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She was still reliving the moment the next day, perplexed.
For a terrifying instant, Annalisa thought she hadn’t remembered to put on deodorant. Joel had stiffened and gripped her aggressively. The answer might have been as simple as the annoyance he wasn’t trying to hide, with all the fanfare from Moves.
Crossed arms and a jawline so hard it could cut diamonds, her loss of balance was, probably, just another offense. Though he had defended her, he was most likely thinking how a weekend of rest would have done her good, gaining back the finesse that can only be earned by the brutal demands of professional life.
However, that explanation did nothing to reason away why it had felt so...nice.
Things had been unpredictable for a long time. The signs pointing to her dismissal from the Minneapolis Metropolitan Ballet had glared down at her before she acknowledged them. Even being determined to amend her shortcomings, she hadn’t entered that process with a humble heart. At the time, she wanted to prove herself and stick it to the director that his rising star ballerina could keep her nose in the air with her feet on the ground.
Yet, there was no time for her to prove her righteousness. She was booted with an abruptness that suggested pleasure.
With nothing and no one to hold her down, her ego irked, and her determination set to defy the next person who looked at her side-ways, she tumbled back to Chicago. Skin of her teeth and bootstraps. She’d make the life she wanted happen.
So, it was lovely, for a moment, feeling someone else take her weight, the weight of everything she’d been carrying.
The logical part of her brain reasoned it made sense she’d feel that way with Joel. During partnering classes, his had been the steady hands to correct alignment and the sweaty, teenage boy desperately trying not to get the family jewels knocked, drop his temporary charge, or accidentally molest her.
Joel had been the one to demonstrate the lift, propping her into the air, controlling how many turns she did. And doing it with him was always a relief. Even when the mistake was hers. Like every student of a good teacher, she trusted him.
She still did. Based on that alone, she might have been able to wave off the sensation. If not for the other day, however, when putting her hand on his chest made her tense up like a frosted leaf.
That had been unexpected. She hadn’t been anticipating anything. It was obvious his sense of how things should be, and his position as the director, had been poked and she was trying to help him relax. The motion to touch him was unthinking, unintentional for anything more than a motion between mutuals.
Swiftly, though, her palm itched and stung. Mr. Joel Dvorak’s shirt hid a solid, defined physique. Altogether, she was rapidly aware how much taller than her he was, how much broader.
Flattery, attraction, and a reminder that she was a woman gob-smacked her. Yet not only was this attractive man who flattered her senses her boss, he had also been her teacher the day her period was late and made its appearance during stretches on the floor in class.
Legs straddled to near one hundred eighty degrees, she had been lying flat on her stomach when she felt the red menace arrive. Mortified, she’d scrambled to her feet and moved to run to the bathroom when Joel stopped her. She had mumbled something and made to move again when he called her name a second time. It was then she felt another “wave” and knew it had breached her leotard. Her eyes nearly popping from their sockets, she looked down. Joel looked down, too.
Of course, he didn’t say anything. In fact, he yanked off the sweater he’d been wearing and shoved it at her, turning quickly to continue class. When she poked her nose in, a solid thirty minutes later of crying in the bathroom, to say her mom was coming to pick her up, he nodded.
She and him, they weren’t just anyone to one another. Although he had not shared a great deal about his personal life, she’d watched him through the years, too. She’d seen the weeks he came in with dark circles under his eyes. The classes where his temper was short and his demand for perfection astringent. She knew when his mother died and how he went to the bathroom to “blow his nose” because tears were starting from his eyes.
To notice him as a man, to notice how inky blue his eyes were, how broad his chest, and how slim his waist felt wrong. Like innocence had been taken away.
She flicked the light off in the bathroom. Smidge was splayed out in the middle of the lone table, eyeing the dress and shoes she had placed on his favorite (and only) chair.
He gurgled when she neared.
“I’m not supposed to have the hots for teacher.”
That felt gross to say. It wasn’t the hots. She was a woman. He was a man. In many ways, he was new to her now.
Sliding her hand through the nylons she’d wear for tonight, checking a third time for runs or snags, she felt somewhat soothed by the thought.
Maybe that was it. He was new to her. Likely, she was new to him. They were getting to know one another as adults now. Joel used to live on a tight budget and walk to work. Now, though he dressed simply, she saw the quality and the fit of his clothes. A director of a ballet company, his tax bracket had changed. In a similar vein, she’d had her ass handed to her, along with her ego, enough times to suffer an outlook adjustment.
Everything old becomes new again. Between them there had been a wonderful relationship and there would be again, but it’d take time because Time had changed them both.
Over the back of the chair, she draped the nylons, her underwear for the night. The true no-panty-line-promise. However, she needed a strapless bra that offered enough support to not appear flat-chested. A sloping derriere she had inherited. Any trace of a décolletage was engineered.
The navy cocktail dress she’d found at the closest Salvation Army was strapless. Beading down one side in aquamarine and turquoise offered the only decoration, starting modestly over one breast and then increasing in density down the left side to the hem.
She’d washed it in the sink before taking needle and thread to solidify loose beads. At the publicized dinner, she could not run the risk of bedraggled beads in high-definition camera shots.
