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Her body quivered with a need he had stoked, and she fell back onto the floor. Her pupils were dilated with arousal. She looked feral and feline. His immediate instinct was to rush to her, pull her to her feet. But her legs were crossed and the wild look in her eyes was that of a hunted animal. If he dared step towards her, he deserved whatever slashing of claws he got.
Part of him wanted to receive the punishment damn due.
Yet he wouldn’t betray her like that, betray her any more than he already had. It was criminal. Bastardly. He was shit and worthless.
“Annalisa...I...”
“Nope.” She stood. “Don’t. Don’t talk to me. Give me five minutes to get my stuff. I won’t be here Monday. Company policy allows three unexcused absences.”
“Got it.”
“Don’t!” She screamed. “Shut up!”
On her heel, she spun with all the force of slapping him and ran from the room. The echo of her footfall was caustic, and he felt the impact in his chest. A grenade shot-put straight to the heart.
Shot down, he dropped to his knees. No accusations foul enough existed. She had been in his arms. Her body and her heart had been open for him. The way her skin felt resting on his chest, the curves of her body that he raked his hands over. He could have been king. That low voice, deep for a woman, whisper-soft for his hearing only. The world was his.
There had been nothing but light in his brain. He was blinded by the fire she ignited. Pressed to him, her sweet mouth his, the sound of her breathing drowning out his hearing, he’d never felt so real. Grounded. He was, somehow, the man he was supposed to be. He was the shield to protect her, the one to kneel so she could climb higher. A bridge for her. Armor for her.
“What happened?” he murmured in the hollow silence he’d created.
Everything had been right. Clarion.
But what happened next? What happened in the wake of their sexual encounter? Things could never revert. Never again could she be simply the young woman he’d taught years ago. Never again could he watch her dance and not think about how that body moved for him. The instant they pulled apart from that wild embrace, she was a woman barely in the middle of her twenties and he was more than a decade her senior.
Until he no longer felt his knuckles, he drove his fist into the floor.
Have a fling with a younger woman, be the token older man she slept with—fine. But care about her. Learn that she cares about you. Where does it go? Both you and her are standing on opposite roads in life. She’s making a career and enjoying all that life offers for the young. You are looking at the memories of your life and words like “legacy” float around.
Between you and her, there’s nothing. And you’re lower than low for putting an employee in that type of position. Her position is compromised. Her trust in you is broken in three ways: the trusted teacher, the employer, and the man.
Fuck me.
It had been more than five minutes. Slowly, he stood. His joints were granite and his chest felt cracked. Thank God tomorrow was Saturday. He wouldn’t have to come here and face himself. At home there was anonymity; he could be the nothing he deserved.
Grabbing his shirt, wallet, and keys that lay in the corner, Joel shut the lights off and walked to the front doors. He pulled on his shirt, noting the way the street lamps in the parking lot illuminated how the wind rushed and swept gusts of rain.
The lights also illuminated a figure that hurt to look at. Hood from her sweatshirt pulled low, she had one arm under the heavy material while the other stuck out only enough to see her phone.
He should leave her alone. He owed her that respect, but it was obvious something was off, and it wasn’t possible to be a bigger ass than he already was.
At the sound of the heavy glass door opening, she jumped.
“The cab will be here in a few minutes. My back tire is flat. I tried to get the spare on but one of the lug nuts is rusted. I can’t...”
Keeping his back to the door, he kept his distance from her. “Do you want me to try?”
“No. I’ll have the car towed in the morning.” She flashed him a glare sharp enough to draw blood. “And that tire better still be flat when the tow gets here. You don’t...” Her inhale was unsteady. “You don’t get to make this better.”
“I don’t know how I could.”
She looked back down at her phone. “Neither do I.”
Unable to say more, unable to walk away, yet knowing he had no business waiting with her, Joel opened the door behind him and stood under the frame, half outside, half in.
She moved further from the overhang, letting the rain soak her even more.
Five minutes passed. Then five more. She started to not look away from the phone and shifted her weight from foot to foot.
He couldn’t be a bigger ass than he already was.
“Cancel the cab, Annalisa. I’m taking you home.”
She whipped around. “What?”
“You heard me,” he answered, walking past her, down the steps, with an imperious wave.
“You don’t get to make this better, Joel.”
“I know that. Get in the car.”
She cursed but he heard her steps hurry in his wake. Across the parking lot, wind tugged and twisted, spraying rain in all directions. Both were soaked when they got inside, and Joel turned up the heat.
This might have been a wonderful night. Maybe they never left the studio. Maybe they moved to his office and fell asleep on the couch. Before dawn, both probably stiff, he could have told her about what happened with Len. He could have told her what was going on financially. Without feeling her hold him between her legs, he could empty himself in another way. Just as deep. Just as powerful. And he’d have listened wordlessly to anything she wanted to tell him.
