Page 42 of Until You

“Relax,” he murmurs.

“I am relaxed.”

“Your shoulder is touching your ear.”

I consciously drop my shoulders. It doesn’t help much. Because his hand is on my back and I can feel every single one of his fingers through the fabric of my dress, and the heat of his palm is radiating into my spine, and my body remembers this. My body remembers him. The specific pressure of his hand, the way he leads without pushing, the way his thumb brushes—barely, almost accidentally—against the curve of my waist.

My body remembers, and it is staging a mutiny against every ground rule I established.

“You’re tense again,” he says.

“I’m always tense. It’s a personality trait.”

That breath of a laugh. The one that got out before he could weigh it. I feel it against my hair.

“You made both of my parents cry.”

“Everyone cried.”

“My dad cried. And he hasn’t cried since Kelsie’s wedding, and even then, he blamed allergies.”

“Texas does have a lot of allergens.”

“Cora.” His voice drops half a register. “I’m trying to tell you that what you did meant something. To my family. To my grandparents. Stop deflecting.”

I press my lips together.

The thing about deflecting is that it’s a reflex. You learn it young in foster care—how to make a joke before someone can make you feel something, how to redirect attention before it lands somewhere tender. It’s armor. It’s survival. And it works beautifully right up until someone sees through it and calls you on it with quiet, infuriating patience.

“It meant something to me,” he adds.

“Okay,” I say softly. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Then he nods. “Can I ask you something?”

My pulse picks up. “Depends on the question.”

“The photo of my dad. The hospital one. How did you know to include it?”

“It was in the box.”

“But you put it at the center of the slideshow. Right in the middle. Everything builds to that photo and then expands outward from it. That wasn’t accidental.”

I swallow. He noticed that. Of course, he noticed that. This man misses nothing.

“Because that’s what it was,” I say carefully. “The center. Everything they built—the marriage, the family, all of it—that moment was the turning point. When it stopped being just the two of them and became something bigger.” I pause. “Something that lasted.”

His hand tightens at my back. Just barely. Just enough.

“You see things,” he says.

“I observe,” I say, echoing his own word back to him from that night at Ace’s.

He’s quiet for a beat. “I remember.”

The air between us thickens. Not with tension — with something denser. Recognition. The slow, dangerous awareness that this isn’t a dance between strangers, or even housemates, or even a one-night stand’s awkward encore. This is something else. This is two people who fit together in a way that defies the clean, contained boxes I’ve tried to put them in.

The song starts to fade. Another one picks up beneath it. This one is even slower.