It was a pity the lone pair of blue shoes she owned were flats. With the dress tapering in at her knees, flat shoes would make her legs look oddly stumpy. Black heels it would have to be but black hair clips, black earrings, and a heavy cat-eye black liner would pull it all together.
Keeping the rest of the makeup minimal, with barely brushed blush and a nude lip, Annalisa was confident she was hitting the right image people had of ballet dancers. Lone artists, dedicated to their mistress of dance, slightly unaware of the times when it came to popular styles and music.
However, she should have touched the dress’s zipper with Vaseline before wriggling in. After a smart yank over her hips, she tugged the fastener. It budged then stopped, snagged.
“Drat.”
Her arms were plenty long to reach behind herself, but she couldn’t feel the jammed bit of fabric. Nor could she get close enough to the rickety full-length mirror on the inside of the bathroom door, to crane her neck and see.
Joel was due to pick her up within the next fifteen minutes. Earlier, she had tried to tell him she would rather use public transport and meet him at the restaurant, but he said he’d declined the limousine Mr. Boone offered. Photographers would be there when they arrived; she and him had to arrive together.
“Ugh! Smidge, why?”
White whiskers prickled and she heard a disinterested purring chuff for a response.
“I’d rather he not see the current living situation and now this stupid zipper is stuck!”
Bad enough that she had to put down the address of the hotel when she filled out her employment papers. Bad enough she had to give him her room number and know that he would walk through the lobby smelling disinfectant, burnt coffee, and weed. Now, he’d come to the warped door and find his employee, who promised she had her life together and just needed a chance to prove it, stuck in her own clothes.
Great. Just great.
With a heaved sigh, she sat down on the bed.
“I don’t need it to be easy,” she said, as much to herself as to Smidge. “I’d just like for things to start to go normal. Why is that so hard?”
Golden eyes looked at her with a slow, loving blink unique to cats.
“You’re not normal, either. Cats aren’t supposed to snore.”
Smidge rippled a meow in return, sounding like a trill of vibrating bubbles, and Annalisa moved to rub the sweet face when an assured knock tapped on the door.
He was early. Of course, he was early. Early was early. On time was late. Late was useless. That speech had been drilled into her brain back in classroom days.
“Coming!”
It was either gonna be a joke or brutal honesty. Either something about how her current stuck zipper was not an indication of her new work ethic or that it was hard to have him see her current living situation.
However, neither of those things came out of her mouth. She opened the door and went quiet.
He looked...wonderful. A royal blue three-piece suit with a matte black shirt and matching vest. The narrow tie matched the jacket and the pants. In defiance, a high polished bronze watch decorated his wrist. His hair, more silver than gray, with traces of dark brown still in it, was styled instead of merely tamed by a comb. He was clean shaven and smelled like vetiver, orange, and bergamot.
What was more (what was worse) was that those dark blue eyes, an ocean at midnight on a moonless night, took in the sight of her without blinking. For a moment, painfully aware of how his physique showed through the suit, of the itch in her palm to touch his arm or chest, and him strangely quiet, they stood silent before an unseen slammed door from down the hall jolted them both.
“Who knew you cleaned up so nice?” she teased.
“It’s been a while. I almost forgot how.”
She saw him glance over her head, into the room, and she stepped back. “Can you forget you saw your protégé living in a hotel?”
“Protégé, huh?” He smiled. “Bold of you to assume that.”
“Tell me how I’m not practically the definition.”
“I’m not George Balanchine.”
She waved her hand in the air. “He’s overrated.”
“My ass. You adore his works.”
“Just another proof that you know me well enough for me to be your protégé.”
Joel scoffed and asked if she was ready.
“Practically. But your hotel living protégé got the zipper of her dress snagged.”
With a twirl of his wrist, he motioned her to turn around. “This is what the beginning of success looks like, sometimes. Temper some of that boldness with a little humility.”
“Is that why the zipper snagged?” she asked, exposed back facing him. “An ego check?”
“Maybe.”
She was about to reply that, if that was the case, the check had been effective for she felt like an idiot klutz. But Joel pinched the fabric below the defective fastener at the lowest part of her back. With the other hand, he grabbed the zipper, and his knuckles brushed her skin. Despite herself, she shivered.
Had the dress been a costume, he could have adjusted the cups sewn into her leotard or picked a wedgie from between her butt cheeks. In performance mode, her body was a tool, functioning solely to bring ballet to life.
However, in the relative stillness of the room, she was a woman half-dressed before a man she found attractive. He had inched closer to find the snag and she heard his breathing. Coils of the cologne he wore snaked around her like incense and she had to squinch her eyes shut, reminding herself this was only a bump in their new relationship.
“Got it,” he mumbled.
She bounded away from him, grabbing the small clutch that would serve as her purse for the night.
“Thanks! I’m ready.”
From the threshold, he stepped aside, and she hurried past him, into the narrow hall.
***
THE DRIVE HAD BEEN quiet. He’d thanked her for doing this and she reminded him she wanted to be an asset to the company.
