"I missed you," Odette admitted. Louis's eyes widened but he did not speak, the way he would have done years ago, some immediate exclamation. He still held her hand, rough now from years of scrubbing with lye soap, in both of his, and she thought if she had tried to draw hers back, he might have remained quiet yet but would not have let go. The years had passed for them both.
"Afterwards, you had warned me and I hadn't listened and I ruined it all, I wasn't sure how I felt," she explained. Those first days of disbelief and the sharpest pain, then the weeks of misery, despair she could not afford, she had not been able to tease it apart, the degrees of loss. Or she had known it would break her, to face it, and so she had not, had found a stick and a series of houses to clean until Louis had asked her, very simply, to attend to the Opéra House, and she had not be able say no.
"You were hurt," he said. They would be more careful this time. His lips on her cheek had been deliberate but light, like the tone she used when she said his name for the first time in years Louis, the hint of her Provencal accent making it an endearment again.
"I did not want to say it, if I missed dancing more. If I missed myself, the ballerina I had been. I was stupid, I should have realized," she said. One of his hands kept her in his grasp, but the other he lifted to her face, tracing her cheek and chin, then her parted lips. Once, he would have followed swiftly with a kiss, demanding and definitive, possessive, and she would have acquiesced and known he did not have all her heart.
"I think I understand, I think I do. You weren't stupid though, you were only young and so badly hurt. I had not made you know well enough, how I felt, if I could not dance it with you. Odette, I did not love you well enough then. But I can, I would, if I may?" Louis said. He did not rush through the words and he waited for her to answer, however she would. She turned her face into his hand and brushed a kiss in the center, slow, incontrovertible, assured.
"Oh, how I missed you!" he cried and then she was in his arms, herself, not again but at last.