood their ire. I didn’t know how to respond to it—how he looked, how I felt.

I just knew I wanted him so badly that I was willing to let myself have him, even if it was just for one night. For one night, I wasn’t going to think about the panic attacks and my failure. For one night, I was going to celebrate my progress, the new life I was carving out for myself.

And now here we were, watching a girl who’s following in my footsteps, with our baby growing in my belly and the ghost of his touch still lingering on my skin.

“Tonya gave me a key when I was a student too.”

I feel Beau’s gaze on the side of my face, but I don’t turn to look at him. “She did?”

A smile touches my lips at the memory. “She was tired of me breaking in with a metal coat hanger. Told me I could let myself in and out as often as I wanted, but I had to make a deal with her.”

“What was the deal?” he asks, voice soft, his gaze never leaving me. I’ve never known how to handle the weight of his full attention on me.

Finally, I look up at him, not seeing the man he is now but the boy he was when we met. “That I had to go to the party that Sierra Bennett was having at her house the next night.”

His eyes widen, recognition dawning. “The party where we met.”

My eyes trace the contours of his face. The strong nose. The full lips that I’ve always been jealous of. The thick brows that frame searing brown eyes framed by the thickest lashes I’ve ever seen. The mustache I still can’t think about without feeling a hot blush stain my cheeks.

I can still remember that night like it was yesterday.

The way our eyes locked from across the room.

How I turned away, cheeks burning, and tried to throw myself into conversation with Jade and Sierra, a girl who danced with me at the studio.

The feeling of his hand on my elbow when he walked up to me.

The sight of that smile that I could feel all the way down to my toes.

How he reached his hand out and introduced himself right then and there, and how I knew in that exact moment that I was a goner.

“That’s the one.”

“So I owe Tonya a thank-you, then,” Beau responds, and I think his voice is thicker.

I shrug, guilt surging in my stomach for the way I’ve handled everything over the last year, how I’ve drawn away from him, how I’ve hidden pieces of myself for even longer than that. “I don’t know about that.”

He moves in front of me, blocking my view of Maya, and when I look up at him, his face is both stern and soft. I don’t know how he’s managed it.

“I’m going to thank her,” he says earnestly.

“Because she changed my life that day. She made one small decision that turned my entire world upside down, and I’ll get on my knees to thank her for it every day for the rest of my life if I need to.

You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Elsie Jennings,” he says, voice dripping with a sincerity I can feel.

His eyes bore into mine, like he needs me to understand this one truth. “You have to know that.”

Before I can respond, before I can think of a way to express to him what his words mean to me, the door to the studio opens, and a horde of giggling teen girls comes crashing in. The cacophony is so familiar that I sometimes hear it in my sleep.

I know I only have a moment before one of them asks if I like their new leotard and another one tells me about the boy she has a crush on at school and another asks if I listened to the Beatles growing up—because they have no concept of how old I am.

So before I get sucked into the hurricane that is teenage ballerinas, I lift up on my tiptoes and press a kiss to Beau’s stubbled cheek, breathing in the earthy, leathery scent of him.

He’s always smelled like Montana, even when we lived far away, and it’s one of the things I love most about him.

I tell him the only thing I can right now, the only piece of truth I have time for. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me too.”