Page 46 of Not Our First Rodeo
“I won’t be dancing, not really. I’ll be…teaching.” The words stick in my throat. I’ve been doing my new job for months now, and I’ve been surprised by how much I enjoy it, but I can’t help the pinch I always feel when I talk about it. The lingering feelings of guilt and shame that were only hammered home after the lunch with my parents a few weeks ago. I wasn’t supposed to be a ballet teacher, at least not yet. I was supposed to keep dancing professionally until an appropriate retirement age. This was never the plan, even if I have grown to love it.
A smile tugs up one corner of his mouth and then the other. “Well, I’ve never seen you teach either, and I’d really like to.”
Nervous butterflies take flight in my stomach. No one has watched me teach besides Tonya, and even she is mostly hands off. I’m not even sure if I’m good at it—if I’m too hard on the girls or if I’m not pushing them enough, if my technique is what they need—and I’ve never allowed people to see me be anything but my best at something. Even Beau, when I would let him watch me at the studio when I was rehearsing. I don’t like looking like a failure. I especially don’t like feeling like one.
“I don’t know…”
One of Beau’s brows lifts, and his eyes narrow in that way they’ve been doing recently, like he’s no longer taking anything I say at face value. It’s terrifying. “Why not?”
I grasp for an excuse, opening and closing my mouth several times.
The intensity of his stare never wavers. “You’ll hardly notice I’m there. Let’s go.”
And then he walks past me, out of the bedroom, not waiting for me to protest.
The studio is cold, as always, when we walk in. Outside, the sun is shining, and it arcs through the huge windows at the front of the building, illuminating the creamy walls and the high ceilings that are broken up by exposed beams. There’s a couch and a desk in the lobby, but just beyond it is the main studio. It’s empty, except, of course, for Maya.
She’s in her warm-ups, working at the barre. Beside me, Beau shakes his head, and when I look at him, he’s grinning.
“So she’s a mini you.”
I cross my arms over my chest, even though I feel no real agitation. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
His smile widens, taking over his face, and it hits me how good he looks like this. I remember how he looked that night at the bar, with that new mustache that had drawn my attention away from the hollows under his eyes and the new wrinkles above his brows, like they’d been furrowed the entire two months we’d been apart.
But now, it’s like every day we spend together, every day the sun shines brighter and longer, burning off the last vestiges of our cold, lonely winter, he’s seeming to come alive again. I think I am too.
“It’s a Saturday morning, and she’s here before anyone else,” he says, drawing my attention back to our conversation. “How did she even get in?”
I avert my gaze, turning back to face my student. “I gave her a key,” I mumble.
Beside me, Beau laughs.
I feel it in my chest, like warmth seeping into me.
“Tonya isn’t going to be happy about that.”
Tonya hasn’t questioned any of my professional decisions, and I doubt she will start with this one. After I moved home, broken and jobless, she showed up at my house and told me I was taking a job at the studio. I was at my darkest point then, just a few weeks after I’d asked Beau to leave, barely making it a day without a panic attack. I didn’t think I’d be able to do it—teach the sport that was supposed to be my career. And I told Tonya that, but she ignored me, told me to be at the studio the next morning for class.
I taught my first class the next morning, met Maya and all the other students that were looking at me like I was a goddess, and then locked myself in the bathroom, heaving and gasping for breath, feeling like the world was caving in on me.
I did that every time I taught for the first few weeks, and the first day I didn’t, I decided to celebrate by going to the bar in town, the one Beau and I had frequented so many times. I wanted to be close to him in some sort of way, to celebrate my accomplishment in a place where I could feel his presence. I hadn’t counted on the way everyone would look at me, like I was gum on the bottom of their shoe, because I had hurt their golden boy. Except when I got there, it didn’t feel much like a celebration at all.
And then he showed up, looking angry and raw, and I finally understood their ire. I didn’t know how to respond to it—how he looked, how I felt.
I just knew I wanted him so badly that I was willing to let myself have him, even if it was just for one night. For one night, I wasn’t going to think about the panic attacks and my failure.For one night, I was going to celebrate my progress, the new life I was carving out for myself.
And now here we were, watching a girl who’s following in my footsteps, with our baby growing in my belly and the ghost of his touch still lingering on my skin.
“Tonya gave me a key when I was a student too.”
I feel Beau’s gaze on the side of my face, but I don’t turn to look at him. “She did?”
A smile touches my lips at the memory. “She was tired of me breaking in with a metal coat hanger. Told me I could let myself in and out as often as I wanted, but I had to make a deal with her.”
“What was the deal?” he asks, voice soft, his gaze never leaving me. I’ve never known how to handle the weight of his full attention on me.
Finally, I look up at him, not seeing the man he is now but the boy he was when we met. “That I had to go to the party that Sierra Bennett was having at her house the next night.”
