Page 25 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

“Can you line dance?” Tessa asks Nolan.

“Define line dance.”

That gets a chorus of groans loud enough Nolan visibly reconsiders his answer.

“I've been to a bar before,” he says. “I've seen it happen.”

“Watching doesn't count,” Dani says.

“How hard can it be?”

The reaction to that is immediate and unanimous, several people talking at once about how hard it can, in fact, be, until Nolan holds up both hands in surrender.

“Somebody's going to have to teach him,” Reid says.

“Cassidy,” Tessa says, like it's obvious.

Cassidy looks up from her cards. “Why me?”

“Because you're good.”

“That's not a reason to punish me.”

Nobody backs down. Cassidy's apparently teaching Nolan to line dance, whether she signed up for it or not.

Nobody asks me.

I keep my eyes on my cards and don't offer anything. Across the table, Nolan's still trying to explain why watching a bar full of strangers line dance from a barstool counts as prior experience. It doesn't. Cassidy's going to have her hands full.

Friday might be interesting.

seven

Ivy

“Stop looking at your feet,” Cassidy says.

“That's where the problem is,” Nolan says, not looking up.

The bar is loud. Boots on wood floors, a fiddle working through something fast, half the town crowded around the dance floor in various states of coordination. Strings of lights loop across the ceiling beams, and the walls are covered in the kind of decor that accumulates over decades rather than gets designed all at once: old license plates, a mounted elk head wearing a cowboy hat somebody put there years ago and never took down, a chalkboard behind the bar advertising a burger special. I've been coming here since I turned twenty-one and it still feels the same every summer. Familiar. Ours, for a few hours a week.

Nolan misses a step, catches himself, tries again.

“Weight on your left,” Cassidy says.

“You just told me right.”

“That was the last step.”

“Nobody told me it changed.”

“I told you it would keep changing,” Cassidy says. “That's the whole dance.”

“That seems like something you should lead with.”

Trevor, watching from the sidelines with a plate of fries, offers nothing useful except moral support and the occasional unhelpful laugh.

Cassidy demonstrates the step again, slow, exaggerated. Nolan watches her feet like they hold the secrets of the universe.