If he wasn’t worth a shit.
“I’m not going to the hotel. I don’t have hot water. Do you know where Kristy lives?”
“Yeah. She lives close to Len.”
“Maybe you two can hang out, share that asshat energy.”
Part of him hoped if he stayed quiet, it might spurn her, and she’d unleash a torrent equal to the weather hurling itself at the windshield. At the same time, it stung to know this wasn’t how she displayed anger.
Annalisa kept quiet and seethed. He’d seen her, tightlipped and fuming, glaring at classmates who pissed her off, for whatever reason, during those early years.
Back in the black box, when he decided a dagger in his heart was better than adoring the woman in his arms, for her to have yelled at all—if she wasn’t in the car now, he’d consider driving through an intersection with his eyes closed.
Mishappen by the streams of rainwater plundering down the windshield, colors of stoplights bled. Surrounding cars looked like scurrying animals, impatient to get to their dens. Too soon, Joel pulled up near Kristy’s building, unable to get closer without the parking permit for residents. The complex was not one she could have afforded on La Faire salary, but her grandparents had money and enjoyed supporting their granddaughter’s career.
“I’ll throw on the four-ways if you want me to walk with you.”
She scoffed. “No, thank you.”
“Goodnight.”
She slammed the door. Joel switched on the four-way lights and waited. He told himself it was to make sure she got into the building. He told himself she was already having a rotten night and it didn’t need to be worse by having to wait for Kristy to buzz her in.
That’s what he told himself.
But he couldn’t take his eyes off her. The peculiar heavy steps she had for someone who’d danced all her life. The sway between her hips. And in this moment, trying to shield herself from the rain, how small she looked, how determined.
So focused on her, Joel did not immediately recognize the tall, heavy-set man who lumbered into her path, until she was halted by his size.
Joel did not look for on-coming traffic. He erupted from the car and ran towards her. The man was drunk, and his meaty hand had landed on her shoulder, whether to intimidate her or stop her, Joel would not wait to learn.
Annalisa did not try to wrench herself free. Her chin was high but the emotion of the day, the fatigue her body was under, was clear because her free hand was gripped at her stomach, tugging the sodden fabric of her hoodie.
Succumbing to the anger at himself by hitting the wide waisted fellow would have been great but as soon as Joel reached them, he stopped and swung his arm up under the man’s, casting it back.
“Whoops! Sorry, bud. She’s going this way.”
Alcohol induced stupor clouded his eyes and it seemed the words did not process. He tried to reach out again, flinging his arm forward. This time, Joel caught him by the wrist and directed the momentum askance.
“Sorry, buddy.”
“Dude, I was just-just asking her for dir-directions to Cermak.”
Joel put his arm around her shoulders and started walking. “Up your ass and to the left, man.”
She did not shirk him, but she did not cradle into him, though he had not expected her to.
“You’re gonna get a ticket.”
“It’s fine.”
“I was fine.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Jackass. You won’t sleep with me, but you’ll play the hero on the sidewalk.”
“Yep.”
“You won’t admit you care. You would’ve slept with me if you didn’t—”
“Yep.”
“Jackass.”
***
SOMETHING ABOUT THE day needed to go right and Joel drove the few blocks to Len’s building. Fishing the swipe card from his wallet, he entered the large, still lobby, and took the elevator to the eleventh floor. His cousin’s bedtime routine was astringent, but he’d have to get his butt up.
Although he had the code to the apartment, too, Joel didn’t use it. Instead, he called his cousin while knocking at the same time. Len had a lot of delicate sensibilities and preferences, but the man slept like he was buried six feet under. And it took two phone calls with constant knocking before he came to the door, clad in a linen pajama set.
Wordlessly, he stepped aside for Joel to enter before walking to the kitchen and throwing on a lone light over the half-wall that stood as a divider between the cooking area and the living room.
He looked fine. Joel wasn’t sure why he hoped his cousin would look as trashed as he’d let himself become these past days. Probably ego. It would have made him feel better to know the way they’d parted had affected him similarly. But Len could sit in a sauna and not sweat.
I look bad enough for both of us, anyway.
Pulling a half gallon of aloe vera water from the fridge, Len poured a tall, slim glass partway before he offered Joel his choice of cranberry or pomegranate juice. The man believed in drinking his health, as opposed to chewing.
“You look like shit.”
Joel took the proffered glass of chilled pomegranate. “No argument there.”
“Do you still feel like arguing?”
“No.”
His cousin looked at him with the hooded eyes that alarmed those unaccustomed to his stare, though he rarely turned it on Joel as he did now. Unblinking. Unreadable. Poker sharks could never touch him. There wasn’t a lie detector test in the nation that could decipher his feelings.
