Emily actually looked behind her, because there was no one else in that direction and the alternative explanation, that he had come specifically and purposefully to speak to her without being dispatched by someone else as a charitable errand, seemed genuinely unlikely.
He noticed. He laughed, softly and without unkindness. “No, definitely you.”
She looked back at him. “That’s brave.”
“You hiding back here?” he said.
“Is it hiding if everyone can see me?”
Something changed in his face, the expression settling into something more considered. Not pity. She had memorized the face of pity over the past six months and could identify it across a gymnasium without difficulty. This was something less comfortable and more honest than pity. “Fair point,” he said. He held out his hand. “Would you like to dance?”
She stared at him. “I can’t.”
He nodded once, the way a person nods when they are genuinely receiving information rather than waiting for a pause to speak again.
“Okay,” he said. “Then we’ll figure out what dancing looks like.”
She laughed before she intended to. A real one, the involuntary kind that your body produces before your mind has finished deciding whether the situation warrants it. It surprised her and apparently surprised him too, because he looked briefly delighted.
He wheeled her onto the floor before she had assembled any argument against it.
She went rigid immediately. “People are staring.”
“They were already staring,” he said.
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