The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(8)
Erik swallowed a slight panic. He wasn’t sure if it was an order or an invitation, but no way in hell was he going to dance class.
But David laughed. “Kees’s most popular course is called ‘Dance Appreciation for the Modern Neanderthal.’”
“There’s a waiting list,” Kees said.
Erik wrote it down.
Interestingly, while the seniors rehearsed front and center, Daisy and Will were upstage, dancing the same choreography. David explained they were understudying, and would get to dance one matinee performance.
The arrangement was for strings, flute and oboe, and against the slightly mournful melody, the pas de deux was decidedly romantic, full of longing. The partnering was difficult—even to Erik’s unpracticed eye. Yet Will didn’t seem to give much thought to what his hands were doing. They lifted, threw and caught Daisy with unconscious confidence, allowing his touch to be both supportive and tender. His fingers lingered on her limbs. He crushed her against his chest as if he loved her. At times, he seemed to be whispering to her. Daisy trusted him implicitly, jumping backwards or turning blind without hesitation, her hand reaching for a precise spot where she knew he would be.
At an especially emotional swell in the music, Daisy fell backwards in the circle of Will’s arms and he laid his head down at the base of her throat. His lips parted. Erik’s eyes narrowed in fascinated jealousy. Will wasn’t kissing her neck, he was just inhaling there, resting, and Daisy’s hand came up behind his head. Downstage, Kathy made the same exact gesture to Matt’s head. Clearly it was part of the choreography, but Kathy’s motion seemed a throwaway while Daisy’s was a definitive human caress. The hair at the back of Erik’s own neck stirred.
When Will brought Daisy back up, the look they exchanged was smoldering. Their faces seemed to twitch with the suppressed laughter of a private joke. As Daisy moved forward into the next phrase, her smile back over her shoulder at Will was laced with affection. Erik felt a crushing despair sweep through his bones.
Beside him, David was chuckling low in his chest. “I swear sometimes I hate the man’s guts,” he said.
“Are they together?”
“Depends. What day is it, Sunday? Yeah, Sunday is Will’s straight day, they could be together.”
Kees looked around, chuckling. “You still think he walks both sides of the line?”
David held up a defensive hand. “I know what I know.”
“Get out of here,” Kees said, snorting.
Erik was starting to feel slightly overwhelmed. He was more than a little sure Will and Daisy were together offstage. Dancing the way they did, looking at each other the way they did, how could they not?
And yet, throughout the rest of the rehearsal, whenever she wasn’t dancing, Daisy kept coming back to their rows of seats. Coming, it seemed, to sit somewhere in Erik’s general vicinity.
“Well, now, Keesja,” David said after one such visit. “We know Daisy never comes to sit with me.”
“We know she’s not after me,” Kees said, grinning. “Sunday’s my gay day.”
In unison, they turned eyes to Erik.
“She must like you,” David said with a sigh.
Coax Another Revolution
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” David said to Erik as they arrived at the theater Monday afternoon.
Leo gathered his crew for a short meeting. “What do you see before you?” he asked Erik and Allison Pierce, the two freshmen. They exchanged confused glances, looking for a trick question within the obvious.
“A stage?” Allison said.
“Wrong. David?”
“A fish tank,” David said, sighing and cleaning his fingernails with the tip of a screw.
“Exactly. Dancers live in light as fish live in water. Jean Rosenthal, The Magic of Light. If you haven’t read it, read it, and if you’ve already read it, read it again. Erik, stop writing things on your hand. Learn to trust your memory.”
Erik sheepishly put his pen and his hand down.
The normally laid-back Leo was pacing briskly. “If you’ve never lit a dance concert before, forget everything you thought you knew. This is all different. It will take us half an hour to hang all the instruments on the booms. To focus them? If we’re lucky, we’ll get out of here at midnight. In fact, if you have pressing business at the DMV or a root canal scheduled, I’d go now and have a better time. This will be tedious, boring work and the dancers are going to be grouchy. Stay out of their way because they kick high, they kick fast and they kick hard. Any questions?”
None. The stage techs rose. Unless perching on a bar or crawling on your stomach on the catwalk qualified as sitting, nobody sat again for three hours.
“On a lighting boom,” Leo said, working with Erik and Allison, “the lantern lowest to the floor is called the shin buster. Which is self-explanatory. An inexperienced dancer will bump into them. And they will blame you when they do. We just knock them back into line.”
“The dancers?” Allison asked, wide-eyed.
“The lanterns,” Erik murmured.
“Booms can have a low-and mid-shin buster,” Leo said. “As you can see we’re wiring a mid-lantern for all eight.” He went on explaining how these two lowest fixtures were the most crucial. They kept the light on the moving bodies without reflecting off the floor, allowing the dancers to appear floating in space, not unlike fish in an aquarium.