Tomás might not have been able to give Duon a home, but he devoted as much time as he could to being present in his life. He got him clothes and a phone and a second pair of shoes, gave him rides home from dance classes, and had him over for dinner with his family every Sunday. Sometimes he invited Spenser, but Spenser always declined, and Tomás didn’t push the issue. He wondered often if he should, but by the time he got around the complicated moral wrestling of whether or not it was a good idea, what with his family and his too many jobs, and because he couldn’t decide if their mutual concern over Duon meant they shouldn’t get involved—well, truthfully, long before he laid out that calculus, Spenser tucked himself back into his cocoon, and the moment passed. Eventually Tomás stopped considering overtures toward Spenser at all and focused on Duon.
It was probably good, Tomás decided as October wore on, that he hadn’t been able to take Duon in. His schedule had become so tight he basically came home to eat and sleep, which meant caring for Duon would have fallen to his parents, and they had enough on their plate. Alisa took the kids for a few days here and there, but by the end of the month they’d practically moved in again, and Alisa stopped coming by entirely. Tomás didn’t ask where she was because the answer would have unquestionably pissed him off. His sister’s thoughtlessness bugged him now more than ever. One slip would start the snowball forming that would take his whole family away from him.
Laurie noticed how stressed he was, and one night his boss strong-armed him into going home with him for a late dinner.
“You need to unwind.” Laurie put his arm around Tomás’s shoulders and herded him to his car. “I have everything prepped at home for a pasta dish, and I sent Ed out for wine, bread, and salad.”
Tomás had enjoyed Laurie’s cooking before and wasn’t going to argue. He texted his mom as they walked to let her know where he was going. When he looked up, they were at Laurie’s car. “You’ve managed to keep from getting your car wrapped with the VOTE NO banner, I see.”
Laurie smiled wryly. “Not for much longer. We’re going to Duluth this weekend to get it done.”
“Duluth? Why on earth are you going there?”
“Apparently that’s where the next event is. We’re meeting friends of one of our friends there for dinner after.” Laurie regarded Tomás thoughtfully over the roof of the car. “You should come along with us.”
“I work every weekend. Can’t do it.” He paused, remembering. “Though, wait. There was a schedule mix-up, so I’m not at the nursing home this time. I have to open at Starbucks, but I’m off at eleven.”
“We could make it work.” Laurie pressed his hands together and tucked them under his chin. “Please say you’ll come. I love Marcus, and I’m sure his friends will be fine, but…well, I’d love for you to be there, if you think you can spare the time.”
He probably couldn’t, but he wanted to. Not for Duluth but to get away from everything for a bit. He should take the kids to the movies or do something with Duon, but oh, he’d love to go with Laurie and Ed. The idea of getting out of town and being for a few hours was heady. “I’ll think about it.”
When they got to Laurie’s loft, Ed was in the kitchen, puttering around. Another man was there too, and he turned out to be the Marcus Laurie had referenced.
“I hope you don’t mind that I invited him.” Ed said this casually enough, but he also put his back to his guest and gave Laurie one of those couple-glances that conveyed whole conversations with the widening of an eyeball.
Whatever message he delivered, Laurie received it loud and clear. “Of course not. We certainly have plenty of food. Marcus, so good to see you. Let me introduce you to Tomás.”
Marcus was a lawyer at a high-powered firm and also a big old bear, which Tomás didn’t mind. But the man was also clearly nursing a great heartbreak. Sifting through their dinner conversation, Tomás learned Marcus had recently ended a long-term relationship after his fiancé had been caught cheating on him.
They discussed more than anything the impending election, both the Presidential race and the looming vote on the amendment. Ed, a recovering Catholic, was angry at the role the church had in trying to get the discriminatory amendment passed. “It’s not like they’d have to go marrying anybody. They don’t even have to watch me go down the aisle. All I want is some goddamned health insurance and the right to make sure Laurie can make medical and legal decisions for me if I’m unable to make them myself.”
“And tax benefits.” Marcus leaned back in his chair and grimaced. “There are over a thousand legal advantages you get by being married.”
