Back in the Watson’s Landing kitchen forty minutes later, Eight slumped down at the table. Pru tossed the keys to the Mercedes onto the counter, drank a glass of water, and gave Barrie a stern look.
“Do you think you can please try not to get into any more trouble tonight?” she asked. “I’m not going to have to take the key to the tunnel to bed with me to keep it away from you, am I?”
“No, Aunt Pru. I’ll go up to bed as soon as Eight leaves. I promise.”
Pru sighed and set her glass down in the sink, then kissed Barrie briefly and pushed her way through the swinging door back into the corridor. Barrie and Eight both listened to the sound of her footsteps retreating against the soft backdrop of beach music from the radio on the counter.
Eight leaned back in the chair and stretched his legs out. They were hard-muscled, long, and tanned. His sun-lightened hair fell across his forehead, rumpled-looking like his yellow shirt.
The air thinned in the room around Barrie, became something forbidden, and she fidgeted with the stacked collection of notebooks, sample restaurant menus, and newspaper ads for the opening that lay beside the roses on the faded countertop. Her fingers felt cold.
“What are you thinking?” Eight asked.
“I’m thinking that hope is possibly the only inexhaustible resource on earth. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that you are like a compass. You veer off course when you hit an obstacle, but I can always be sure you’re going to find your way back to the right direction.”
“Is this the right direction? I’m not sure this was the result we wanted.”
Eight rested his forearms on his knees and shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore. Can we have a few minutes where we’re not thinking about bindings and curses and magic? Listening to Mary and Daphne was a good reminder that I don’t have nearly as big a stake in all of this as anyone else, and I don’t have a right to complain about much of anything. Not when ‘getting through’ is still the best that a lot of people can hope for.”
“We can know we’re lucky and still feel a little overwhelmed.” Barrie’s voice wavered, not quite a crack, but close.
“A little?” Eight asked with a crooked grin.
Moving with the usual grace that made everything he did seem effortless, he shifted to his feet and crossed toward her. “I keep telling myself I’m going to put some distance between us, and the next thing I know, I find myself reaching out to touch you,” he said. “I seem to need to touch you.”
His touch was gentle as he cupped her face with his palm, then he pulled her close and rested his chin on her hair. He smelled like himself, like root beer, and cloves, and cherries. She didn’t know why that surprised her, that his smile and the smell of him hadn’t changed.
Slowly, she slipped her hands to his back and slid them up to burrow into the thick cords of muscle that throwing a baseball and swinging a bat had given him, reveling in the solidness and warmth against her fingers. She had seen him without his shirt: the wide planes of his chest, the rippled stomach, the ridges of muscle above his hips. The shift of fabric across his skin was pure temptation, like a present waiting to be unwrapped.
Her breathing had fallen into rhythm with his, both of them breathing harder, their hearts beating faster, the only sound in the room except faint chords of beach music from the radio.
He pulled away.
“We should have music, if we’re going to have a reconciliation. It won’t matter if Cassie can’t give a big speech. Just inviting people there will be enough, and we’ll get people dancing and laughing. That’ll be a start. It’s a good idea, Bear. You were right. Hey.” He tipped her chin up. “Did your mama ever teach you the Carolina Shag?”
Barrie shook her head, choking on a sudden bittersweet longing, because as much as it hurt for him not to kiss her at that moment, at least he was there with her. She remembered the joy of dancing in his arms in the cemetery beneath a red umbrella while the rain poured down. But she also remembered her mother dancing to beach music, moving painfully, shuffling with her odd gait to the beat of the Drifters and the Tams, the Midnighters, the Ravens, the Zodiacs, and the Platters, like her own peculiar form of a ring-shout. Had that been Lula’s way of getting through? Of surviving? Thinking of the beach music that had seeped out into the house from beneath her mother’s closed bedroom door at odd hours of the day and night, Barrie wanted desperately to understand what that dancing and that music had meant to Lula.
“Whatever you seem to think,” she said to Eight, “you haven’t lost much of your gift at all. You still know what I want—what I really need.”
“Maybe I just know you,” he said.
“If that’s not magic, it’s something even better.”
The radio was playing “Drift Away” by Dobie Gray. Eight dialed it louder and held Barrie’s hand firmly wrapped in his. “Start with your right foot,” he said, “and then it’s step-together-back and back-in-place.”
He demonstrated and helped her through it, then put it all together.
“There. You’ve got it. That’s the ‘basic’—easy, right?”
Barrie frowned up at him, wishing for high heels, confidence, and some of her cousin’s sex appeal. “What do I do with my other hand?”
“Just keep it at your waist.” He squeezed the hand he was holding lightly and then eased up a little. “You want to feel where I lead with this one, and let me feel where you want to go and how you want to get there. Shag is an improv. You get the foundation and then set off on your own or together into spins and fancy steps. You meet at the turn.”
He moved her back and forward—step-together-back, back-in-place, rock-step. Step-together-back, back-in-place, rock-step. When Barrie had the rhythm, he took his place in front of her and kept going, same steps, his left foot to her right, his right to her left, holding her hand and moving apart and back together again. The same push-pull that had always been there between them. But the push all along had been mostly hers, her fear to trust her own feelings as well as his. She let go this time, let herself believe that when they came apart, the rhythm of the dance would bring them right back together, as inevitable as the tide of the Atlantic sweeping up the mouth of the Santisto. As inevitable as the breath that whispered in her lungs and the blood and the binding that sang in her veins when he pushed his thumb against hers, stepped to the side, and pulled her smoothly into a spin, moving around her and bringing her back.
They danced as the songs changed, as the mood changed, their feet moving low and fast, so smooth that it was easy to forget the movement and see only Eight’s eyes on hers, always on hers. It was freeing, careless, exhilarating, alive. So alive.
Ultimately, wasn’t dance a whispered question? A story told through the position of a foot, the tilt of a head, the touch of a hand, the brush of an eye. A rite of passage. A claiming.
“Too Late to Turn Back Now” by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose came on the radio, and Barrie knew it had been much too late for much too long. Eight kept her close as he finished a turn. He pulled her closer, and he kissed her, so slowly and breathlessly that she was dizzy with remembering where they had begun and who she had become because of him. Who she was becoming with him.
The air was charged around them. The avocado kitchen with its years of meals and hopes and fears melted away, and there was only them. Her and him. So alive in that moment that it made her ache.
But just when they were so fused together that she couldn’t tell where one of them began and the other ended, he pulled away. Maurice Williams’s “Stay” was playing on the radio, and she whispered the word, changing it into a plea.
“I can’t,” he said. “We have disasters to avert in the morning, remember?”
“We haven’t really talked yet.”
“If you don’t think we’ve been talking, you haven’t been listening, Bear. The dance and that kiss, that was all a conversation. I heard every word you said in here”—he tapped his hand above his heart—“and it reminded me that if you and I had both been listening to our feelings more carefully all along, we wouldn’t have had a problem.”
“So do we?”
“Do we what?” He lowered his brows in confusion.
“Have a problem?”
He smiled at her so beautifully that it made her want to close her eyes. “Ask me again if I want to stay.”
“Do you want to stay?” She caught his shirt in both hands and pulled him closer.
“So much that I have to go.”