by Emme Rollins, Julia Kent, Anna Antonia, Helena Newbury, Aubrey Rose
This is crazy! We can’t just ignore it! But I nodded and started to get changed. And immediately, it was different. Yesterday, I’d been unsure if he liked me. Today I knew he did, and he knew I knew.
I started to peel off my sweater...and stopped halfway, with it just beneath my breasts. I’d locked eyes with him, and my heart was suddenly thumping. I have a leotard on, I have a leotard on.
I pulled it the rest of the way off. His eyes didn’t leave me once.
I kicked off my sneakers and unfastened my jeans. My legs emerged from the denim, soft whispers of nylon against the cloth. I saw him swallow.
I had to sit to put on my pointe shoes. As he stood there watching me, eyes eating up my every move, I was aware of how quiet it was. Just the two of us, in that huge underground room with no traffic noise, no birdsong, no nothing. Just the sound of our breathing and the creak of silk and leather as I wound and tied.
He passed me the phone again and I found the music I wanted. I should have been thinking about the steps—it was tougher choreography than last time—but I kept thinking about his lips, and the way his hands had felt on my face. Why didn’t he want to talk about it? Had it all been a mistake, or did he just not know where to take this next?
The music started.
The dance began with a pas de chat, a quick little jump before I got to the big stuff. I flowed through the next few steps, then pushed off into the first of a series of grand jetés that took me most of the way across the stage—exactly the kind of aerial work he’d asked for. A pirouette and a piqué and I was moving directly towards him, relishing the glorious moment of weightlessness as I soared in another grand jeté, and another and another. On the final one, I landed only a foot clear of the edge of the stage. I’d have to be careful, when it came time to repeat that section.
A glissade took me back to the center of the stage and then a simple pirouette let me move into a fouetté, my leg whipping out to the side to power my turn. I heard a tiny intake of breath from him, as if I’d done something important. I turned again, again, trying to find a spot on the wall to focus on so I wouldn’t get dizzy, but it was difficult in such an unfamiliar environment. The adrenaline was pumping now, the simple pleasure of dancing and the feel of his eyes on me combining to make me heady and careless. I came out of the final fouetté and launched into the first of three grand jetés that would take me towards him.
One, and I soared like a bird, one leg forward and one back, the rush of air delicious over my heated limbs.
Two, and something was wrong, but I couldn’t see what it was. My feet were already preparing for the brief kiss of the stage, my muscles ready to push me back up for the final jump.
Three, and as soon as I took off I saw the danger, but it was too late to stop.
I was going to miss the stage. I was going to land not at stage level, but three feet further down. And instead of landing on springy wood, my legs were going to smash and shatter against cold concrete.
I let out a silent scream—
His hands caught me around the waist. My momentum swung me down, my feet sweeping an inch from the floor. He bent with me, then swung me back up and this time hooked an arm under my knees. And then I was in his arms, both of us panting.
The fear soaked through me—that aftershock of realizing how close you came. He held me as the chill passed. And then the feeling of his arms, strong under my knees and back, started to warm me again. I felt so...safe. Like he could hold me there forever, if I needed it.
I looked up into his eyes.
His lips came down on mine. A gossamer touch at first, then firm and hungry, my own mouth responding just as needfully. He sank down, until he was kneeling on the floor with me draped across his knees. I reached up and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him down further so that we were lying on the floor, him on top. The concrete should have been freezing through my leotard. It wasn’t. It felt like we were warming the whole area around us.
His hand was on my hip and I gasped not so much from the touch as the idea that he was touching me. He slid it up my side, tracing my waist through the smooth black Lycra. Up to my chest, to the side of my breast. My whole body tensed, wanting him to, but he held back. He smoothed over my bare shoulder and I writhed under him and then we were kissing again, both of us breathing in slow, shuddering gasps. Like before, it felt like we weren’t in control. It felt like this was just happening and all we could do was watch.
