“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 sure 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 she’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.