Entangled Hearts
A tragic friends to lovers contemporary romance
© Copyright 2019 by Anastasia Sweet - All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ONE
Two days before her thirtieth birthday, Ciana boards a flight to Spain. She joins her mother and sister for an early summer vacation not unlike their trip to France the year before. They might have waited until later, but then she’s not sure how long her course prep will take her and she wants to be able to dive into it with a clear calendar. Plus, celebrating a milestone birthday had seemed like just the right excuse.
They’d planned this trip months ago, when she hadn’t known where she and her dance partner Weldon would be. Little had she known, then. At the time she’d thought it wouldn’t be so bad having some time separate from each other. That’s how couples grow, after all. It’s also sometimes how friends grow apart, she thinks with an amount of terror, her heart still so heavy. As much as their parting had come as a mutual step, there’s no denying they’re in brand new territory once again. They’ve recovered from missteps and miscommunications before, but never this exactly.
It’s an odd feeling, knowing that everything that comes next really is unwritten and unexpected. She can be okay with that, she thinks, and maybe a vacation is exactly what she needs to help with that. She needs to remember what it’s like to wake up alone, eat dinner alone, go about her day on her own steam.
Except, once they arrive at their rented house on the coast, Ciana realizes she doesn’t actually have to do any of that. Her sister pulls both of their suitcases into the master suite with an enormous king sized bed and informs her they’ll be sharing. “Like old times back at the cottage, Cia,” she says, adding no other explanation.
Her mother leads an expedition to the market where they collect enough supplies to eat for days. They get back to the house and immediately reach for the bread and cheese and cured meats, making the barest hint of an attempt at plating it all on a board before falling upon it hungrily. Her mother pours wine and they sit on the stone veranda with a view of the ocean, their jet lag now forgotten.
Ciana opens up with them about her and Weldon, little by little as the afternoon grows long and a second bottle of wine appears. She tells them how there’d been conversations between them for a while, signs they maybe should have or could have paid more attention to earlier. Her sister Joslyn sits next to her curled up on the patio sofa, carefully asking questions when she needs to.
“Do you regret choosing those routines, Cia? I mean, maybe it was a lot to put on you all at once,” she reasons. Ciana hates these questions, the what-ifs and maybes. They’ll never completely vanish, there are always so many other un-chosen paths and ways things could have gone differently.
Still, she considers the question for a minute, actually thinking it through in her mind. Eventually she shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I think we would have had the same answer in time, this just got us there sooner. It might have saved us a little, in a way. No need to drag anything out, and now we can move on.”
“I’m so sorry, Cia. We were all rooting for you both.”
She leans against her, puts her head on her sister’s shoulder. “I know you were,” she says, more quietly. “I was, too.”
*
Weldon spends the first week of June hiking with his brothers. Dewer and Ren had been planning it since before Christmas - all the park permits had taken long enough to figure out, along with gear and vacation time and getting fit for all the hiking and coastal terrain - “Not all of us are still in shape, little brother” - but they’d kept the invitation open.
By the time his competitive ballroom dance career came to an end - along with his relationship with Ciana - that open invite turned out to be just the lifeline he needed. There’s something grounding about being surrounded only by trees and ocean, and his closest family. He knows Ciana’s doing her own version of this trip, just in a more glamorous fashion on the coast of Spain. He doesn’t begrudge her that, though, would have happily kissed her goodbye and wished them all a great trip if they’d still been together now. The reality of their lives the last few years hasn’t left him with as many opportunities like this as he’d have liked, to take adventures with his family and take time to reflect. Both he and Ciana deserve their time with themselves, with their families, in whatever way they need.
It’s not lost on him that when he finishes this trip he’ll be returning home on entirely new footing. He’s managed ‘exes’, before, but he’s never imagined Ciana would be one of them.
“Does it still count as an ‘ex’ if it’s someone you still need to go back to work with? Someone you might still see every week?” He muses out loud as they come to a rest stop, easing their packs off and pulling out water bottles.
“Sure it does, bud. Lots of heartbroken office romances out there to prove it,” Dewer says.
“Yes, I guess so,” he acknowledges. He’s less than thrilled at the idea of him and Ciana being compared to a mundane office relationship, but he gets the idea.
The fact is it’s still pretty wide open how much they will have to work together again, with the exception of a dance exhibition tour that’s still to come. Thinking about that makes him feel a bit numb in his limbs, so he’s trying not to dwell on that too closely right now. But the reality is they really could just decide to part ways entirely, there’s nothing else contractual keeping them together. No more competitions, no more international trips. At least, not yet.
