of hooking up or not. Instead of Amanda continuing to work up her nerve with him, she stopped in her tracks and pointed, gaping, at a guy standing near the water’s edge. And when the guy turned around to walk back toward the hotel, he spotted Amanda and friends. The mutual recognition struck like a lightning bolt, shocking the three friends into a cartoonish freeze pose that would probably have been comical to onlookers. Except the only onlooker wasn’t laughing.
“Oh my god!” Julie blurted. “He’s the mystery jogger!”
It was Jeremy.
“Whoa. This can’t be a coincidence,” Alan said.
Amanda dropped her arm from his, taking a step away. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”
Okay, maybe there was a little animosity.
Jeremy lifted a hand, not quite waving. Alan had only met him a few times before the breakup, but he remembered him well enough to see he’d clearly made a lot of changes in the last year or so. The buzz cut, for one thing. And he had obviously been working out. Holy crap, had he ever been working out.
“So...are you gonna go talk to him?” Julie asked Amanda. “Or do we all just stand here looking at each other across the sand? Awkwardly? Like we’re doing right now....”
“Fuck. All I wanted was a damn vacation. And maybe some action. Was that really too much to ask? Really?”
“Oh, he’s coming over here. Please go talk to him. But, you know...report back. Because what the fuck?”
Sensing Amanda’s worsening mood, Alan tugged at Julie’s hand in a “cut it out” way, but she ignored him. Kept her hand in his, though. He liked that.
“Fuck,” Amanda repeated. But to Alan’s vast relief, she went. He and Julie watched for a minute as she met Jeremy and they started conversing. Over the party and the surf, they couldn’t hear the words, but it didn’t look pretty.
“We should probably go,” Alan finally suggested, though his feet stayed put. Amanda was starting to gesture, her hands flying wider, Jeremy leaning away in an automatic retreat. It was like reality TV with the sound down.
“It’s a train wreck.” Julie echoed his thoughts. “I don’t even want to watch, but it’s like I can’t drag my eyes away.”
“I know. We have to, but...I know. What were you planning to do tonight, anyway? After this, I mean?”
“Um...what? Oh. I thought I’d go back to the dancing over there and see if I can pull anything interesting out of the crowd.” She turned and gestured toward the party, eyeing it with not-that-eager speculation. Watching Amanda and Jeremy’s tense reunion had sucked the fun out of the evening for both of them, apparently.
“No, seriously.”
“I am serious. To the extent I had a plan, that was it.”
Pull someone interesting, she meant. He got that, but his brain pushed the idea out forcefully. No. He started toward the lights and noise, pulling her along. “Better the dance floor than the train wreck.”
“But what are you gonna do?”
He looked at her, puzzled. “The Hokey-Pokey? The Electric Slide? I don’t know, whatever sort of dancing is going on.”
“Yeah, but—” She looked like she was choosing between bad options for what to say. Finally, she settled on, “But you can’t dance.”
“I can totally dance!”
“I have never seen you dance. Not once in... How many years have we known each other?”
“Four? Maybe?” He had no idea, because it felt like he’d always known her. Not so much the first few months after she started working for the company, but definitely the first time they worked a project together. And after she moved to his floor of the office, he’d recognized a kindred spirit. “I’m sure you’ve seen me dance, Jules. I can absolutely dance. And more to the point, there’s no way I’m gonna let you wander off alone into a torch-lit crowd of drunken strangers. You were planning to do this with Amanda, so you can do it with me instead. Dance, I mean. Not... Jesus. You know what I mean.”
“Let me? You’re not going to let me? What is this, Victorian England all of a sudden?”
She didn’t seem all that insulted, probably because she thought he’d meant it in a “friends don’t let friends pick up drunk strangers” way, not a patriarchal bullshit way. But he didn’t want to take the chance that she might actually think that of him. Especially since he absolutely meant he didn’t want to allow her to go off with somebody else. “No! I didn’t mean you couldn’t do—I just didn’t want to go off if you needed—you know. You’re twenty-seven. You can do whatever—”
“Alan.”
“I just thought we could dance together, I didn’t—”
“Alan! It’s okay. I was just giving you a hard time.”
“Oh. Oh, good.” Lies, all lies. But she seemed to have bought it. He wasn’t sure if he was right on track, or utterly screwed. “Okay. So...are we going to dance, then?”
* * *
Bye-bye, unknown holiday lover. We could have had something magical. I know it in my heart.
Julie told herself she was relieved. She had never been the type to pick up strangers, and the prospect had been more daunting than thrilling. Really. Better she should take the first evening to size up the situation before doing anything rash. “Yes. Of course we’re going to dance. Dork.”
Alan totally couldn’t dance. He made up for it with infectious enthusiasm, however. His version of fail-dancing was highly entertaining, prompting a few eye rolls but more grins from the gyrating crowd around them. Somehow his flailing always managed to pull short of smacking anybody, and after watching for a while Julie realized he was actually in brilliant control of the whole thing. He could dance. Every so often a moment or two of perfect coordination and rhythm sneaked through. Beats where his hips moved in a way that suggested he really knew how to...move his hips.
“You’re a big liar,” she finally shouted over the cacophony of music and noisy revelers.
He didn’t even look fazed. Julie was pretty sure he knew exactly what she meant.
“How so?”
“You can dance.”
“I told you I could dance!” He raised his arms over his head and executed a brilliant twirl maneuver that involved his body undulating in a miraculous way. It left her speechless, her body responding in a manner that completely overruled her higher brain functions. The dork-face he made over it spoiled the effect, though. Sort of. “My mother made me take ballroom dance for years with my sister Theresa, so she wouldn’t have to dance with strangers. Because God forbid. Yeah...we ended up winning some competitions and shit like that. I lived in fear that some friend would find the sequins all over my closet floor. It was crazy.”
He stepped in and pulled her close, the sudden proximity startling the breath out of her. When he dipped her, smooth and swift as a lover in a fantasy tango, her world spun for a moment.
