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He’s two left feet and a shy smile, flushed cheeks and an averted gaze but he scarcely stumbles when he asks her to dance and his fingers are warm and steady where they tangle in hers when she accepts. “It was a beautiful ceremony,” Newt remarks, clearly practiced, once they’re moving mostly along with the music a few moments later.
For Tina, it’s impossible to be anything but fond of Newt Scamander in nearly any given situation, but here now, pressed just a little too close together on the dance floor at her sister’s wedding, it is especially challenging. He’s all done up in a nice suit, a scrap of cobalt tucked into his pocket to match the startling color of his tie, both of which set off attentive cast of his gaze as it just barely avoids catching hers, as if worried he’s being too forward. Oh Newt, she cannot help but think, the strings of her heart tangling into tighter and tighter knots with every moment she spends with him.
Tina Goldstein never once fancied herself a romantic. It’s not an adjective any of her housemates would have pinned upon her back in her school days, nor is a term one her coworkers would have leveled at her. Detail oriented, practical, stubborn to a fault, all these would be doubtlessly accurate but certainly not romantic. Passionate maybe, if one was specific to mention the focus of that passion. Yet for all that the word has never particularly been hers, she can’t help the way the corners of her mouth seem unable to settle in his presence nor the way her pulse always races, eager, each time Grayson comes back with another letter addressed to her in Newt’s particularly scrawl.
“Very much,” she agrees easily, smiling as she glances across Newt’s shoulder to where her sister is dancing with her husband, radiant as she’s ever been, looking like the happiest witch in the world. It’s been a long road, to get Queenie and Jacob here, but she’s happy and Tina is happy for her. “It was good of you to come all the way from England for it.”
At this, Newt’s gaze manages to find hers, even holds it for a long and pregnant pause but it skitters away, the warmth there fleeing to the corners of his smile instead. “I would not have missed it for all the dragons in Europe,” he assures, earnest in a way that leaves Tina laughing and leaning forward, to bury the sound against his collar. Newt startles, just a second of uncertainty as she presses in closer, before he too joins in an easy chuckle. And then he adds, rather a bit quieter, less brave but no less honest, “Though if I may confess, my motivations may have had a bit less to do with the bride than with her sister.”
It’s the closest he’s ever come to any sort of admission, in all their many letters or his visit in the fall to deliver his book, and Tina knows by the drop in his tone, the way he cushions the words with the full weight of expected rejection, that it takes a great deal of effort for even this much. She feels stricken all over again, heart wild in her chest, an echo of another day standing just this close at the docks, Newt’s fingertips just scarcely grazing her cheek. She hadn’t had the words then, truthfully doesn’t now, but she breathes his name like a question and an admission and a prayer and his answering smile says more than his mouth will likely ever manage, but it’s certainly enough for the moment.
Newt’s hand against the small of her back presses a little more firmly, thumb rubbing absentminded circles across the fabric of her dress and they twist around just a note behind the beat, unaware or unconcerned as the bride and groom watching with knowing smiles of their own.
He’s two left feet and a shy smile, flushed cheeks and an averted gaze but he guides them with a tentative tenderness that she easily follows.