The studio had been soaking up the sun through its large windows all morning, and someone hadn’t cranked the air conditioning up high enough because it was uncomfortably warm. None of us wanted to be the one to complain, though, so we just toughed it out.
They were calling us in surname order, which put me midway through. Each dancer would get up from where they were lounging against the wall, walk into the middle of the studio and do the part while a group of suits from the ad agency and one woman I’d pegged as the choreographer watched. One dancer bugged out—just grabbed her bag and ran for the door after she’d seen the first two dance, realizing she was out of her depth.
As I watched the others, a faint sliver of hope just peeked over the horizon. I wasn’t anywhere near the standard needed for the New York ballet, but then they didn’t have time to audition for some commercial. The teaching at Fenbrook—ferocious Miss Kay included—put me in the top tier. I’d danced to the first piece plenty of times before and could remember the choreography I’d learned. The second one was deliberately obscure. I’d have to ad lib it, but so would everyone else. I could do this. All I had to do was avoid a mistake.
My turn.
I walked to the center of the room and bowed my head. As the music started, I sank into a demi-plié and powered upwards, turning and flowing through a sequence of steps and building towards a grand jeté. I pushed off and flew, that glorious rush as my feet left the floor, one leg forward and one back as I floated. I heard a little intake of breath from the choreographer. I was off to a great start. I was going to—
There was a noise like a thunderclap. I landed heavily, my concentration destroyed. Time seemed to slow down, and as my ankles complained at cushioning my messy descent, I looked towards the back of the room. A lock of hair had slipped loose, and I was brushing it from my eye when I first saw him.
He was still moving. He must have barreled through the doors and now he was trying to brake, one foot out in front of him. Soft, black curls were bouncing and flopping over his forehead and his mouth was slightly open, as if he was gasping—at what? Then my eyes locked on his, drawn in as if by a magnet, and once on them I couldn’t look away.
Whenever I panicked and started to think about what happened, I felt myself start to slide. Nothing seemed solid, and I had to cling on to something real so I didn’t wind up a bawling mess of tears on the floor. The cutting was my anchor, my one solid thing. Suddenly, looking into his eyes, I could feel myself start to slide. But it wasn’t the familiar downward rush, the feeling that the room had tipped under my feet. It was the opposite.
I was rising, instead of falling, and felt...connected. This guy, this stranger, was the solidest person I’d ever met. It was as if he was lifting me up to safety from the cliff face I’d been clinging to.
Everything else seemed to fade down, as if the lights had dimmed. All that existed were those eyes, achingly blue and so honest and clear that they seemed to go on forever, like looking out to sea. I wanted to keep looking at them forever.
They say that you can see emotion in people’s eyes, but I’d never really understood what they meant until that moment. As his lips parted farther, I could see the shock turn to fear—the realization that he’d done something horribly wrong. He managed to stop his forward rush, and the shirt he wore flapped and moved as if in a breeze. The thin fabric molded against his pecs, his broad chest like a wall. I started to realize how tall he was, easily a half-head taller than I was.
The music stopped and time restarted.
The choreographer turned and glared at the guy and then nodded to some chairs at the back, where a couple of dancers’ friends were waiting. He moved over to them, but his eyes didn’t leave me once. What the hell was going on? Why was he looking at me?
“Sorry,” the choreographer told me, even though it wasn’t her fault. “Let’s go again.” She cued up the music.
I returned to center. I was physically shaking, both from the shock of stopping so suddenly and what was rushing through my mind. I felt weak, almost light-headed and the air burned in my lungs. Where there should have been calm and serenity and the next few steps, there was a swirling, hot wind with him at its core. I glanced at him. He was sitting down, the smooth muscles of his arms bunching and flexing under his shirt as he moved. Then his eyes were straight back on me, watching expectantly.
“Ready?” the choreographer said, her finger hovering over the button.
I nodded, but I wasn’t—not even close. I was frazzled and off-balance and scared. He was in my mind, pushing everything else out of the way. I’d never felt anything like it before. I couldn’t dance.
He was easily the hottest guy I’d ever seen. And he’d just made me blow the biggest audition of my life.
Chapter Two
Darrell
Twelve hours earlier
A blazing spark arced off the weld and hit my bare forearm. I jumped back and cursed, but my words were barely audible over the pounding music and that took all the satisfaction out of it. I ripped off the welding mask and slammed down the welding torch, then kicked the waste paper basket across the room for good measure. The night was not going well.
I stretched my back as I walked down to the other end of the workshop. I’d been hauling around hunks of metal and bending them into shape all evening and now I was starting to ache. I stared at the equations on the whiteboards, as if I could will them to give me a different answer, but they were starkly clear in their dismissal. I could work away welding the casing all I liked, but I was avoiding the real problem. I still had no way of making the damn thing fly the way it needed to.