Tomás chased a tomato around his plate with a fork as he withdrew from the conversation, lost to his own reverie. He’d never, not once, considered getting married, which it occurred to him was weird. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do it. He hadn’t thought he’d be able to, either legally or because he knew his focus should be on his family. Except tonight, watching Ed and Laurie be a couple, he admitted he wanted to have a partner too. The knowledge cut, though. Even if he could find someone who would tolerate his crazy schedule, total strangers might be about to take that right away before he so much as worked up a good daydream about it.
A daydream about Spenser, maybe. They’d stay up late one night, talking about Duon, and one thing would lead to another. They’d start making dinner together, and Spenser would come over when Tomás’s mother invited Duon. Sometimes the two of them would take all the kids to the park. All four.
Tomás’s heart hitched. Shit. He almost wanted that more than a date. Except going to the park with the kids and a date would be a great time for Tomás. Seeing someone who cared about his family, who wanted to join it.
Would Spenser want that? Or was this all because he was the gay man who was handy?
Laurie’s tense, terse voice brought Tomás back to reality. “I want it to be over. I can’t stand hearing about this every single day.”
Ed shook his head. “But that’s just it, Laur. If they pass the amendment, it’ll never end. We don’t know yet how hard it would hit us.”
“It’s going to remain an issue for another decade at least.” Marcus sipped his wine. “If the amendment passes, it could get overturned by the Supreme Court. The DOMA case is already underway. More lawsuits will come. As soon as there’s a circuit split on a marriage equality ruling, they’ll have to weigh in on the whole mess. If we don’t get marriage equality then, people will keep finding ways to challenge the court until it changes enough to get it through. Though every day this drags on, more people join our side. Look at Iowa. They had their ruling in 2009, and they have yet to make any real headway to overturn it, despite effort.”
“They voted out those judges who made that decision,” Laurie pointed out.
“Yes, but only the one time. The next round in November is expected to have a different outcome.” Marcus leaned over the table, his earlier sorrow buried under his animation while talking about the law. “Mark my words. It won’t be long before we’ll see everything change. You two will be married here in Minnesota. Before we’re retired, we’ll see marriage equality across the whole country.”
When Laurie became visibly distressed, Ed deftly steered them to more benign topics, like Marcus’s eagerness to visit his family upstate for the upcoming holidays and Laurie’s recent improvements and future plans at the studio. As the evening wore on, Ed seemed to wane faster than he should have, and he’d hardly touched his wine. When he disappeared into the bathroom and reappeared with wires bulging beneath his shirt and a TENS unit in his hand, Tomás realized his host must be having one of his bouts of chronic pain from his neck injury. The pain and injury Laurie was always so worried about—which he wouldn’t be able to help him with if the people of Minnesota decided to make it illegal for him to call Ed his husband.
Tomás excused himself shortly after, wanting to give the couple their space, and when Laurie walked him out, he formally agreed to go with them to Duluth that weekend.
When they picked him up from Starbucks on Saturday, Laurie, Ed, and Marcus were already piled in Laurie’s car, ready for the adventure. It was a cold and windy day, but this didn’t slow the festivities, and Tomás decided festival was exactly the right word to describe watching the volunteer crew apply decals to cars. There were upwards of fifty vehicles waiting their turn and three times that number of people milling around, chatting and sipping coffee and cocoa. In the middle of it all was Richard, the man who’d started the whole project. Ed eagerly explained the story to Tomás while Laurie oversaw the decal being put onto his car.
“Richard came home from an LGBT fundraiser all psyched to do his part, and he started by putting his VOTE NO sign he’d donated fifty dollars to get in his condo’s front yard. Except the condo association wouldn’t let him. They said it wasn’t about his message but about the sign itself. They don’t do signs in yards.”
Tomás strongly suspected it had been both the sign and the message. “So how did that lead to car decals?”
“Well, he was pissed. He put the sign in his living room window, but it wasn’t the same as something in his yard. Then it occurred to him if he made his car into a sign, they couldn’t do anything about it. You and me, we’d have hung signs in the back window or something. Not this guy—he works for a car dealership. He designed a decal, got a local company to make him a set, and he parked his car in the drive. Then he took a picture and put it on Facebook—and everybody wanted one. That led to him making more, and more, until now it’s a viral campaign with pop-up parties all over the city. They’ve done fundraisers and held rallies at universities. Because you can’t stop people from driving, and you can’t regulate what they put on their cars.”