He broke the kiss, my lips throbbing and damp. His hand was on my stomach, now, his warmth spreading through the tight material and waking a dark, animal craving inside me. He started to slide it higher, the whole time keeping his eyes on mine, checking it was okay.
I stared straight back at him.
Up, over my core. Up, his fingertips tracing along my ribs. The very edge of his hand brushed the underside of my breast and I parted my lips a little wider, but I didn’t tell him to stop. And then he was right on it, his palm smoothing over the softness of it, and I wanted to grind my hips and arch into him because it felt so goddamn good.
He squeezed, so, so gently, and I caught my breath, hot spirals radiating outwards through my body.
“Clarissa is upstairs,” I panted.
He stared down at me and then nodded and released my breast. His hand found mine and he stood, pulling me up with him.
“What is this?” I asked him again, and this time my eyes told him I wasn’t going to let him escape without a proper answer.
“I don’t know. I...I really like you. A lot.”
The way he said it—so clumsy, so him—made me swell up inside. That tiny glow of hope was shining brightly now, pushing back the fear.
But it was crazy. “You don’t even know me,” I told him, my voice scarcely more than a whisper. “And I don’t know you.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and then nodded, and sat down on the edge of the stage. I sat down next to him.
He looked at me steadily. “Ask me anything.”
Weird how, when you’re suddenly put on the spot with a person you’re insanely curious about, all the questions go out of your head.
I looked around the room for inspiration, then up at the mansion, above us. “Are your parents rich?”
“My parents are dead. No, they weren’t rich. It’s my money.”
There was something strange about his answer. He wasn’t being defensive, or bragging about the money being his. It was more like he was owning up to it.
I went to ask him something else, and then stopped. “Ask me something. Otherwise it feels like I’m interrogating you.”
“When you danced in that audition...what were you thinking about?”
Did he know? “You,” I said simply. “I felt like I was dancing with you.” I wasn’t used to telling the truth. It felt odd.
“And before that, when you were angry. Was that me?”
God, he’d noticed that, too? Even then, he’d been observing me, able to see the difference between the emotion in the dance and what I was actually feeling. “Yes,” I said, for safety.
“Really?” He looked hurt.
“No.” But I said it in a way that said don’t ask, and he didn’t. “How did they die?”
He blinked a couple of times and I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he turned away for a second.
“Wait,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter. Sorry.”
He drew in a deep breath. “Car bomb.” Each word dragged like a rusty blade from his chest.
I swayed back on the edge of the stage and pulled my legs up. Twisted on my ass and slid myself towards him, then sat down behind him, so he was between my thighs. I wrapped my arms around his neck, my head pressed up against his. “Sorry.”
“Are yours alive?”
I felt myself shake my head. “No. Foster parents, since I was fifteen.” I could hear the pain in my voice, and I knew he heard it too.
We lapsed into silence.
“Do you want—I mean, I wasn’t s
ure if you—” He stopped and started again. “Do you want to keep doing this? Dancing for me?”
“Yes! God, yes, I love it. But...not if it’s just....” I shrugged my shoulders, hoping he could feel it against his back. “I mean...you don’t have to pay me to be here.”
He craned around to look at me. “Does the money make you uncomfortable?”
“Not as long as it’s for the dancing.”
“It’s for the dancing.”
“And you really need it? It really helps, to see me dance?”
He nodded, and jerked his head towards the whiteboards. “I really need it.”
I took a deep breath. “Then I want to keep doing it. But I’d like to—Can we do something else? Together? A date?”
He smiled. He didn’t smile often, but when he did it was light-up-the-room fantastic. “I’d like that.”
* * * *
We hesitated as we left the elevator, listening for the shouting. There wasn’t any. Had one of them left? Were they sitting reading the newspapers?
Then, as we got closer, there was the crash of something breakable hitting the floor. I turned to look at Darrell. “Oh.” I was just a little disappointed. I thought I’d sensed something between them. I thought that was why Clarissa had worn that dress.
