The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(20)
She nodded, smiling, and looked away, the color rising up in her face a little. He laughed. She looked back. And then they were staring again. And it happened again, just as it had in the theater yesterday. Time slowed, atoms and particles separating and recombining into a secret sphere around them.
“I like you,” he said.
Her hand out on the table again, between them, and he put his on it. “I like you,” she said, almost soundless.
They stared on through another timeless moment, after which she went back to her book, and he bent his head over his work again. They held hands on the table, held feet beneath. Erik had never been so relaxed with a girl, never known such comfort with another human being. He had no desire to leave this space, and yet within it, he was free. He could sit with her and feel what he was feeling, with no need to explain it, dismiss it or joke it away. Every time he looked up at her and thought, I love this, she looked up too, and her eyes seemed to nod at him.
Love Will Do That
Final dress rehearsal. The atmosphere backstage was significantly calmer, but still carried a buzzing pulse of energy. Erik threaded his way through dancers and techs, looking for Daisy, not even bothering with the pretense of an errand or task.
She was being sewn up. David was standing by her, with the sole of one foot against the wall. His arms were crossed and he looked both calm and content. A rare stance for David, who was one moody son of a bitch. He always kept you guessing. His compliments were backhanded, his humor dark and sardonic. He joked everything away, constantly pushing buttons and boundaries. And just when you had him pegged as an *, he showed his softer side: he sat still for a serious conversation, or showed sympathy for someone in a bind, offering a fix or a favor without the “you owe me one” implication. Once you relaxed into this kinder, gentler David, he abruptly turned into an * again.
Erik felt a stab of jealousy at the sight of David and Daisy chatting, smiling and laughing with ease. Probably in French. He didn’t feel right barging in on the conversation so he was forced to invent business after all. He fussed with cables that didn’t need fussing with, shielded his eyes and gazed up at the catwalk as if in contact with someone up there. When at last he saw David pat Daisy’s shoulder and walk away, he counted to thirty before casually putting himself in her sight.
She smiled at him and held out her hands. He went to her and took them in his. His skin seemed to peel away like a dry husk, leaving him a core of pure joy. They stood in silence, fingers clasped, staring in a way that felt like kissing. Her gravity was so strong, his attraction to her so complex and layered, he felt he was drifting in another dimension. Turning over and over like a satellite broken free of its mother planet, re-orienting itself to the center of a new universe. He ached to touch more of her, longed to pull her against him as he had never longed for anything before in his life.
“Do a triple tonight,” he said.
She looked a long moment back, then smiled. “Are you daring me?”
“I’m asking.” He couldn’t bear it. He had to touch her. He reached with shy fingertips and brushed her small diamond earring and then trailed down her jawline. Her eyes followed his hand and closed as he touched her, her chin lifting a little. She opened them again, put her own fingertips on his necklace charms.
“All right. I’ll do one for you.”
But she didn’t.
Erik watched her in the Prelude, feeling the pull of her across the rows of seats and through the glass of the lighting booth. She was dancing well—a heightened energy in her movements, a palpable transcendence of all thought and calculation. She was on her game, in her element. This was everything she was, everything she was born to do.
The end of her solo passage now, the circle of turns, the dizzying rush down the diagonal of the stage. The controlled preparation onto her right foot, the step onto the pointe of her left, followed by blind speed turning into spin.
“Dave, watch this,” Erik whispered.
One turn. Two turns. Three.
Four.
“Holy f*ck, Marge,” David said, a hand on his head.
Marie Del’Amici was sitting just outside the lighting booth. They could hear her bubbling laugh. “O mio dio, Margarita. You naughty thing…”
Me, Erik thought, as triumphant as if he’d pulled it off. She did it for me. That was mine.
Daisy and Will’s Siciliano was beyond description. Erik had watched it so many times this week, memorizing whole sections of the dance despite not knowing the names of steps. He thought he knew it. Now he watched Daisy and Will take it to yet another place, and he followed them there, mesmerized and connected. Through the medium of Will he could feel Daisy’s body, its weight and warmth and closeness. Her arms here, her leg there, her waist in his hands, her back arching against his chest. He had it. He understood now. He felt the meld of music and movement and grasped how it became something greater, an expression beyond counts and beats and the vocabulary of steps.
Watching Daisy, his throat was tight, his heart swollen in his chest. Will took her back in his arms, laid his cheek at the base of her throat. Erik’s own cheek grew warmer. Daisy’s hand languidly came up to Will’s head and Erik felt it caress his hair. He was being touched by her. He felt his entire being condensing down to one truth: I’m falling in love with her.
He was grateful for the dark of the booth and the simplicity of the lighting cues for the Siciliano, which left him free and alone to savor this moment, hold it in his hands and press it into his memory. I am falling in love. This was the first time he had felt so powerfully and instinctively connected to a girl without yet possessing any intimate physical knowledge of her. This was the profound realization that sex was the fruit of an emotional bond, not the dirt in which it grew. How limited his experience was in this realm of human affinity. He was a baby. As much a virgin as Daisy. At least she was waiting to make love.