It really was an ingenious idea, and Richard looked plenty proud, wearing a bright blue T-shirt under an open blue puffy parka and an orange fleece headband over his ears. His cheeks were bright with cold, but he never stopped smiling. When Ed passed by him on his way back to Laurie with two styrofoam cups of hot chocolate, Richard waved.
Laurie was huddled beside Marcus and his friends from Logan, the small town where they’d all grown up and where Arthur and Paul still lived. Laurie looked entirely out of place beside the three burly bears, but he appeared relaxed and charmed despite himself. “I thought there’d be protesters. I mean, this can’t be terribly welcoming country up here.”
“Nah. It’d be too much confrontation.” This comment came from Arthur, Marcus’s shorter, red-haired, and more boisterous friend. Arthur gestured vaguely to the environs surrounding the parking lot. “They’ll save it for when people go home. Pick them off one by one. It’s the bigot way.”
Paul, lingering at Arthur’s elbow, nodded in agreement. “I’d get a decal, but my family would have kittens.”
Arthur grunted. “I’m tempted to buy you one for that reason alone.”
Laurie did his raised-by-a-socialite routine where he drew polite conversation out of Arthur and Paul. They told him about their hometown of Logan, about their jobs at the local lumbermill, about the cabin they shared and hoped to lure Marcus into sharing with them when he moved back home.
Soon it was time for Laurie’s car to receive its decal, and all conversation stopped as the six of them watched Richard and his team apply the wrap to each side of the vehicle. Ed squeezed his husband’s hand, checking him for signs of second thoughts. Though Laurie did seem nervous, he kept his chin high. When the decal was finished, he shook Richard’s hand and thanked him for spearheading the activism, then wrote him a check for the decal.
They chatted idly on the way back to the Cities, and Tomás tuned some of it out, enjoying the space to simply exist without demands. As they approached the Cities, however Ed raised his voice and addressed the car with a grin and a wicked look in his eye. “Let’s take a drive around town.”
Laurie raised his eyebrows. “Where do you want to go?”
“Everywhere. Maybe drive real slow past houses with VOTE YES signs.”
That was exactly what they ended up doing. For two hours they canvassed the Twin Cities in Laurie’s newly wrapped car, broadcasting their opinion on the upcoming vote everywhere they went. The four of them made a contest of coming up with more and more conservative neighborhoods to drive through, and to Ed’s delight, Laurie sniggered when a particularly WASPy woman in Anoka pursed her lips at their car.
“Let’s go dancing,” Laurie suggested as they finally meandered to St. Paul.
Marcus frowned. “Where do you want to go? It’s Sunday night. Nothing’s open.”
Ed waggled his eyebrows. “Well, as it happens, I know a guy.”
They went to the Dayton’s Bluff studio, giggling like schoolboys as they unlocked the door and turned on the lights. Ed, Laurie, and Tomás put on their dancing shoes, and they fished out a pair from the lost-and-found that fit Marcus. Laurie put music on the stereo, and the four of them partnered up, laughing as they spun around the floor to the rhumba, samba, and then, for Ed and Laurie, a tango.
Marcus wasn’t much of a dancer, but Tomás taught him as best he could on the fly, and the guy was a pretty quick study. “Where’d you learn all this?” Marcus asked when they were finished and sitting on the warm-up bench sipping bottled water. “Were you a child prodigy like Laurie?”
Tomás laughed and wiped water away from his mouth. “Not even close. I took lessons when my family could afford them. Mostly I taught myself, watching videos and practicing in a mirror.”
“Ed told me about the trouble with your parents because he was hoping I might have ideas on how to help you. Has your lawyer gotten anywhere with their application for naturalization?”
Tomás swallowed the bitter bile that rose at the mention of their lawyer and at the thought of having his laundry aired, even for a benevolent reason. “Nowhere. All he’s done is take my damn money.”
