The Lady in Residence - Allison Pittman Page 0,85

too she felt his eyes on her and was thankful for the heat of the stove to explain away the flush she felt. In no time, the comfortable silence squeezed them into an unspoken tension, intensified when the first strains of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love” flowed through the Bluetooth speaker perched on the antique phone table by the kitchen door. Quin rolled, Dini flipped, while the smooth harmony sang of eyes in the morning sun, touching in the pouring rain, and coming to each other on a summer breeze. Under normal circumstances, this song would have stopped Dini short so she could devote the next four minutes to sinking into it, but now she stiffened, imagining the lyrics floating from her mind and wrapping around the two of them engaged in such kitchen synchronicity. Then Quin grasped the rolling pin like a mic and, in a pitch-perfect match to Barry Gibbs’s falsetto, sang, “ ‘You may not think that I care for you when you know deep inside that I really do,’” then held the pin between them to invite her to sing the next few lines, which she did, with passable harmony.

The cheesy romance of the lyrics gave Dini an escape route for all of the feelings that built up to this moment. Did she want to be in those arms? Yes, but there was no way of knowing if he wanted the same thing. How could they, when they weren’t the same people? Quin, divorced and dating; she, not even twenty-four hours past her first kiss. And yet maybe in some construct of time they were the same, both having missed out on the normalcy of being young and single. Both of them dropped in the path of a first, true love—at least first and true for her. But for him?

She watched him during the lyric-free verse, the two of them la-da-da-ing, the full commitment of his body to the song, and thought simultaneously that he was the biggest nerd she’d ever imagined and that she wanted to have this moment every day for the rest of her life. Was he the only light in the darkest night? No. But he was a source that illuminated the space around her. She’d never shared herself with another person. She loved her parents, but she spent much of her time alternating between being part of the act and being alone. She loved Arya but had come into her life as a legal responsibility—something that still underscored all they were to each other. She and Quin had fallen into each other’s lives the same way they’d fallen into this duet. She didn’t know if she loved him deeply, but she knew that she loved him in the way she’d always imagined love would feel—immediate and consuming.

Eventually the song faded into another soft gem from the seventies, and Quin resumed his rolling. “So, you have an old music soul too?”

“It’s what I listened to with my mother,” she said, remembering nights in a darkened dressing room, listening to the radio while her father finished his act. “I never bothered to develop my own taste, I guess.”

“Yeah, I was born in 1990 and always felt like I brought a curse to the music world.”

“Well, now I know who to blame.”

“I mean, I haven’t heard that song in years, and all the lyrics were still right here”—he tapped his temple—“and here.” He tapped his heart.

There was an edge here, daring Dini to take him seriously, but she wasn’t about to let an old disco song be the vehicle of her profession of love. “I’ve always thought the lyrics in disco music are inconsequential. Lots of repetition and cliché.”

“Right,” he agreed. “If you listen, the vocal is really more of a lead instrument, rather than a purveyor of great truth. Just a bunch of let’s dance, then go to bed, then dance again.”

Dini assumed an authoritative air. “You know, Quin, we’re living in a world of fools.”

“Breaking us down.”

“When they all should let us be.”

“We belong to you and me.”

What she initiated with mock sincerity, though, took a turn. It was a rare moment in the breakfast chore when both the skillet and the rolling board were empty and they stood idle with the unfortunate background sound of “Baby, I’m-a want you” standing between them, until there was nothing between them, because he had pulled her close, and she could taste her special coffee blend on his breath, then on her

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