She'd rolled the rug back to the baseboards and pushed the coffee table into the hall, and the room had the raw, waiting look of a stage before the curtain — like a rehearsal for something neither of them had said out loud.
"One song," he'd said on the phone, the excuse so thin she could see the wall through it. "I'm hopeless. You know I'm hopeless." She did. She'd said yes before he finished the sentence.
She set the needle down on something old, three-four time, built for exactly this, and held out both hands the way an instructor would — brisk, businesslike, nothing in it but the lesson.
"Here," she said, taking his right hand and setting it low at her waist. "Not there. Here." He left it where she put it, and it stayed a beat too long even after she'd let go of his wrist.
"One-two-three," she counted, close to his ear, low enough to be only for him, and he stepped on her foot on the two and apologized, and she told him to count, not think, and he tried it again.
His hand at her back stopped correcting for balance somewhere around the fourth turn and started simply resting there, warm through the thin cotton of her shirt. She noticed. She didn't say so, because saying so would have ended it.
"You're leading," she said, surprised, on a turn nobody had taught him.
"Am I," he said — not really a question, his hand still exactly where it had drifted, though the six inches the count was supposed to keep between them had gone somewhere else entirely.
She stopped counting around one. He stopped waiting for the two. The record kept turning in the dim room, playing on to no one in particular, because neither of them needed the beat any more to know where to put their feet.