The truth is he doesn’t want to never work with her again. He’s not sure it’s possible for him to let go of her in that way. He thinks, given time, he get over their romance, as short-lived as it was - is it short if you had a decade of friendship first? - he wonders to himself. He can’t tell anymore. He can adjust to the thought that whoever he marries, whoever he makes a family with, it won’t be Ciana. But the thought of never dancing with her again, never getting to hear her ideas about new routines, never having her there to b
ounce ideas of his own or telling her what’s going on in his life...that’s not a future he wants to live in.
“You guys were never going to be just an office romance, though,” Dewer adds. “I think you blew that option a good number of years ago.”
“So a lot of people kept telling me,” he says glumly. He’s glad he won’t have to face much new public scrutiny about breaking up, since they’d never officially announced they were together in the first place. But the rumors and questions never entirely went away, especially now that they’re retired. He doesn’t expect that to change now.
“It’s not necessarily a bad thing, Wel. You’re not ‘most people.’ It doesn’t matter what most people do or don’t do with their exes,” Dewer says.
“I think Ciana’s strong enough to handle it, too. You both are, you know that, right?” Ren’s been quieter on the subject so far, letting Dewer fill in most of the silences when needed. But he’s been listening just as closely. “You both decided to get together, you both decided to end it. So you both figure out how to be friends again,” he shrugs matter-of-factly.
He does know that, it’s true. Or at least, he’s hoped he does, but hearing it out loud from his brothers makes him feel a bit more confident about it.
“I still need her in my life,” he says then, quietly enough it’s almost just for himself. But Dewer puts one hand on his shoulder and nods, agreeing with him.
“Then you figure out how to do that,” he says. “And then, you go live the life you want,” he adds simply.
And maybe it really is that simple.
*
They still have a dance exhibition tour. Ciana thinks it’s a kind of mercy that they’re flying separately - he had decided to take a few days exploring Berlin with one of his old buddies from home, and she had barely had time to turn around from her trip to Spain and re-pack.
She messages him confirming she’ll meet him in Prague at the hotel a couple of days before the event kicks off, just like they always used to do. He responds in confirmation, adding that he’s looking forward to it and that it will be a great trip.
They’re sleeping in separate rooms like they have done on every other exhibition in the past - why wouldn’t they, after all. But this time there’s something strange about it, underlining intentionality about these decisions that wasn’t there before. It makes her wonder how it will be between them for this trip, if they’ll need to be too formal, too composed with each other.
Ciana texts him after her arrival and they make plans to meet for dinner a few hours later. After unpacking she tries napping but it doesn’t take, so she throws on her running clothes and pulls on a baseball cap and heads out for a run. She winds down towards the river and ends up making a loop of almost ten miles by the time she returns.
Once she’s showered and changed again she looks herself up and down in the mirror, scrutinizing her appearance more than usual. She tells herself it’s only reasonable, given the high profile week. She and Weldon aren’t quite household names like they used to be a year ago, and the trip hasn’t even started yet, but still. She wants to look put together.
It’s not until she’s on her way down to the lobby in the elevator when it occurs to her how much she doesn’t want to disappoint him. It would be worse than before they’d gotten together as a couple, she thinks, if she’d shown up to meet him somewhere a year ago looking like she’d put herself together in a rush. Now it would feel like she’s letting him down, even in a small way.
When she steps into the lobby and sees him waiting in one of the armchairs, one hand in his pocket and the other fidgeting against the armrest of his chair, she knows instantly that she’s not the only one of them who feels like that.
It’s written all over him when he stands to greet her, it’s mapped all over the way he holds out his arms to hold her for the first time in weeks. He’s still here for her, in the way he’s always been here for her for over twenty years of them knowing each other better than anyone else on the planet. She lets herself be held by him and it’s like her body relaxes for the first time in ages.
But as much as her body might still want him, she finds her heart needs him more. She’d been worried about whether she’d need to pretend with him now, put on a facade for the rest of the world while her heart would need to be kept locked away. But she’s relieved to discover it doesn’t feel like that at all.
She still loves him. She’s still here to be his friend. She knows he’ll always love her back. They’ve years of friendship between them and it’s going to take more than a broken romance to break them altogether.
