by Emme Rollins, Julia Kent, Anna Antonia, Helena Newbury, Aubrey Rose
I returned to center. I was physically shaking, both from the shock of stopping so suddenly and what was rushing through my mind. I felt weak, almost light-headed and the air burned in my lungs. Where there should have been calm and serenity and the next few steps, there was a swirling, hot wind with him at its core. I glanced at him. He was sitting down, the smooth muscles of his arms bunching and flexing under his shirt as he moved. Then his eyes were straight back on me, watching expectantly.
“Ready?” the choreographer said, her finger hovering over the button.
I nodded, but I wasn’t—not even close. I was frazzled and off-balance and scared. He was in my mind, pushing everything else out of the way. I’d never felt anything like it before. I couldn’t dance.
He was easily the hottest guy I’d ever seen. And he’d just made me blow the biggest audition of my life.
Chapter Two
Darrell
Twelve hours earlier
A blazing spark arced off the weld and hit my bare forearm. I jumped back and cursed, but my words were barely audible over the pounding music and that took all the satisfaction out of it. I ripped off the welding mask and slammed down the welding torch, then kicked the waste paper basket across the room for good measure. The night was not going well.
I stretched my back as I walked down to the other end of the workshop. I’d been hauling around hunks of metal and bending them into shape all evening and now I was starting to ache. I stared at the equations on the whiteboards, as if I could will them to give me a different answer, but they were starkly clear in their dismissal. I could work away welding the casing all I liked, but I was avoiding the real problem. I still had no way of making the damn thing fly the way it needed to.
I looked at the prototype missile, eight feet long and six months in the making. I’d done everything I’d set out to do, except get it to dodge—change direction, mid-flight, to avoid anything trying to intercept it.
I had a relationship with my work. Some would have called it a dysfunctional one—even an abusive one—but it had worked for me, for the last four years. Each project consumed me, but it also fed me, giving me the energy to keep going. The trick was to finish the project before it ate me up completely. This one was already a month overdue, and there was no end in sight. The project was winning.
I’d planned on it being a late one—maybe even an all-nighter. One of the advantages of having no boss is being able to set your own hours, and I often worked pretty weird ones, into the early hours and then sleeping until lunch—if I slept at all. But raw effort wasn’t going to fix this problem.
What I needed was inspiration.
I killed the music, and the workshop went quiet as a tomb. Three floors underground, there was no traffic noise, no birdsong, no nothing. Within seconds, the silence was driving me crazy. Memories started floating up to fill the void—things I didn’t want to think about.
I popped the top on a Dr. Pepper, fell into a chair and switched the big desk monitor from a blueprint to the TV cable feed. Movies I’d seen before. News I already knew. A documentary on Bigfoot. I went through my usual channels and headed into deep, uncharted cable territory. Food channels. Home makeover channels. Art—
A freeze frame of a ballerina hanging in mid-air. No, she wasn’t frozen, she was moving—just moving so gracefully it looked like she was floating at the top of her jump. My thumb hovered over the button, ready to move on, but something stopped me.
She landed, twirled—what did they call that, a pirouette?—and took off again, energy coming from nowhere. I sat forward, transfixed. I’d only known ballet in a very abstract way: fat kids in pink tutus falling over and old rich couples dressed up in dinner jackets and gowns, paying hundreds of dollars a ticket. I’d never actually watched it before.
The dancer took a single step forward and then tipped and I actually rose up out of my chair, horrified, thinking she was going to fall flat on her face. But she hung there, balanced on tiptoe—no, not even tiptoe, her foot was actually straight, up on the end of its toes! How the...?
She seemed to lie there in the air, as easily as a bird floats on a thermal, and then the idiot who’d edited the program together cut to another shot and I lost her.
I sat there staring at the after-image of the dancer in my mind, one hand running through my hair, and something kicked into gear, deep in my brain. A tiny, tantalizing glimmer—a feeling that this was important. I always trusted that feeling. Inspiration can come from weird places, sometimes—I once solved a navigation problem after reading something about humpback whales.
I wanted more. I hit YouTube and started watching clips from ballets around the world, devouring them like snack food. By 4 a.m. I realized I didn’t really understand what I was looking at, so I hit Wikipedia and learned about history and styles, which lead me on to composers and choreographers. I immersed myself in ballet, swimming in pas de chat and port de bras.
6 a.m. I sat down and watched The Nutcracker end to end, then made coffee and watched Giselle. By lunchtime, I’d worked my way through La Sylphide and some of La Bayadère. My head was filling up with moves and shapes. I could feel my brain twisting and realigning, preparing to come at the problem from a new direction—it was working, even if I didn’t know where the hell this was all leading me. I needed to share it with someone so, as always, I called Neil.
Neil’s like my big brother. He took me under his wing at MIT and we kept in touch after I dropped out and he graduated. I could hear traffic roaring past. He must be out on his bike, stopped by the side of the highway to take the call.
“Mm-hmm?” said Neil.
“Did you know they go through a pair of shoes in a performance?” I blurted out.
“Who does what?”
“Their hip flexors have to rotate out 90 degrees. Can you imagine that? Their legs have to turn sideways!”
