Page 83 of The Lonely Road

Nokoni meets her in the middle, and they step into the rhythm, and I watch something happen that I don’t have a category for. He is a man who has been doing this for sixty years, the authority in every step absolute and unremarked-upon. And Taya matches him—meeting him there, in a language they both speak, in a place they both have always known.

The round ends. She steps back.

She dances again.

With her aunties, who carry themselves with the ease of women completely at home. With Sienna, who laughs once mid-step and falls back into the rhythm without missing anything. With Cam, who lasts forty-five seconds before a dog catches his eye and pulls him clean out of the line, and Taya watches him go with a smile that belongs only to him.

Then she turns.

She looks across the line at me.

I see it coming about two seconds before it happens—long enough to understand what’s about to happen, not long enough to do anything about it.

She lifts her shawl and extends it toward me.

Daniel makes a sound that is half laugh, half warning.

“She just shawled you,” he says.

“What does that mean?”

“It means she asked you to dance.” He’s enjoying this considerably.

“And what if I refuse?”

“You don’t. That’s the point.”

“Has anyone ever turned down a woman for a dance?”

He thinks about it. “Not that I know of.” A pause. “It would be—not good.”

I look at the shawl. I look at her—standing at the edge of the arbor with her chin up and her shawl extended, the look on her face that says she knows exactly what she’s doing and has been planning it for the better part of the morning.

I step forward.

What I don’t know yet is that the Catman has struck his stick against the growler box—a signal, a permission. Taya will explain it later. What I know in the moment is that when she draws the shawl around both of us—the cobalt blue settling across my shoulders and hers, both of us inside it, the fringe falling at the edges—she doesn’t step back to the arms’ length the other couples kept.

She steps in close.

Her hand finds my arm. Her other hand takes mine.

She looks up at me with the Bear Dance in her face—all the looseness of it, all the rootedness. “The Catman opened the floor. Couples can touch now.” She smiles. “I’ve been waiting two hours so I can touch you when we dance…here…together.”

The drum finds us. The moraches find us. The rhythm that has been in the ground and in my boots and in my chest all morning finally has a direction.

We move.

The same step I’ve watched all morning—forward and back, grounded, close to the earth—but with her against me inside the shawl, it is an entirely different thing. Her weight shifts with mine. Her hand tightens in mine. The fringe moves when we move, and the May sun is on the grounds, and she is looking up at me with an open expression that has nothing managed in it.

I am completely, thoroughly, irretrievably done.

It’s not a new feeling. I’ve known it for some time. But here, inside the shawl, in the middle of the Bear Dance grounds, with Taya Morningstar in her grandmother’s regalia with her chin up and her eyes bright—the knowing of it drops all the way through me and settles somewhere I can’t argue back out of.

I’m so screwed.

The thought arrives with something that feels, embarrassingly, like relief.

“You’re smiling,” she says.