We rounded the corner. “Oh!” I said again, very quietly.
Clarissa was half-lying on the table, the newsprint from the New York Times rubbing off onto her dress. Her outstretched arm was what had just knocked a mug off the table to shatter on the floor. One of the catering pots of coffee was lying on its side, hot coffee glugging out across the table—luckily, away from her.
Neil was between her legs, one hand hiking her already short dress up almost to her hips, the other under her back. It was almost violent—I would have been worried, had Clarissa not been kissing him with wild, unrestrained hunger.
For a second I worried about disturbing them. Then I realized they were completely oblivious to us. I exchanged looks with Darrell and got another of those fantastic smiles.
We waited by the front door. “Tomorrow night?” he asked me.
“I have to work. Monday?”
“Monday. I’ll call you.”
We both glanced towards the kitchen again, as if afraid of being caught—why?—and then he was kissing me again, soft and gentle, a teasing kiss that sent heat rippling down my back. I had to stop myself giggling. How long had it been, since I giggled?
I closed the door behind me, making sure to give it a good slam that Clarissa and Neil would hear. Sure enough, she came out a few minutes later.
“That man!” She was almost spitting out the words. “Smart enough to know better, but he’s all—urgh!”
“Mm-hmm.” Her hair was mussed, as if from strong hands stroking through it. We climbed into the car.
“Remind me never to come here again with you. I can’t stand to be in the same room with him.”
“Mmm.” I thought about telling her that her lipstick was smeared, but decided it was more fun not to.
Chapter Eleven
Natasha
Saturday night at Flicker. There’s an unwritten rule that, if you have to work a weekend shift, your friends come along as customers to keep you company. Clarissa had to rehearse, but Jasmine was there and she’d brought Karen.
Flicker was a bar, opened twenty years ago by some group of low-budget filmmakers who needed somewhere to meet—and a way to make money when their films kept bombing. They’d kept the lights low—like, trip-over-something low—and invested in hundreds of screens, hung all over the place like an art gallery. The screens showed random, classic scenes from movies, minus the sound, which made for a pretty good conversation filler if you were on a date that wasn’t going well, or could lead to full-on group movie karaoke if you were with friends and a movie from your teen years came on.
Jasmine and Karen were sitting at one of the small, black tables. I could tell they’d argued over where to sit and reached a compromise. Jasmine would have wanted to sit in the very middle of the bar, while Karen would have pleaded for a corner. They’d wound up against the wall, but midway along it so there was plenty of passing man-traffic for Jasmine to look at.
Karen was a musician. In fact, she was the most musiciany musician I knew. Let me try to explain.
Fenbrook was divided into three camps: dancers, actors and musicians. Now of course we all got along just fine and had plenty of friends in all three disciplines, but there were still stereotypes and prejudices. They were gently mocking rather than cruel, but they were still there.
Every discipline thought it worked the hardest. We dancers pointed to our aching legs and sore feet, and the fact we were physically fitter than anyone else. The actors liked to say that their emotional toil was the worst (“I had to live being a drug addict for a week—do you know what that’s like?”). Musicians moaned about the endless practice they had to do.
If Fenbrook was a high school, then actors were the cool kids everyone was jealous of (seriously, how many famous dancers do you know?), we dancers were the jocks and the musicians were the geeks. Like I said, it was a gentle, loving stereotype. We all worked our asses off and we knew it. But musicians did have a reputation for being the quiet, studious ones and Karen was the living embodiment of that.
She was a cellist—I swear, her cello case was bigger than she was—and generally regarded as the best musician Fenbrook had. Possibly the best student the academy had, period. She was a bit of a control freak, practicing before anyone else arrived and staying long after everyone else had finished. She was also seriously posh. Her family might not have had as much money as Clarissa’s, but her accent was pure upper class Boston.