“Have you been up all night again?” I heard a horn and what sounded like a semi truck blast past him. I could imagine Neil nonchalantly lounging on the saddle of his Harley, barely off the road. It was impossible to faze him, which was probably why we got on so well. I knew I could come over a little...intense.
“Where can I see some ballet? Live, in person?”
“Um...I don’t know...some place in the city? Like, don’t they have a building for it?”
I was checking websites as I talked to him. “They’re all tonight. I need it now.”
“It’s vital that you see some ballet right this second?” He didn’t sound all that surprised by this. He knew the way my brain worked. “I guess there are rehearsals, and auditions and things? Maybe you could get into one of those?”
I was already typing. Deep in the bowels of a dance website, I found a listing for an audition starting in an hour. “I found one! Gotta go!”
* * * *
I had a cold shower to make sure I was fully awake, but I didn’t need it. Despite the all-nighter, I was more fired up than I’d been in months, desperate to follow this thing through. I knew that inspiration could be as transient as it was powerful. If I didn’t chase this thing down it was liable to slip away from me and I’d be back to kicking the waste paper basket.
I had no idea what the hell you were meant to wear to a dance audition—especially one you were crashing—so I pulled on jeans and a shirt. For a second, as the shirt went on, I glimpsed the scars on my side, the sight of them hauling up the memories from the dark depths of my mind, screams rising in my ears.
My hands clenched into fists. Focus. Finish the project. Move onto the next.
I took the elevator up to the garage, grabbed my helmet and swung my leg over my bike. It was easier when I was working, the memories pushed back by the intense concentration and blocked out by machine noise, or music, or both. When I rode, my only distractions were weaving through traffic and the sound of the engine.
Which is why I’d bought a very powerful bike.
I flipped my visor down and cranked the throttle on the Duca
tti. I was doing fifty before I’d left the driveway.
* * * *
I begrudged every moment away from the workshop. Finding my inspiration was essential, but why did getting there have to involve so much wasted time? The thirty seconds I spent waiting at a Stop sign nearly drove me insane. Someone once told me that sharks have to keep swimming, or they die. I could relate.
I parked the bike on the sidewalk. I knew I’d get a ticket, but the thought barely registered, the cost negligible next to the money the missile would bring in. I started jogging towards the dance studio and then broke into a run. I couldn’t help it. I could feel the call of inspiration dragging me in even as the pressure of the project pushed me forward. Inside, I could hear classical music coming from upstairs, so I sprinted up them two at a time, crashed through some double doors and—
She was frozen there in mid-air, like the dancer on TV who’d started all this. Except that dancer hadn’t had soft, long lashes, eyes half-closed as her arms stretched gracefully above her. She hadn’t had cheekbones that led my eyes down to her lips, pursed in careful concentration. Her beauty didn’t just make me stop, it damn near floored me. I skidded to a halt and stood there like an idiot, just inside the doors.
Everybody in the room turned to look at me, which is when it hit me that maybe I should have inched the doors open quietly.
The dancer’s eyes flew open and she landed, her poise thrown off by my clumsiness. I felt like I’d just shot down a bird. I’d never been the most sensitive person, but right then even I realized I’d messed up. All the energy I’d felt as I’d charged through the city and up the stairs drained away, leaving a sickening, tight knot in my stomach.
A fierce-looking woman nodded me to a chair and I slunk over to it, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the dancer as she struggled to recover. All that was going through my head was please be okay.
Chapter Three
Natasha
Focus, Natasha. You can do this. You’re a good dancer. You’re the best.
Every affirmation and confidence booster I’d ever learned was spooling through my head on fast forward, and none of them were working.
The music started and I sank into my plié, but it was mistimed and awkward. Immediately, my mind was shrieking at me. I’ve messed up, I’ve messed up!
Concentrate. Push into the jeté. Float. Just like when I saw him.
Distracted, I wasn’t ready for the landing and slipped a little. There was a sound from the watching dancers, that tiny, sympathetic intake of breath you never want to hear. The room was suddenly the size of a cathedral, every pair of eyes like a spotlight on me.
Three easy turns came next, time to get my mind straight. But coming up was a fast-moving combination and I wasn’t focused. I was drunk on his eyes and his chest and that feeling he’d given me, for once in my life, of being grounded, of having something to cling onto that wasn’t cutting. I was a mess. I shouldn’t have been driving a damn car, let alone trying to dance.
I’ve messed it up. The best chance of my life and I’ve wasted it.
Maybe because I thought it didn’t matter anymore, I glanced across at him. He was still staring straight at me, his chest rising and falling under his shirt. He’d been running. That’s why he’d crashed through the doors—he’d run all the way up here. Why? He didn’t look like a ballet fan.
And then I got mad. I hadn’t messed up. He had. And I was damned if I was going to throw this away.