“I don’t specialize in immigration law, but I have a good friend who does. He might not be able to do it pro bono, but he could do it for administration costs.”
The offer caught Tomás so off-guard tears formed in his eyes. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t mind. You’re a friend of Ed’s, so that’s enough for me. Plus this same guy knows Laurie’s godfather. We can call in a favor at both ends. It’s no trouble. Happy to help.”
Tomás ducked his head to hide his tears, but they were evident in the thickness of his voice. “Thank you.” He drew a ragged breath, let it out. “Thank you.”
Marcus gripped his shoulder, squeezing it gently. “Not a problem.”
Tomás did cry on the way home, so hard he had to sit in the parking lot for a minute and pull himself together before he could go inside. Once he was in bed, he lay awake listening to his mother urge the children to go to sleep, soothing the youngest from a nightmare.
He wanted the amendment to fail, yes. He wanted to find someone to marry him, yes—Spenser, or someone he had yet to meet. But he hoped his friends wouldn’t hold it against him to know if he had to pick between marriage equality and a law promising he wouldn’t come home one day to find out his parents had been raided and taken to Mexico…well, it wouldn’t be a choice.
Like Marcus said. Family first. Except Tomás didn’t share Marcus’s optimism about people’s willingness to give him, or his parents, any protection at all.
The first few weeks with Duon went exactly as Spenser expected. Duon was quiet, freakishly obedient, and polite to the point of being ridiculous. But while he rinsed every plate and always hung up his towel, he also spent half the night awake raiding the fridge, sometimes eating all but the jars of condiments. Once he ate those too. Sometimes Spenser heard him crying in his room. But if he asked him what was wrong, Duon wiped his emotions away and said only, “It’s cool, man. It’s all cool.”
His responses were far, far too close to home, and they dredged up old ghosts.
Spenser’s time in foster care hadn’t been particularly traumatic, but it hadn’t been pleasant, either. His first home was in an Eden Prairie subdivision, the house so nice and so large it felt like a palace. The neighbor children were mean though, and they’d teamed up with his foster brothers to pick on him. Though he hadn’t felt attachment to the family, it hurt when they chose to resolve the issue by sending him away, not the older boys. He’d learned to school his emotions, but it hadn’t mattered. He was a legal adult before he found a home.
He wanted more than anything to be that safe space for Duon.
Because he knew it would be good for both of them, Spenser focused on routine, the coping mechanism that had always gotten him by. He woke at six. He worked out for three miles on the elliptical. He showered, ate breakfast, then nudged Duon through his own morning routine enough to get him ready for school. Nearly every day Duon went to the studio, sometimes driven by Spenser, sometimes Tomás. While Duon was there, Spenser ran errands, did laundry, and fixed dinner, so that when Tomás brought Duon home, the apartment was homey and welcoming. They discussed their respective days while they ate and did the dishes, and then they sat at the kitchen table and did homework. If they had time, they watched TV or played a game of cards. Sometimes Tomás joined them, but usually he was busy with his family, or he had to go to bed early because he had to get to Starbucks at four thirty in the morning. Sometimes Vicky or Laurie or Ed stopped by to check on Duon. But the routine was there, a gentle scaffolding to hold them all in place. It seemed to help Duon become accustomed to his new environment. It definitely helped Spenser.
School, as always, kept him more occupied than he wanted to be. It was his third year at St. Anthony, so he knew what the fall festival and Christmas pageant would require from staff. This year, however, they had an added chore, and it was particularly uncomfortable for Spenser.
While a majority of the staff was either Lutheran or nondenominational, St. Anthony’s principal, Dr. Brett Harvey, was a strict and conservative Roman Catholic. He required the staff to not only participate in morning prayer in the school chapel, but to also know the Catechism and endure pop quizzes on its minutiae whenever he met them in the hallway. But this fall, in the months running up to the election, Harvey put out calls for volunteers to canvas local neighborhoods, distributing literature devoted to the passage of Amendment 1, the amendment seeking to ban same-sex marriage in the state of Minnesota.
