Page 83 of Redline Baby

It isn't a performance. It isn't the attention-seeking strut he does at Redline when he wants every eye in the room on him. He's simply moving because a song came on and his body wanted to move with it. I stop in the doorway, holding the mug, and realize I'm smiling more easily than I have in years as I watch him sway without an audience, without anyone to convince of anything.

When the chorus hits, Kit tips his head back, hair shifting away from his forehead, and sings badly without appearing to care in the slightest. That might be the most disarming part of it. Then he opens his eyes and sees me standing in the archway.

The old Kit would have frozen. This Kit doesn't. His feet keep moving to the bassline. A grin spreads across his face, genuine despite the faint pink dusting his cheekbones, and he holds one hand out toward me.

"C'mon. Dance with me, Daddy."

"I'm not a dancer, baby."

"Everybody's a dancer in their own kitchen." He wiggles his fingers at me, insistent and delighted with himself. "Don't make me come drag you over there. I will. I'm small, but I'm scrappy."

I am not a man who dances. But I don't leave him standing there with his hand out, and I certainly don't leave that particular challenge unanswered. I turn, set the steaming mug on the kitchen counter behind me, and cross the hardwood floor.

I take his hand and let him do most of the work. I raise our joined hands, and Kit ducks underneath my arm without hesitation, spinning cleanly beneath them. The oversized shirt shifts around his body as he turns, and he comes out of the rotation facing me, laughing.

A real laugh. Completely unforced.

"See?" he says, breathless and triumphant. "You know how to move."

"One spin. Don't get ahead of yourself."

"That's exactly what a man with moves would say to undersell it."

He's grinning up at me, cheeks flushed, chest rising and falling with the small exertion, entirely unguarded in a way that still catches me off balance sometimes with how much I want to keep being one of the reasons he looks like this.

The song ends, the last notes fading into the quiet of the apartment before the speaker shifts to something slower and acoustic. Kit stops dancing, but he doesn't let go of my hand. Instead, he steps half a pace closer. His face is still flushed, but the playfulness begins to fall away.

"Thank you," he says.

"For what?"

"Today." His free hand comes up and rests lightly against my chest, directly over my heart. "All of it. Even the part that sucked."

"You don't have to thank me for that."

"I want to."

His fingers curl slightly against my shirt.

"Nobody's ever followed through before. Not like this. Not all the way to the other side of it."

I stay quiet. He continues. "Not all the way through the hard part and then still being there afterward. And then cocoa, and Ghibli, and coloring, and dancing in socks in your living room like none of it changed how you feel about me.”

“You can make a bad choice. I can hold you accountable for it. And when it's over, I still want you here."

Kit's mouth trembles slightly.

"You don't have to earn your way back to me afterward."

That nearly does him in. His eyes shine, but he manages not to cry this time.

"That's going to take me a while to get used to."

"I know."

"And you're going to keep doing it anyway?"

"Yes."