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Privacy and cookie detailsShe helped keep him out of her dance room. Now she wants him beside her.
Coralia helped exclude the man who opened a rival dance night. One dance with him makes loyalty a much less tidy affair.
Completed · 18 chapters · 2h 13m
SteamyIntense chemistry. Sensual intimacy.Heat guideYearning · Tender
Social exclusion and public criticism, Friendship and relationship conflict
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Dear Maeve,
Gethin asked me to dance while my best friend was pinning our club badge to my dress. The pin caught my skin. I would like to blame that for how quickly I said yes, but it would be unfair to the pin.
Coralia Marden knows where every chair belongs at the Friday Rooms. For ten years she and her closest friend, Fenna, have made their dance night a place people can rely on. When Gethin Penrose left to open a rival Sunday social, Coralia helped keep his flyers off their noticeboard. At a shared hall fundraiser, he asks her to dance. She wants to say yes. Gethin has said things about Friday that she cannot excuse. He is also the man who notices she has no chair of her own, remembers the biscuits she gave away, and lets her get a step wrong without explaining how to improve. Over coffee and an evening in his room, attraction becomes something she can no longer dismiss as a good tune. Fenna remembers every difficult Friday they faced together. Gethin wants to be invited for his company, without a useful job to make him acceptable. Coralia wants both her oldest friendship and this new, unmistakable pleasure. With their tenth-anniversary social approaching, making room for someone she wants may ask more of her than rearranging the chairs.
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Eighteen months ago he left our Friday Rooms and started a Sunday dance of his own. He also wrote something unkind about us. There was truth in it, which has made forgiving the unkindness considerably more difficult. Fenna and I kept opening the doors. I typed the notice telling people not to bring his flyers.
I am forty-one, Maeve. I know the difference between a dance and a declaration. I am less certain why I kept looking at his mouth when there was an entire floor requiring my attention.
He made me laugh and I missed a step. He didn’t explain what I’d done wrong. He waited until I could dance again. Afterwards I asked him to sit beside me without finding him a useful job first.
Then I asked him for coffee. He remembered that I used to give away the biscuits because there weren’t enough. I had forgotten anyone might notice whether I ate one myself.
I have been to his Sunday now. Some people were happy, some were lonely, and nobody had solved the difficulty of walking into a room on your own. I had a very good evening. A great deal of it was him.
Fenna says I get to change my mind and she gets to remember agreeing with me. She is right. She has been beside me for ten years, with spare keys and lifts home and a hundred kindnesses that don’t stop counting because I want something different.
I want to see him again. I also want to tell her that without making him sound useful, harmless or temporary. I can arrange a roomful of chairs so everyone has a place. Apparently asking for one of my own is beyond my present qualifications.
From The Other Half of the Dance
Read this if you want a new romance to test a friendship that still matters.
Read this if you want two people in their forties finding room for desire in a life already full of other people.
Enemies, rivals and forbidden love
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