Lapis Lazuli, she learned on a brief internet search, had made its mark on the Chicago culinary scene by serving turtle soup. Generally illegal across the U.S. owner Gervais Boone had made the bold choice to use farm-raised alligator snapping turtles, despite negative reactions from the press. The macabre notion appealed to enough diners that when it was found his concoction was delicious, crowds flocked.
Valets dressed in a particular shade of blue Boone had tried to trademark scampered up to Joel’s car before he had fully pulled alongside the curb. Two held the doors for her and him. A third gestured towards the entrance from which photographers bounded.
Though she was sure Joel gritted his teeth, he lost no second of the expectation. This was a performance to please Mr. Boone, the self-purported pasha. He placed his hand at the small of her back and she tucked her chin, the director’s ballerina. Demure and slightly overwhelmed by all the fanfare because, after all, she’d lived her life in a music box, a tiny dancer, in someone’s hand.
Gervais loomed inside the entrance, ginger, garlic, saffron, turmeric, and smoked paprika behind him, like a harbinger of the exotic. For a moment, Annalisa was dazzled. It wasn’t enough to say everything was blue. From the paint and wallpaper patched on the walls, the textured ceiling, and crystalline candelabras to the large, polished tiles underfoot, the restaurant was a heady visual experience. Thick as the spices greeting guests, the spectrum of robin’s egg to navy was almost overwhelming.
The restaurant owner held out both his hands. Joel offered only one of his, but the portly man clasped it to himself, shaking with all the welcome of his indigo empire.
“Welcome, welcome to Lapis Lazuli, Mr. Dvorak! Miss Jean!” He turned to her, taking her free hand and brushing his lips over. “A most sincere welcome to you. I heard from a little bird that you are the newest star in Ballet La Faire.”
She smiled her stage smile, the practiced one. The mega-watt one.
“I was so honored Mr. Dvorak asked me to accompany him.”
Mr. Bluebells didn’t take the feint. “You can thank me for that,” he replied with a wink.
“What a tease you are, Mr. Boone.”
Chuckling like an overly sexualized Santa Claus, he beckoned them to follow him. Behind, the photographers buzzed, the flash and audible click of cameras like poppers on the Fourth of July.
They were led to an upper section of the restaurant, partitioned off by not only five steps but a curtain of prismatic beads. Called The Cove, fountains, hidden twinkling lights, and exquisite arrangements of flowers decorated this elite space. It also seemed that this section had its own wait-staff. Instead of the black slacks and blue tunics worn by others, these few men and women were garbed in Asian style frocks that might have been culturally insensitive if they did not lack Mandarin collars.
Mr. Boone held out Annalisa’s chair and a waitress held out Joel’s. Treated to a monologue of the menu, they were informed their meal had been specially chosen by the owner and he would join them for dessert so they could experience Lapis as intended.
Ice water with frozen blackberries. Thick cut blue potato wedges served alongside an intense tahini dipping sauce. The wine list was set down and both the waitress and her boss disappeared.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do if we get served the turtle soup,” Annalisa whispered, leaning forward.
Joel smirked. “I’ll say you’re not allowed to consume anything but vegetarian proteins in preparation for one of my shows.”
“People are dumb enough to believe that.”
“I can stand being the bad guy. Let Len have a break.”
“He does exude that...” she paused, thinking of a polite way to describe the artistic anal retentive.
However, Joel finished the thought. “He’s crazy. Always has been.”
“You probably know him best.”
“He’s my cousin. We’ve split rent on plenty of duplexes.”
“You don’t look anything alike.”
“Having different parents usually means that.”
“Pedantic,” she jibed, smiling at the deadpan expression he wore. “I meant he doesn’t have anything of the Dvorak look.”
“Should I even ask what that is?”
A truthful answer flitted across her thoughts. Handsome, hands down. Saved from being rugged by years of dance, the aquiline had been shaved into his jaw and the shape of his mouth.
She blinked the real answer away. “Len looks more like a Renaissance man.”
“I think he’d resent you for saying it but you’re right.”
Mildly relieved he didn’t press for an answer to the original question, she asked more about his relationship with Len, charmed by the idea of the two of them together.
By the time they were served their first course of sliced, grilled fennel with pickled lemon rinds and tofu, Joel was talking about the time he and Len almost came to blows over the which choreography of Rite of Spring would still captivate audiences and be true to the original upheaval the ballet created when it debuted.
Sprouted wheat rolls with candied ginger apple butter came before the second course of spicy fish cake served beside a rice porridge Annalisa confessed she hated to admit was good. Joel agreed. She was telling him about the time she got into it with a conductor for the way he played Coppelia’s score because no human dancer could ever keep up.
“Never change, Annalisa,” he said, before taking a bite of the couscous pilaf studded with cranberries and candied dates that had been placed down moments prior.
“Always be a handful?”
She expected him to quip back. She expected his grin to broaden and for him to return the tease. Instead, though, he set the fork down and looked at her. That deep blue gaze drowned her, making her feel as if the color of her eyes had been parched for years and she never knew it.
“You’re a revelation. It can be hard to accept revelations but there’s so much beauty on the other side.”