Spenser wasn’t out at work, and he had no intention of changing that, but his closet made moments such as this incredibly awkward. He kept his coworkers at a polite distance, attending group gatherings but never seeking out one-on-one friendships. Letting his guard down felt too risky. School was work, and he didn’t want it complicated by anything personal. His decision felt wise as he watched colleagues he’d counted as friends take up the cause to “protect marriage” with a zeal that pierced Spenser’s heart. His teaching partner, who he’d nearly come out to several times, had a Vote Yes bumper sticker on her car.
The all-staff activities lately had focused around lobbying efforts to pass Amendment 1, and since Harvey had a public chart in the teacher’s lounge keeping track of who had canvassed and who had not, Spenser eventually had to “participate,” in that he accepted the clipboard full of flyers, chose a liberal neighborhood far from the school, and dumped the notices in his trash can as soon as he was home. Caring for Duon provided some relief from these demands, as a child in need took precedence, thankfully, over canvassing for hate, but Harvey didn’t stop watching Spenser like a hawk. There was no reason for him to know Spenser’s orientation, but Spenser still felt exposed and uneasy every time he walked into the school.
Happily, the responsibility of caring for Duon and the intensity of parenting lessons he was learning on the fly and in the field kept Spenser adequately distracted from both Harvey’s crusade and the impending amendment itself. As the date of Duon’s court hearing came closer—the hearing where they would learn whether or not Duon’s grandmother was dropping custody and if Duon could stay with Spenser permanently—Duon became less and less of a perfect child. When the court date was moved at the last minute to November sixth, Duon became more agitated, obsessed with not going to school. He invented a million reasons to stay home, none of which Spenser accepted.
“Why don’t you want to go to school? Is someone harassing you?”
Duon rolled his eyes. “Come on, man. I just don’t want to go. Why do you care?”
“I’m an educator. Of course I care.”
This reply, of course, never won him any cool points. More than once Spenser had prodded his charge into complying by stating, calmly but clearly, that a condition of his staying with Spenser was school attendance. While Duon accepted this dictate, he didn’t care for it. Spenser suspected he was the first person to ever require Duon go to school.
Tomás became Spenser’s ally in the struggle, his cheerleading counterpoint to Spenser’s hardline stance. “Come on, D. You know you can do it. You’re smarter than all of them.”
This never failed to puff up Duon. “Damn right I’m smarter than them. But I don’t need to go to prove it.”
“Yeah, but why waste it? Get your degree. Light the world on fire.”
“I don’t want to go to school. I want to focus on dancing. That’s what I want to light on fire.”
It was at this point Spenser appeared with the hammer. “Well, the only way you get to go to dance is to go to school first.”
This tag-team approach worked for a long time. Every day through the rest of October, Spenser drove Duon to school, getting him there almost an hour early. Duon hated this, especially because Spenser arranged for Duon to wait in the office and do any missing work during that time. After school Duon always went to the studio, sometimes driven by Spenser, sometimes by Tomás, sometimes by Ed or Laurie, and the promise of going there at the end of the day was usually enough to get Duon through even the greatest morning resistance.
But on Election Day, the day of the rescheduled hearing, Duon woke up surly and obstinate, insisting he wasn’t going to go. Spenser was nervous too—this would be the day when he either became a parent or watched the boy he’d come to feel strongly for be removed from his hands. But avoiding it wouldn’t solve any problems.
“Duon, I need you to go to the hearing. I’m open to bribes to get you there. I’ll take you anywhere you want to eat tonight, if you go.”
No response.
“We’ll go shopping.”
Not even a glance up.
As Spenser racked his brain, he saw Duon’s dance clothes stacked neatly in a pile on top of the laundry basket. “If you go to the hearing, I’ll come with you to your dance class. I’ll join your dance class.”
It had been a Hail Mary, this bribe, but it was the one that got Duon to not only look up but smile. “For real? You’ll be in my dance class?”
Spenser seized the lure with both hands. “Yes. Absolutely. I’m not going to have time to buy a leotard, but I will attend and I will dance.” His nerves bubbled out of their box. “Even if everyone laughs at me.”
“Nobody’s gonna laugh. And it’s modern dance. You just gotta wear loose clothes.”
