The Last Slow Dance

You're staring.

That's what I said to him. I didn't say it out loud. I said it into the leaded glass of the bar mirror, where I could see him behind me, three tables over, watching me instead of his drink.

He heard me anyway. Douglas always heard me anyway.

"Am I?" he said, and shrugged, and came over, and set a whiskey in front of me that I never ordered.

"You're staring," I said again, out loud this time, since apparently we were doing this.

"Occupational hazard." He leaned on the bar next to me. "I stare at data all day. You're better looking than data."

"You flatter every woman at every wedding like this or just the ones you've known for twelve years?"

"Just you." He tapped the rim of my glass. "Drink. It's the good stuff. Brock has taste, which surprised me too."

I drank. It was the good stuff. It burned all the way down and settled warm and stupid right in the middle of me, which is exactly where I didn't need anything warm and stupid settling.

Let me back up. My name is Teresa Swenson, I'm thirty-four, and I have spent twelve years building a quiet, orderly, single life that does not have room in it for Douglas Spaulding. I have a postdoc behind me, a lab of my own, a small apartment with plants that mostly live, and a policy about this man that has held since I was twenty-two.

The policy is simple. Do not want him. He is your best friend. Wanting him would crack the whole thing open.

The policy was working great until tonight.

It's Roberta's wedding. My cousin Roberta, thirty-three, the human sunshine of our family, who introduced me to Douglas at a campus party back when we were both babies in grad school. She believes, to this day, that we are platonic. She would be horrified to learn what platonic looked like at the cocktail hour of her own wedding.

Because the cocktail hour has a particular quality. Every time I looked up, his eyes were already on me. Every time I turned around, there he was at the edge of my vision, whiskey in hand, watching. And every time I caught him, he didn't look away. That was the new part. The old Douglas would have looked away. Old Douglas would have made a joke about the shrimp.

This one just held my gaze like he had something to say and was deciding against saying it for the twelfth year running.

Meanwhile Roberta laughed in the center of a cluster of aunts, white dress glowing under the chandelier of antlers, and Brock stood beside her looking relieved and slightly terrified, and the fog rolled in past the windows of the Overlook Inn, and I felt the pull. The old pull. Except time and whiskey had gotten their hands on it, and now it wasn't a pull, it was a tide.

"Teri!" Roberta grabbed my wrist at some point, breathless, aunts arrayed behind her like a jury. "You came! I thought for sure the lab would eat you alive."

"The lab gave me the week off. I bribed it."

"See? See, this is what I mean about her," she said to the aunts. Then she leaned in, conspiratorial, perfume and champagne. "Did you talk to Douglas yet? I sat you two at the same table on purpose. It's been forever since my two favorite science people were in one room."

"We've talked," I said.

"You've talked," she repeated, in a tone that suggested she suspected nothing and never would, and got swept off toward the cake table.

Douglas appeared at my elbow with the timing of a man who had heard all of it. "She sat us together on purpose."

"She did."

"Twelve years of friendship and she still thinks we're just friends."

"Because we are just friends."

"Sure," he said, and smiled, and walked away, and left me standing there with my heart doing something I refuse to describe.

Then the first dance came.

Roberta and Brock did the slow sway in the middle of the floor, oak polished to a shine under the antler chandelier, everyone clustered around with phones up. I hung back by the wall because I hang back by walls. And Douglas hung back too, a few feet to my left, and instead of watching the bride he watched me.

I don't know how to explain what was different. I've turned it over all evening and I keep coming back to the same thing.

He looked at me like he was memorizing me.

Not checking me out. Not the almost-kiss look from that night in our crummy shared apartment when we were twenty-three and drunk and both too smart to ruin things. This was slower. This was a man taking inventory. My face. My collarbone. My hands. Like he was writing it all down somewhere to keep, because the keeping was about to end.

Like he was saying goodbye.

"Stop it," I murmured.

"Didn't say anything," he said, without looking at Roberta even once.

"You're looking at me like that."

"Like what."

"Like you're already gone."

He didn't deny it. That was the worst part. He just looked back at the dance floor, jaw tight, and said, "Nice song."

"Douglas."

"Mm."

"Why are you looking at me like you're saying goodbye?"

The song ended. Everyone clapped. Brock kissed his bride and the DJ announced dinner and the room shifted and surged and in all that movement Douglas leaned close, so close his breath touched my ear, and said, "Not here."

Then he was gone, into the crowd, and I stood there with my pulse in my throat and my policy in shambles.

Not here. Not here meaning not never. Not here meaning somewhere else. I excused myself from the table during the salads, told my aunt I needed the restroom, and then walked right past the restroom.

The solarium is at the back of the inn. A long glass room, floor to ceiling windows, empty at night and unlit except for the sconces out on the porch. I found the door and slipped in and shut it behind me and the noise of the reception dropped away to a heartbeat.

The ocean was black past the rocks. Fog on the cove. The tide going out slow and grinding against the granite, that soft rasp you could feel more than hear. I pressed one hand to the cold glass and told myself to breathe.

Twelve years. Two of them sharing a studio apartment so small our desks touched. One night of drinking that ended three inches short of a kiss, which we laughed off the next morning and never mentioned again. Then my postdoc across the country, then his field seasons, then holidays and emails and the slow drift of two careful people being careful.

And now Antarctica. Roberta told me at the rehearsal dinner, casually, over the chicken. Douglas ships out at dawn. Research post, a year minimum, maybe three. She'd said it like weather and I'd nodded like weather while something in my chest went very still.

The door opened behind me.

I didn't turn around. I didn't need to. I knew the sound of his footsteps at twenty-two and I knew them now, and my entire being had sensed their approach before the door even moved.

The footsteps stopped a few feet behind me.

"You followed me," I said to the black glass, where his reflection floated pale in the dark.

"You walked past two bathrooms," he said quietly. "I figured you weren't looking for one."

The tide dragged against the rocks outside. He didn't come closer. He didn't leave. And I stood there with my hand flat on the cold window and realized my policy had about thirty seconds left to live.

He stayed where he was. The tide kept working the rocks. His reflection and mine hung in the window together and neither of us moved for a long time.

"Roberta tells me you're seeing someone," he said. "Somebody at your lab."

"She tells everyone that. There's nobody."

"Huh."

"Nobody, Douglas. Twelve years of nobody, if you want the real number. You do the math faster than anyone I know, so do that one."

He was quiet. Then, because he is a man who stares at data all day and then asks the one question nobody else would ask, he said, "Why didn't you ever marry?"

My breath left through my nose, slow.

"Why do you think," I said.

"I don't. That's why I'm asking."

"Because no one else ever knew what it was like to share a mattress with you at 2 a.m. and pretend it didn't matter."

The silence after that was enormous. Bigger than the reception. Bigger than the sea.

"That's not fair," he finally said.

"No. It's really not."

"I was twenty-two. So were you. We were terrified."

"I wasn't terrified. I was being practical. You were going to be great at something and I wasn't going to be the wife who followed you around the world and resented it. I had a plan."

"How'd the plan work out?"