Jasmine and I had taken care of her since we all met as freshman. She was friendly enough, if a little intimidating, but I sometimes wondered if she understood the concept of having fun. It felt like she begrudged every moment she spent away from her music, until we almost felt guilty asking her to come out with us. She’d remained single, despite our best attempts to set her up with guys. Even as I walked up to their table, I could see Jasmine eyeing up guys for her.
“What about that one? No, not him—eww!—him!” I turned and followed her eye line. There was an actor there I vaguely knew—Billy something. Good smile, good body...and he knew it.
Karen shook her head quickly and looked up at me, hoping for rescue.
“Leave the poor girl alone,” I told Jasmine. “She’s happy single.”
“No one’s happy single. The happy singleton is a myth put about by a conspiracy of happy couples, to make unhappy single people feel even worse. We should be proud of our unhappiness.” Jasmine thumped the table with her fist. “Now fill us in. What’s the latest from the batcave?”
I bit my lip. There was so much to tell...falling off the stage, the kissing, the—I flushed. Not to mention that we were going on an actual, proper date on Monday. I’d told Clarissa, who’d hugged me and told me to be careful, still blissfully unaware that I’d seen her and Neil kissing. But I’d told her in the car, right after it happened, and now that I’d had time to think, it was harder. Things with Darrell felt too magical, too fragile...like a soap bubble. On the other hand, I couldn’t not tell them....
“Do you want another one of those?” I asked, trying to change the subject. Each of them had just finished a Pretty Woman—all the cocktails in Flicker were named after movies. Pretty Woman was actually one of the lighter ones; you didn’t order a Dark Knight or a Hunger Games unless you didn’t have anything to do the next day.
Karen shrugged, as if she’d rather be working her way through some Brahms. I wasn’t going to get any help there.
“You think you’re getting out of it that easily?” Jasmine asked me. She looked at her empty glass, edible glitter and pink goo coating the inside. “Okay, then. Go! Go to the bar, but on your return you will relay every morsel of said story, that we may swoon over you and your prince!” I could always tell when sh
e’d been rehearsing Shakespeare.
I wished I was more like her—loud and funny and flirty. I might not have been a Karen, but I still spent a lot of time brooding. Not to mention what I did to myself when I was on my own.
A warm glow spread through me as I remembered the kiss. All I had to do was make sure he didn’t find out who I really was, and I could be as happy as Jasmine. I thought back to what he’d said about his parents. I’d better steer clear of that subject, or inevitably it would lead us onto my own past.
As I waited for the barman to make two more Pretty Women, I gazed around the bar. I always felt I could relax in Flicker, that all of us were off duty here. There were some bars in New York where the actors went with the specific intention of being discovered. Here, almost everyone was either from Fenbrook or hung around with that crowd. We weren’t trying to impress anyone here, except maybe each other.
Not that we didn’t get groups of non-Fenbrook guys—outsiders—coming into Flicker. Come on, the place had a reputation for having actors and dancers working there, of course we did. But groups of actors and dancers can be cliquey and protective, and the guys usually left disappointed. Plenty of times I’d heard Jasmine or Clarissa issue a withering put down to some guy who’d got a little too gropey, or come out with some lame line. Don’t ever, ever, ask a dancer if she can put her ankles behind her ears.
I caught myself wondering if that was why I liked Darrell so much—because he hadn’t approached me in a dark bar, looking to sleep with me. He’d wanted me as a dancer first, and everything else second. It made me feel like I was worth something, like I had something to offer. I really believed that, if I’d rejected his advances, he still would have wanted me to dance for him. Not that I had any intention of rejecting his advances. I smiled a secret smile, the memory of his hands on me sending a swirl of excitement down between my legs. I coughed, self-conscious, and looked around the bar again to stop myself completely zoning out.
I couldn’t stop thinking about him, though. About those whiteboards, and his interpretation of my dancing, the moment when I’d caught a glimpse of his amazing mind. I’d been a little intimidated at first, but once he’d told me and—I flushed—shown me that he was really interested in me, I was just in awe. I realized that I was as fascinated by his ability to create as he was by my dancing.