Thick Love (Thin Love, #2)(36)

“Wait. Dance?” I asked, not understanding that or why Aly only nodded. “But you teach.”

“Yeah. So?”

“You’re just, you’re good.” I liked that shrug/head dip thing she did. It made her seem humble. Not many people I know are remotely humble. “I’ve seen you with your students. You just…you’re self-taught?”

She made a small noise, similar to a soft grunt and then nodded at the guitar. “And your mom taught you everything?”

“No,” I said, smiling. “She didn’t.” Aly moved her lips together again and that time I didn’t let my eyes linger on her mouth. Instead I cleared my throat and started on another tune. “Anyway, she shouldn’t start out with one of the most popular and hardest songs on Broadway. Besides, I bet you those professors at the auditions will have heard something from Les Mis about fifty times before the auditions are over. You should try something unexpected.”

“Like?”

“Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones was older, but perfect for what she’d need. Aly’s range and the sweet, high pitch of her voice would sound like a damn angel in that auditorium singing this song.

“You know this one?” I asked her, taking the plug from her. The pick up on the bridge of the guitar would give the tune an ethereal quality that would balance her high voice. When she didn’t answer and my humming got not reaction from her, I started in on the first line, keeping my voice low, watching her face until she moved her eyebrows up as recognition filtered into her mind.

“Sing,” I encouraged when I finished the chorus

“Um, okay, but…just let me…” and she turned, her back to me, returned her posture to that uncomfortable-looking too straight way she held herself. I let her try for a few bars, watching what I could see of her chin and long neck. She had a sweet tone, but her voice wobbled again as she rushed to get the words out before all the air left her lungs.

“Hold up,” I said, putting the guitar back on the stand.

“What?”

She tried to turn but I sat behind her, my legs on either side of the bench, putting my hands on her shoulders to keep her still. “I won’t give you shit about not looking at me when you sing. Although, you had your body pressed tight against me at the studio and didn’t look one bit nervous.”

Aly glared at me over her shoulder. “That’s different. That’s…” she turned back around. “That’s me in my element. I sort of get lost when I dance. No one makes me nervous in the studio.”

Despite myself, I smiled, feeling like a punk for thinking Aly singing in front of me made her nervous, but then she stiffened harder the longer I held her shoulders and I let her comment slide. “Um…everyone gets a song out in their own way, but this,” I squeezed her shoulders and ran a knuckle down her spine, “this isn’t gonna work.”

“Why not?” she asked, looking up at me over her shoulder again.

“Because…” my gaze slipped back to her mouth. Damn. Those lips looked so familiar. I thought for a split second that maybe Aly had been one of the girls I’d serviced at CPU, but knew immediately that wasn’t it. I shook my head to distract myself. “Because, you aren’t auditioning for the opera. This kind of performance is little bit like the Kizomba.” Her features relaxed, but those perfectly arched eyebrows lifted higher. “You have to feel it in your gut, and it can’t look like a performance. It needs to look like something that makes you happy.”

That didn’t have the impact I wanted. Aly frowned hard as though I’d insulted her. “I’m happy.”’

I was unable to keep the humor from my voice or my eyes from going wide. “This is you happy? Jesus, I’d hate to see you pissed.”

“Wi, Ransom.” She brushed off my hands and moved to the edge of the bench. “You would.”

I sighed, bringing my hands back to her shoulder despite the small attempt she made to jerk away from me. “Look, I’m just trying to help you out. It’s like what you explained to me about the dance. How it should be almost…I don’t know, like sex.”

That earned me another glare. “Me singing for a bunch of theater professors is like sex?”

“No. You being up on that stage, everyone watching you, listening, you’ve got to show them that you are more than a voice. You’ve got to let them know what you keep inside.” She kept staring, but her eyebrows weren’t as high and that frown didn’t get harder. Finally, when she continued to lean away from me, I took my hands from her shoulders, deciding that another tactic might work. “Tell me how you feel when you dance.”

“When I dance? You mean on the stage?”

Aly was a smart girl and had a hell of a lot of ambition. But God was she literal, too literal sometimes. I could sense the frustration from her when I sighed, but kept myself in check. “I mean whenever it was that you felt the freest dancing. When it was so good, so real that you thought you could fly.”

Her face took on an intense expression while her mind obviously whirled with memories. Watching her focus, I tried like hell to remember where I’d met her before and why those lips, those eyes seemed so familiar to me—then the sharp line of her frown disappeared.

This time, her dimple was deeper than I’d ever seen it and she came damned close to smiling. But then Aly closed her eyes, like the memory she’d chosen was too remarkable and too personal to do anything but focus directly on it.