The Last Excuse

It was raining the night Nadia finally ran out of excuses entirely, which felt, she thought, exactly dramatic enough for the occasion.

She hadn't brought shoes. She hadn't brought thread money, or a fake question about the weather, or any of the fourteen increasingly absurd reasons she'd manufactured over three months of walking eleven extra minutes out of her way. She'd simply shown up at closing time, soaked, holding nothing, and stood in the doorway of Omar's shop like a woman who had finally run out of clever things to pretend.

Omar looked up from locking the register and did not look surprised, which somehow made it worse.

"No shoes," he said.

"No shoes."

"No excuse, then."

"No excuse." Nadia wrapped her arms around herself, dripping steadily onto his welcome mat. "I just wanted to see you. Like you said. Weeks ago. I'm only now admitting you were right, which I want on the record is deeply annoying."

Omar came around the counter slowly, like a man approaching something he didn't want to startle, and stopped close enough that she had to tip her head back to keep looking at him.

"I've been resoling shoes that don't need resoling for three months," he admitted. "Your dancers have excellent feet, Nadia. Suspiciously excellent."

"I know."

"I just wanted the eleven minutes."

"I know that too."

Outside, the rain kept falling, entirely uninterested in the fact that two extremely stubborn people had finally stopped pretending, and inside the small shop that smelled of leather and thread and four years of Nadia's aggressive avoidance, neither of them moved to close the distance first — because neither of them, for once, needed to.