Spenser marched to his room, grabbed workout clothes and shoes, and deposited them in a bag. “Done. Get your backpack. If we leave in the next thirty seconds, we have time for Egg McMuffins on the way.”
They had their Egg McMuffins, but Duon barely got to eat his because he talked a mile a minute about all the things he was going to teach Spenser in dance class. None of it made any sense to him, but Spenser didn’t care. He was only glad to have gotten his charge out the door. He had time to wiggle out of actually dancing later.
The hearing was quick and far more banal than Spenser could have imagined. Spenser had anticipated the grandmother would attend, but the guardian ad litem said she’d surrendered custody voluntarily. It wasn’t quite as big of a deal, Spenser supposed, than if it had been Duon’s mother. He didn’t understand how the law worked, but he couldn’t help thinking this was rather a perfunctory, unfeeling way to give a child away.
In other words, the system hadn’t changed.
The judge asked a few questions of the social workers and the guardian ad litem about Spenser and Duon, confirmed this was what Duon wanted, and basically that was it. She said she was pleased to see someone had stepped up to take on Duon, and with the gentle tap of her gavel, she made Spenser a parent.
Duon didn’t have much reaction in the courtroom, and Spenser didn’t prod him for one. As Spenser drove him across town to deposit him at school, however, Duon bounced higher on the seat as he explained how amazing dance class was going to be together. Spenser nodded absently, mostly dizzy with the realization of what he had so casually been handed, hoping he was up to the task.
But once he was at school, it dawned on him he had some news to share. So he pulled out his phone. Also, it dawned on him he should let them know they should expect another person for dance class. So he texted.
Hi, Tomás. This is Spenser. I wanted to let you know I was officially named a suitable other placement for Duon today. Also, it’s a long story, but I only got Duon to the hearing by promising I’d join his dance class tonight. I hope that’s okay. I’ll obviously pay whatever fees I need to, but I thought I should let someone at the studio know. Let me know if you need anything else from me before we get there. Thanks.
He sent similar texts to Vicky, Laurie, and Ed, minus the information about dance class. Soon his students began arriving, and Spenser was able to think no more on being a new parent and whether or not he had bitten off more than he could chew with his rash promise of attending dance class. Not until his lunch break when he checked his phone and saw he had a missed call, voicemail, and text from Tomás. Spenser read the text while he spread his lunch across his desk. There were several texts, in fact.
So glad to hear about the hearing! As for class, that’s not a problem at all. We’ll be glad to have you. Do you have loose clothes and soft shoes? The shoes will be the most important part.
What size are you? You might be able to borrow a pair of mine.
I’m a nine.
Oh, but you’ll need thinner socks.
Hey, I called but couldn’t get you. I’ll bring some stuff with me in case.
Oh, and you don’t have to pay anything. This one’s on me.
Amused, Spenser listened to the voicemail too, which was basically the same information delivered with more enthusiasm. There was a sparkle to Tomás’s voice he’d never heard before. Like Duon, dance was where Tomás’s passion lay.
It wasn’t Spenser’s. In fact, he frankly hated to dance. He’d been keenly aware every time he went clubbing that some people had natural rhythm and some people did not. He was one of the latter.
Sometimes he wondered if his failure at dance was the reason he never dated. Hookups only wanted a bed, but dates always seemed to involve a dance floor, which meant whatever charm Spenser had managed up until that part of the evening evaporated in five minutes of awkward gesticulations. So now he only hooked up, never dated, and never danced, full stop. Not even at weddings.
But he had made a bargain with Duon, and though initially he’d planned to weasel out, he decided as a parent now his job was to stick to his word. He could hide under his covers and work through his mortification once he was alone at home.
The bell rang to announce the end of noon recess, and Spenser stopped thinking about dance lessons and how much he didn’t want them. Not until the bell rang again, signaling the end of the day, letting him know it was time to pay the piper.
He half-hoped Duon had forgotten, but he had no such luck. Grinning wide enough to split his face, eyes dancing with anticipation, Duon leaped into the car when Spenser approached the high school. “You ready for your lesson, teach?”
