Thick Love (Thin Love, #2)(19)
Leann shook her head at my mother’s complaint. “You know of anyone that can help her out, Ransom? There has to be some girl you know that needs a little extra cash. Maybe one of your classmates?”
“The girls I know aren’t the kind that are cool with watching kids.” Another crash sounded from the play room, louder than Dad’s cursing or the amused laughter Koa released. “Especially that kid.”
“What does that mean anyway?” Mom’s voice was higher than normal. “‘The girls you know?’” A small smirk and a lewd waggle of my eyebrows had my mother wincing. “You know what?” She paused dramatically. “I don’t wanna know.”
“Nope. You really don’t.” Mom’s laugh that time wasn’t as amused and just then I spotted the dark circles under her eyes. They made her look even more exhausted than I’d first noticed. Then, something occurred to me. “Hey, Leann? Doesn’t your sister-in-law own a daycare?”
“That’s not an option,” Mom instantly answered for her cousin.
“She’s being picky.” Leann sat back and took to moving her cell between her fingers. “Keira thinks someone from the daycare could be carrying Ebola or something.”
“Koa has been sick a lot,” Mom argued, shaking her head at Leann when she laughed. “I’m just being cautious.”
“You’re being anal.”
“Don’t you have a studio full of dancers to go check on?”
Leann looked at her cell, frowning before she left her chair. “I do, actually. I’ll ask around there. But seriously, keep your eyes open, okay Ransom?”
“Yeah, Leann. Sure.”
She called a goodbye to my dad, kissed Mom’s cheek and was nearly to the door before she turned back to me. “And speaking of the dance studio, don’t you even think about skipping that meeting at 2:00. You promised, Ransom.”
Shit. I had, but damn that had been a month ago when Tristian begged me to help him out with his mom’s recital. Then the little shit took off for a semester abroad in France leaving me high and dry with the volunteering bullshit. I frowned at my cousin, silently praying this volunteering gig wouldn’t have me pushed around a bunch of grinning, awkward dancers who needed a warm body to practice on. Leann had forced Tristian and me to learn technique and dances ages back. We were always guinea pigs for her and her students. It was rarely fun despite us both having a little dance skill. But Leann didn’t need me sitting around listening to a bunch of dancers yammering on about lighting and costumes for a recital that was still months away. “Leann, you don’t really need me, do you? Besides, I just got here.”
“It’s in an hour,” she said as though I hadn’t said a word.
God, the women in this family were stubborn. I was going to say something else, maybe put on some of that Hale charm I’d been born with, but then my mother kicked my leg under the table and I realized it was hopeless. They’d gang up on me, no doubt, and Dad wouldn’t be any help either. He was more scared of them than I was.
“Fine. I’ll be there,” I sighed. When the door closed behind Leann, I glared at my mom, annoyed that she’d pushed me into driving all the way back to town for no good damn reason. “Happy?” I asked her, grunting when she smiled.
“Yeah. Now I am.”
4
November, 2014
He sat on the hood of his car, looking thinner than he had when I first met him. Ransom was still large—too large for a teenager, though I didn’t think about his age, only the beautiful lines of his body and the deep, deep sadness that lived in his eyes.
There were bags under those eyes as he idly watched the traffic passing by, and his shoulders were tight, though he leaned on his elbows. In his hand he held a necklace, too small, too elegant to belong to him and I wondered if it was hers. That girl who was gone. Had he taken it? Had he made certain not everything of her vanished completely?
It was silver and held a charm that I couldn’t make out, even though it dangled from his fingers. The expression on his face reminded me of someone lost in thought, or maybe even praying. His whole attitude was aimless, like a tree branch drifting in a fast moving river, severed from the deep, earthy roots binding him to home.
That’s what Ransom had looked like to me that day, how he’d seemed to me ever since: drifting.
Present
Sometimes you can only escape, you can only feel completely free, when you are in solitude doing the thing that scorches your cells and makes you feel alive.
I found real, honest freedom in dance.
Tapping, twirling, pirouetting, pushing myself beyond my limits, breathing in the sweat-slick hardwood in front of mirrored walls, I discovered over and over again who I truly was. I fell apart, showed the world my soul, every hidden emotion, on the stage. Every day I let it tear me apart. Every night I put myself back together to do it all over again. I became everything and nothing I wanted to be all at once.
This freedom is real, part of all the good and bad I will ever be. And so I take this freedom and the lessons I’ve learned from every blister, every crooked toe, every aching muscle and show the world who I am through dance. We dancers tell a story with our bodies, moving through space, exuding all the emotions we otherwise keep hidden deep within ourselves; our struggles and our accomplishments on display with each movement.