*
The tour turns out to be a good balance of socializing and historical tourism. It’s a city neither of them have gotten to spend a lot of time in, before, and both of them enjoy themselves. Ciana likes the contrast with the sun-tinted coastal vacation she’s just come from. Here there are cobblestone streets and enormous Gothic cathedrals. She enjoys hearing Weldon talk about the comparisons with some of the architecture he saw in Berlin. She wishes more people got to see this side of him - how reflective he is, how eager he is to take it all in.
It’s on an evening river cruise on the second night when they do their typical sit-down with the patrons on the trip. Tonight they field questions about what it’s like to be starting the next phase of their career, which they answer honestly by saying it’s exciting and there are a lot of new possibilities out there. They also talk about how they want to find ways to give back to the field, a familiar refrain that now feels a bit less tentative than it did a year ago. Weldon knows he’ll be headed for the coaching track. Ciana knows she doesn’t want to leave her dancer identity behind entirely, just hasn’t figured out exactly how, yet.
They’re still looking at each other with care, reading each of their expressions and seeking confirmation and reassurance like they always used to before. It’s an indescribable relief to Ciana, discovering they don’t have to pretend to be warm and friendly with each other in front of people. They still care for each other and their twenty-one years together still gives them an incredible foundation.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t any awkwardness. There is - almost like they’re working a bit too hard to be gracious and careful. In a way it’s like they’re back in the past figuring things out after moving away from home, or back home in Morsely figuring things out after their Dance Sport win. They haven’t been here before, exactly, but they’ve been in some version of it before. It’s a muscle her body still remembers how to stretch.
Back at the hotel that evening Weldon gets off the elevator with Ciana on her floor - she knows he’s two floors below her, so it makes her smile that he’s being gentlemanly like this.
“We’re good, aren’t we, Cia?”
“Yes, of course we are, Weldon.” They’re stopped outside her door, now, though she hasn’t pulled out her key yet.
He’s fidgeting a bit now, one hand in his pocket, the other running through the back of his hair. “Because if we...I don’t think I could live with myself if we weren’t.”
On instinct she launches herself at him, wrapping her arms around his waist like she’s comforting him after a hectic performance. “I couldn’t either. Promise me we’re still friends, always.”
He hugs her back, sinks into it like he’s letting go of something. She can feel the relief, palpable between them. “Always, Cia. Always. You won't get rid of me so easily.”
“Thank God,” she breathes, her face buried against his shoulder. She lets him hold her for a moment longer, then says goodnight.
*
They spend their last day with the group on a long afternoon walk through the forested valley outside the city. It turns out to be a hot day, and everyone’s reaching for their water bottles, wishing they’d packed more. But it’s still gorgeous scenery, and a jovial group. Someone produces a bag of gummy candy that gets passed around a few times. Weldon notices Ciana taking just one on the first pass, but then a small handful on
the second go-around, and he smiles.
Weldon thinks about the trip he just spent with his brothers and how grueling the terrain had been in a few places, how they’d had to pack so lightly and so carefully but even still there were days they felt weighed down. By the time they made it to the end of their route and the little bed and breakfast they’d booked ahead, he’d felt weightless and renewed when he’d dropped his pack and fallen into the comfortable bed.
He has a bit of that same feeling now, coming to the end of their easy trail, waiting for their shuttle bus to collect them. The afternoon is almost changing over to evening, now, and there’s a nice rosy light starting to fill the horizon. The greenery surrounding them feels earthier, sturdy.
Ciana’s off to the side taking a few photos with some of the tour patrons - lots of thumbs up and grateful smiles. He can guess at some of the captions that will appear later, probably stories about sweat and making their evening meal worth the calories. They start to break up after a few minutes and then Ciana’s on her own for a moment, straightening a few things in her pack and starting to fix her hair.
It dawns on him then that there’s one conversation they haven’t actually had yet, about what happens next between them. He doesn’t want to wait any longer to have it, either. So he politely finds an end to the chatter he’s been having with the guys next to him, and jogs over to Ciana.
“Hey,” she smiles at him. “Good hike, right? Pretty easy going for the most part.”
“Yes, it was. Too bad we have to pack up tomorrow morning, otherwise I’d come back again and find another trail.”
She pouts gently. “Don’t remind me. I hate the packing up part.”
“I remember,” he says, laughing a bit. He nods off to the side, turning them a bit farther away from the group to talk more. Ciana finishes slinging her pack onto her back, slipping the straps over her shoulders.
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