“I don’t agree with bringing Moves and that idiot of Lapis on board. And I think the tête-à-tête performance would have been better served a month from now, when we’re more stage-ready.”
“I didn’t come here to try and convince you I’m right.”
“I know. I know we can disagree.” For a moment, he held the glass of aloe vera to his mouth without drinking from it. “That wasn’t it. I was hurt.”
“About what?”
Len took a long draft before placing an empty glass into the sink. “You’re a bull,” he began. “Always have been. You’re gonna do things the way you want because you can. And we’ve locked horns before. It was...her.”
“I should have waited—”
He shook his head. “No. I mean, my ass was chapped you hired her without me even seeing her move. That’s not it.” From around the half wall, he came and stood next to Joel, looking straight ahead. “Since the beginning of La Faire, it’s been you and me. This company is our lives. Every day. But you hired her, and something changed.”
“Len, I—”
“Let me talk cuz you’re not the only one who needs to apologize. You hired her and I saw you look the other way for the first time in ten years. The same thing that’s been in front of both of us for so long, suddenly it was only in front of me. It felt like you left me. Like, all we’ve accomplished isn’t enough. Like what we’ve been achieving wasn’t enough and La Faire is all I have.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be but I’m sorry, too. If there’s more for you out there, I want you to have it. I’ve never seen you look at a woman the way you look at her.”
“Lotta good it did me.”
“You fuck it up?”
Joel admitted Shakespeare could not have written it better and recounted the whole episode.
Still standing next to him, Len listened quietly. Joel appreciated the silence. Initially, he thought he would only give a bare recital of, as he called it in his mind with grim humor, the black box incident. There was comfort in Len’s silence, however. They had known one another so long, both men could spend an entire day together without talking. And in this moment, feeling hurt and loathing twist and writhe within his body, the silence was balm to let it all out.
He went back to the dinner at Lapis, to the walk afterwards which he had not mentioned to Len the first time. Then he explained how Annalisa had had the worst timing possible, coming to his office bare minutes after Len and his swollen jaw left. The worry on her face, the way she hurried to his side, made him want to bury his head in her lap and give way to all his frustrations.
But she touched him, and the feel of her small hand backfired within him. His body couldn’t reconcile the surge she produced in him. Wrath fumed in his thoughts. She touched him and he snarled at her, roared, and scared her away.
That was the beginning of the week being shit. He cancelled the specialty class for the day and steeled himself to teaching and running rehearsals. All the while, he saw the confusion in his dancers’ faces and the equal hurt in Annalisa’s.
At the same time, even though he couldn’t manage to eat more than toasted wheat bread and coffee for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if he met her stare, his body moved towards her, like a ship in a storm drawn to a lighthouse beacon.
Even worse, he saw how his touch affected her. It might be a subtle weight change or her shoulders rolling back. Sometimes, though, her lips parted. Sometimes, she inhaled and that was when he blessed that they were not alone. He might have let himself snap what frail hinges were holding him up and take her, without care for tenderness.
As the days went by, he got worse and so did she. Then, Kristy came into class today saying Annalisa nearly fainted in the locker room and she’d be missing the full day’s rehearsal. Joel managed to wait ‘til the end of practice to tell Kristy he’d make sure Annalisa went home safely.
She was supposed to wake up and leave without him knowing. Alone in the black box, he’d given himself permission to dance, to sweat out all the toxins he’d been brewing. To find release for his body in some fashion. What he discovered he wanted most wasn’t his to claim.
But she opened the door. Like a stop-motion dream in pencil sketches and watercolors, she ran towards him. Of course, he caught her. Of course, he pulled her to his body and let himself be sapped by the feel of her figure.
“I’m not made of stone like you.”
“It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” Len replied.
“I don’t know what happened after that.” Joel pushed his hands through his hair. “She was...”
“The woman you’re in love with.”
“Yeah. And that’s the whole problem. I’m practically twice her age. I knew her when she was fourteen, for God’s sake!”
“She’s not fourteen anymore.”
He pushed away from the counter. In front of one of the windows, overlooking the frothing rainstorm, with splatters of freezing rain, he crossed his arms over his chest. Len followed but sat down on a cream suede couch.
“No, now I’m her boss. I can compromise her in all sorts of new ways. She came to me because of the relationship we had when I was her teacher. She trusted that Mr. Dvorak to help and I did. She’s a born dancer.”
“She is.”
“She deserves to make her name known.”
“You caring for her stops that?”
“I’d be in her way. Her position in the company would be compromised.”
“Not if she cares for you, too.”
“She does and that’s shit, too. She deserves to have clear sights right now and if she wants some young dipshit next to her—”
“She doesn’t, from the sound of it. She wants your broken ass.”
“It’s not right.”
“It’s not your call.” He croaked a laugh. “For once. You can make decisions for La Faire. You can’t make them for her.”