Spenser gave a defeatist salute, and Duon laughed. He then peppered Spenser with questions—did he know this move or that one, and he was incredulous when every question received a “no, I don’t” as the answer. Thankfully, it wasn’t far from Duon’s school to the studio, so Spenser didn’t have to endure this for long. Unfortunately, this also meant it was that much less time until Spenser walked into the boy’s locker room, clutching his duffel and wondering what in the hell he’d gotten himself into.
Tomás was in there already, wearing a tight T-shirt and a pair of shorts barely covering his ass and showcasing his…everything. He was a little taller than Spenser and significantly more muscular, though not like Laurie’s husband. His muscles were lean but well-defined.
They were also highly distracting.
Tomás hugged Duon and wished him congratulations on his new official home, and then he smiled at Spenser, an eager grin making the sparkle in his eyes that much brighter. “You ready for your dancing lesson?”
“Hell yes, he is,” Duon answered for him, tossing his arm around Spenser’s shoulders.
Spenser disentangled himself gently from his charge. “I’m fairly sure I’m about to make a fool of myself, but I made Duon a promise, and I intend to keep it.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll go easy on you.” Tomás winked, and Spenser blushed.
He tried to hide in the back, but both Duon and Tomás insisted he be up front. Duon wanted this because he was in the front, Tomás because he pointed out he could see his instruction from there. There were twelve other students, all of them teenagers, most of them male, exactly one of them white—Spenser. Until Laurie came out of his office to lean on the doorway and watch, Spenser was the only one melanin-challenged in the whole studio.
And yes, he understood dancing ability wasn’t correlated to race—the owner of the studio being exhibit A—but he couldn’t help feeling like everyone else present had come with not only a crib sheet but the teacher’s edition to the lesson Tomás was giving. They didn’t laugh at him when he screwed up every single step, but that was almost worse. And the more badly he performed, the more nervous he became, until he left the floor, red-faced, making a great show of drinking from the fountain on the side of the room until he could get his mortification under control.
This was worse than his failed dates in college. This was a goddamned nightmare.
He wanted to call it quits, but when he saw Duon watching him, smiling and motioning impatiently for him to come back to the dance, he knew he couldn’t. Spenser was almost wooden now as he endured the lesson, no longer trying to keep up, only doing his best to get to the end of this class so he could never, ever offer to do something so awful again.
But when it was over, Tomás and Duon ganged up on him, telling him what a good job he’d done. Spenser couldn’t handle it any longer. “Are you insane? I was awful.”
Tomás held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa. You weren’t awful. And you had a pretty big disadvantage, because we’ve been working on this routine for months now.”
Spenser wasn’t having any of this. His face was red, with exertion, with embarrassment, and with decades-old shame. “I’ve never been able to dance. And it turns out when you don’t try for ten years, you get worse.”
Duon and Tomás exchanged a look. Then Duon scuttled toward the locker room. When Spenser attempted to follow, Tomás caught him gently by the elbow and led him to the floor. “Oh no. You, Mr. Harris, are getting another dancing lesson.”
Spenser broke free of the grip and backed away. “No, thank you.”
Tomás did a fancy step and blocked him. When Spenser went the other direction, Tomás blocked him again. And again. When Spenser sighed in frustration, Tomás winked at him. “See? You’re a natural. You’re dancing right now.”
It had been a long day, the next day would be longer if the amendment passed, and Spenser didn’t need this. “I don’t care if I can dance or not. I want to go home.”
“I can’t let you go, not when you’re this frustrated. I’d be a terrible teacher if I allowed you to leave.”
Oh, this was a low blow, because of course he was right. Spenser went for blunt. “I’m tired.”
But Tomás wasn’t having it. “Fifteen minutes. Give me fifteen minutes.”
“Take an hour.” This came from Laurie, who stood at the door to the studio with Duon, who now wore loose sweats and a winter jacket. “I owe a young man some ice cream, and the next class got cancelled because Susan’s sick.” He waved at Spenser. “Knock ’em dead, tiger.”
And just like that, Spenser had landed himself in the middle of an hour-long private lesson.
With Tomás.