The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(16)

“Why?”

“She’s a generous dancer. Makes me wonder if she treats all the people she loves the same way.”

“Oh.”

Kees smiled. “You like her?”

Erik glanced at him, then back to the stage. “I do.”

“She’s a lovely girl.”

“It’s weird, Kees, at first I just liked how she looked. Now I’m starting to like who she is. And a lot of it, maybe even all of it, is coming from watching her dance.”

“Like I said, my friend, she seems the type who likes to make something beautiful with her partner, rather than just be carried around and adored in the spotlight.” He patted Erik’ shoulder and got up. “So I imagine she’s generous and forgiving in the dark.”

He left then, and Erik looked back at the stage, rolling the words “in the dark” around his mouth like hard candies. He watched Daisy dance, illuminated and suspended in the sidelight coming from the booms.

In the dark.

What are you like in the dark?





Natural Spin


Wednesday afternoon, they came to the theater together again, communing in the quiet of the empty auditorium. Daisy sewed her shoes and Erik played the piano. He played more confidently today, and when his hands coaxed from the keys a competent version of the F minor Prelude, Daisy had begun to dance parts of it.

“Do the last part of your solo, with all the turns.” He stopped playing as she first circled the stage, then headed down the diagonal in a blur of turns, moving fast, foot-to-foot, up on her toes, into a double pirouette to end the phrase.

“Keesja dared me to do a triple here.”

“Can you?”

Daisy backed up a few feet, moved into the chain of quick turns, then into the final spin, one revolution, then two and a third. She finished soft, her arms the last to melt down, a small smile on her face.

“Nice,” Erik said.

She did it again and flubbed, falling off balance after the second turn. “See, I’m turning to the right, and it’s not my strong side. My natural spin is to the left.”

“Can’t you just change it, then?”

She smiled at him, shaking her head. “I have to do it the way it’s choreographed.” She tried another, again wobbling off the final revolution. “I don’t trust myself. If I’m turning right then a triple happens by luck, rather than me controlling it. Two and a half turns with a fudged ending looks like shit. I’d rather just do the double.”

It was the first dress rehearsal, so after warming up she disappeared into the depths of the backstage world: down in the dressing rooms beneath the stage and into the strict governance of wardrobe and makeup. Starting tonight, it was performance mode and the dancers weren’t allowed out in the auditorium during the run-through.

David and Erik were going into their world as well. The cues designed on the temporary board were now programmed into the main boards in the lighting booth. They would be running lights from there, David in charge, in direct contact with the stage manager, and Erik second-in-command. They had their own dress orders, anything as long as it was black.

Last-minute adjustments and tweaks were needed all around the theater, including backstage. Passing through the controlled chaos in the wings, Erik made the interesting discovery that the contemporary girls had to be taped into their short little trunks. Intrigued, he stopped, drew back behind a curtain and stared as the wardrobe techs worked with double-sided tape to secure the edges along all those nether regions. And the dancers, either bent over double, or lying on the floor with their legs thrown over their heads, just chatted away, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

Naturally he couldn’t ogle in peace—David came along and whacked him between the shoulder blades, breaking the trance.

“Dude, close your mouth.”

“Sorry,” Erik muttered.

“What are you, twelve?”

“No, it’s just my first time walking through a troupe of girls with their cooches waving in the breeze.”

“Yeah, well don’t ruin it for the rest of us, all right?”

Now holding the ladder for David, Erik glanced more covertly at Daisy being secured into her dance dress. The wardrobe tech was kneeling, working from the bottom up with a more civilized needle and thread. The entire back of the dress was open and Erik could see the top of Daisy’s tights and the whole, smooth expanse of her skin, the bumps of her spine and the wings of her shoulder blades. In full stage makeup she was like a porcelain figurine, pale and ethereal, her eyes extended and exaggerated, her lips dark and chiseled.

Over his head, David was singing softly. “Fishy, fishy in the brook, will she ever turn and look?”

As if on cue, Daisy looked over at them. She smiled at Erik, and those amplified features softened back into the face he knew better. The wardrobe tech made a cut with her scissors, then sat back on her knees to inspect. Daisy went up onto her toes, her hands reaching over her head. Out of the flowing skirt her waist rose up, tight and slender. The soft grey material hugged her small breasts, draped her back. Her neck was long and sleek, framed by the curves of her arms.

She is, Erik thought, the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.

David came down the ladder, jumping the last few rungs. He retrieved the cup of soda he’d left at the base and took a long, sucking slurp from its straw. “You can fold it up,” he said to Erik, indicating the ladder, and walked off.