I looked at the prototype missile, eight feet long and six months in the making. I’d done everything I’d set out to do, except get it to dodge—change direction, mid-flight, to avoid anything trying to intercept it.
I had a relationship with my work. Some would have called it a dysfunctional one—even an abusive one—but it had worked for me, for the last four years. Each project consumed me, but it also fed me, giving me the energy to keep going. The trick was to finish the project before it ate me up completely. This one was already a month overdue, and there was no end in sight. The project was winning.
I’d planned on it being a late one—maybe even an all-nighter. One of the advantages of having no boss is being able to set your own hours, and I often worked pretty weird ones, into the early hours and then sleeping until lunch—if I slept at all. But raw effort wasn’t going to fix this problem.
What I needed was inspiration.
I killed the music, and the workshop went quiet as a tomb. Three floors underground, there was no traffic noise, no birdsong, no nothing. Within seconds, the silence was driving me crazy. Memories started floating up to fill the void—things I didn’t want to think about.
I popped the top on a Dr. Pepper, fell into a chair and switched the big desk monitor from a blueprint to the TV cable feed. Movies I’d seen before. News I already knew. A documentary on Bigfoot. I went through my usual channels and headed into deep, uncharted cable territory. Food channels. Home makeover channels. Art—
A freeze frame of a ballerina hanging in mid-air. No, she wasn’t frozen, she was moving—just moving so gracefully it looked like she was floating at the top of her jump. My thumb hovered over the button, ready to move on, but something stopped me.
She landed, twirled—what did they call that, a pirouette?—and took off again, energy coming from nowhere. I sat forward, transfixed. I’d only known ballet in a very abstract way: fat kids in pink tutus falling over and old rich couples dressed up in dinner jackets and gowns, paying hundreds of dollars a ticket. I’d never actually watched it before.
The dancer took a single step forward and then tipped and I actually rose up out of my chair, horrified, thinking she was going to fall flat on her face. But she hung there, balanced on tiptoe—no, not even tiptoe, her foot was actually straight, up on the end of its toes! How the...?
She seemed to lie there in the air, as easily as a bird floats on a thermal, and then the idiot who’d edited the program together cut to another shot and I lost her.
I sat there staring at the after-image of the dancer in my mind, one hand running through my hair, and something kicked into gear, deep in my brain. A tiny, tantalizing glimmer—a feeling that this was important. I always trusted that feeling. Inspiration can come from weird places, sometimes—I once solved a navigation problem after reading something about humpback whales.
I wanted more. I hit YouTube and started watching clips from ballets around the world, devouring them like snack food. By 4 a.m. I realized I didn’t really understand what I was looking at, so I hit Wikipedia and learned about history and styles, which lead me on to composers and choreographers. I immersed myself in ballet, swimming in pas de chat and port de bras.
6 a.m. I sat down and watched The Nutcracker end to end, then made coffee and watched Giselle. By lunchtime, I’d worked my way through La Sylphide and some of La Bayadère. My head was filling up with moves and shapes. I could feel my brain twisting and realigning, preparing to come at the problem from a new direction—it was working, even if I didn’t know where the hell this was all leading me. I needed to share it with someone so, as always, I called Neil.
Neil’s like my big brother. He took me under his wing at MIT and we kept in touch after I dropped out and he graduated. I could hear traffic roaring past. He must be out on his bike, stopped by the side of the highway to take the call.
“Mm-hmm?” said Neil.
“Did you know they go through a pair of shoes in a performance?” I blurted out.
“Who does what?”
“Their hip flexors have to rotate out 90 degrees. Can you imagine that? Their legs have to turn sideways!”
“Have you been up all night again?” I heard a horn and what sounded like a semi truck blast past him. I could imagine Neil nonchalantly lounging on the saddle of his Harley, barely off the road. It was impossible to faze him, which was probably why we got on so well. I knew I could come over a little...intense.
“Where can I see some ballet? Live, in person?”
“Um...I don’t know...some place in the city? Like, don’t they have a building for it?”
I was checking websites as I talked to him. “They’re all tonight. I need it now.”
“It’s vital that you see some ballet right this second?” He didn’t sound all that surprised by this. He knew the way my brain worked. “I guess there are rehearsals, and auditions and things? Maybe you could get into one of those?”
I was already typing. Deep in the bowels of a dance website, I found a listing for an audition starting in an hour. “I found one! Gotta go!”
***
I had a cold shower to make sure I was fully awake, but I didn’t need it. Despite the all-nighter, I was more fired up than I’d been in months, desperate to follow this thing through. I knew that inspiration could be as transient as it was powerful. If I didn’t chase this thing down it was liable to slip away from me and I’d be back to kicking the waste paper basket.