I went into the pas de bourrée, three quick steps on pointe and my legs felt steady and firm, the anger lending me strength. I sank into a plié and then, as I came up, one leg whipped out to propel me into a turn. Again. Again. Every time I spun around to the front my eyes met his, and the anger grew and grew. It was about more than just him and messing up the audition, now. It was my past and my present and my future, my whole goddamn life, right back to when I was fifteen—
I pushed that from my mind with the next leap, leaving my thoughts behind and letting the raw heat of the anger carry me, no more than a puppet in its grasp. The problem with letting the feelings out was that once started, they couldn’t be stopped. I flowed through the final few steps knowing I was too fast, too out of control. I had to get a hold of myself.
The music ended and the next piece—the obscure one—began. I hadn’t heard it before that day, but I’d listened to it again and again as the dancers before me had danced to it and I was getting to know it pretty well. It was soft and romantic, calling for lots of slow, sweeping moves, as if an unseen lover’s hands were carrying me. I knew exactly what it needed, but I didn’t have a hope of pulling it off, feeling the way I did. I wanted to scream and kick, not swoon and float. What the hell did I know about romance, anyway? It had been a year since anyone had even kissed me.
My eyes closed for a second. I was on the point of walking out. The anger that had powered me had dissipated and now there was nothing except—
His eyes, staring straight into me—
I let myself flow into an arabesque. It was crazy because no guy would ever want—
Thick muscle bulging under his shirt as he’d sat down—
Not me. Jasmine or Karen or Clarissa, but he wouldn’t want fucked up, twisted me—
Those lips...what would they feel like if he—
And suddenly I was turning around an invisible him, imagining his thumbs stroking my cheeks as his eyes blazed into me, our lips about to meet.
What the hell is this?
It was insane, but it was all I had.
Just go with it!
On my next pirouette, I imagined him kissing my neck...my breasts. The feelings were as strong as the anger had been, every nerve in my body taut and trembling with the sensations. When I turned towards him again our eyes met, and now it wasn’t anger I could feel building. Time seemed to slow, allowing me to make my movements graceful and controlled. When my leg extended in a développé, I could almost feel his large, warm palms sliding down my calf. When I arched my back, it was as if I was leaning into him, my head on his shoulder and his breath on my neck. The music was only suggesting the steps. I was dancing to something altogether more mysterious and dangerous, something I’d never felt before. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
And then the music ended and I sank into a demi plié to finish. I should have been grateful that it was over, that I’d survived it. But right then, staring across the room at him, I didn’t want it to end.
I was suddenly aware that the room was deathly silent. I mentally shook myself. What the hell had that been?
The suits from the ad agency were glancing at one another, as if no one wanted to be the first to speak. Eventually the choreographer said, “Yes. Thank you.”
She sounded more shell-shocked than dismissive, but shell-shocked couldn’t be good. I knew I’d messed up the first piece, my anger showing through. I had no idea about the second one. It had barely felt like me dancing.
They were going to let us know at the end which of us they wanted back for a second audition, so we all had to wait around. I sat against the wall, taking sips of water and taking surreptitious glances at the mystery man. The man who’d messed up my audition. The man I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Clearly, he’d come here to watch the dancing. So why, whenever I looked up, did I see him still looking over at me?
* * * *
When the last dancer had finished, the three suits and the choreographer went into a huddle and exchanged scribbled notes. There was some nodding, and then the choreographer stood up. Clearly the suits, while happy to spend their day ogling women in leotards, weren’t brave enough to risk the wrath of a slighted dancer.
“Thank you all for coming. I’d like these four dancers to come forward to talk about a second audition.”
My heart launched itself up into my throat and I felt as if I was sliding again. I felt for the calming memory of the fresh cuts...but weirdly, I found myself looking to the back of the room. Searching for those
cool blue eyes, wanting suddenly to cling onto him, instead.
He wasn’t there. He’d slipped out while I’d been looking at the choreographer.
I listened as she read out four names. Mine wasn’t one of them.
I grabbed my bag and ran.
Chapter Four
Natasha
I pushed open the door to the street and let the draft of air cool my prickling eyes. Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry—
“Don’t cry.” A voice so deep I felt it as much as heard it. There was so much earnest empathy in it—as if by crying I would hurt him as much as myself.
I spun around. He was standing right outside the door, those crystal-clear eyes right on me. Something surged up inside and stole my breath. It had been two minutes and I felt like I hadn’t seen him in months. What the hell?
“Hi.” He sounded confident, but with just a hint of hesitation. Because he knew he’d messed up my audition, or because he’d felt what I’d felt? Both?
I realized I was standing there with my mouth open, and snapped it shut. “Were you waiting for me?”
He looked at the door. “I thought you might get swept past me, inside. This is a bottleneck.” As if that was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
“I didn’t get the part,” I told him stupidly. I should have been angry with him—should have slapped him across the face and raged at him. But all the anger seemed to have disappeared, as insubstantial as smoke in the face of what had followed.
“I’m sorry. Dance for me.”
I thought I’d misheard. “...what?”
He stepped forward, and the breeze blew his shirt against his body, the arches of his pecs showing through the soft fabric. His clothes looked expensive, but he didn’t look like the suits from the audition. Out here, with the wind playing through his hair, he looked like some demi-god, standing on a mountaintop. He was so much taller than me, with a big, looming presence that spoke of hard, manual work. I could imagine him wielding a sword, or forging one.