The Last Slow Dance

Thea had spent most of senior year perfecting the art of not looking at Declan directly. It was a skill that required constant, exhausting vigilance and had, as far as she could tell, accomplished nothing except making her extremely good at seeing him in her peripheral vision instead. They had two classes together, a handful of overlapping friends, and roughly four years of near-conversations that had never quite become an actual one. It wasn't out of dislike, she was sure, but out of the particular cowardice that convinces two shy people they are reading each other correctly when neither has said anything real enough to read. Had either of them simply asked, freshman year, four years of peripheral vision might have been unnecessary entirely.

The graduation dance was, by unofficial tradition, the last chance anyone got to fix that kind of thing before it became permanent. Rarely had a gymnasium held so much unspoken material in one place. Thea knew this. She suspected Declan knew it too, given how carefully he'd been avoiding the same section of the gym she was avoiding, in what had started to resemble a very inefficient, very mutual game of chicken.

It was Priyanka, tired of watching both of them fail to act on the obvious, who finally intervened. She physically steered Thea toward the drink table where Declan happened to be standing, with the subtlety of someone who had clearly been recruited for exactly this purpose.

"You two are genuinely exhausting to watch," Priyanka said, and left.

Neither of them spoke for a moment that felt considerably longer than it was. Then the DJ, with timing so convenient it bordered on suspicious, put on the last slow song of the night.

"We could," Declan said, not quite finishing the sentence, gesturing vaguely toward the dance floor with an expression that suggested he was fairly certain he was about to be turned down.

"We could," Thea agreed, in the same unfinished way, and somehow that was enough.

Dancing badly, at a respectful distance that gradually stopped being respectful and started being simply closer, Thea found herself doing something she hadn't managed in four years. She was actually saying the thing, instead of performing elaborate peripheral-vision choreography around it. "I've liked you since junior year. I never said anything because I genuinely thought you'd say no."

"I've liked you since the hallway thing in tenth grade," Declan said. "I never said anything because I assumed you were out of my league and didn't want to find out I was right."

"We're both idiots."

"Catastrophically. We had four years."

"We have tonight," she said, "and apparently a group chat's worth of friends who've been planning this exact moment since October."

He laughed, and didn't let go when the song ended, and neither of them looked over to check whether Priyanka was watching, though both of them were fairly sure she was.