Page 88 of Dance with Me
Now or never. He opened the cover, revealing pages he knew by heart. Each sheet lived in a plastic sleeve, connected to the three-ring binder. Flipping one by one, she stopped him four pages in.
“Esperate.”She tapped a finger on a sketch of a dancer. “Did you draw these?”
He scratched the back of his head. “Yeah.”
“Macho,these are great.”
“They’re just rough gesture drawings.”
She pulled the binder onto her own lap and took over flipping the pages. She stopped, then went back a couple, then flipped ahead. Leaning closer, she trailed her finger along the faint handwritten notes, jotted down in pencil so many years ago. Finding the song list on the next page, she hummed one of them, slightly off-tune, and her shoulder moved as if of their own volition as she read through his notes.
“I can totally see this,” she murmured, as she moved to the next page, which detailed the third act.
He swallowed hard, holding very still as she read the notes on the page, her fingertips stroking the pictures he’d pasted around the text. Some were there to evoke mood, others for color palettes or costumes.
When she reached the end of that section, she pressed a hand to her chest. “Oh.”
Nerves frayed, he jumped on the word. “Oh? Oh what? What does that mean?”
When she raised her head, her eyes swam with emotion. “It’s about losing everything, isn’t it?”
He closed his eyes for a second. “Yes.”
She nodded, and turned back to the book.
Page by page, she absorbed the physical representation of everything that lived in his heart and mind. Everything he felt about family, fear, life, loss . . . love. He didn’t look at the pages—didn’t need to. Instead, he lived it all again through her reactions. A surprised laugh, a gasp, a sigh. Eyebrows raised, then down as she pressed her lips together against some deep emotion.
Everything he was existed in this book, and he’d just given her the keys to unlocking his heart and soul.
He leaned back against the sofa, stretching an arm out behind her. Their thighs pressed together, and it took all his control not to resort to old nervous ticks—bouncing his leg, or chewing at his cuticles. He’d broken the habits long ago, but sitting beside her while she looked through this book was the most intense kind of stress. He’d never even shown this to Alex. Sure, his cousin had seen a few pages, and was aware of some of the concepts, but Dimitri had never let him flip through the whole binder.
Moe serdtse prinadlezhit tebe,he’d told her. She had his heart, in every possible way. Who knew love would be so terrifying?
Sometime toward the end, her hair had fallen to cover her face from his view. He’d lifted a hand to brush it aside, then punked out. Better that he not see. He’d wait until she was done, and then . . . well, he didn’t know what would happen. She might just say, “That was nice, now let’s go to sleep.” She might say it was all stupid, or trite.
When she reached the last page, it was late. She closed the book, and paused with her hands flat on the back cover, which held his contact info from his parents’ house in Brooklyn, in case it was ever lost. Her back rose and fell with her breaths, each one stretching his nerves further. What if she—
She set the binder aside, on the sofa, and turned to him.
Her eyes were wet and spilling over. She wiped the tears away with her fingertips. “Dimitri.”
Just his name, quiet and slow, every syllable pronounced.
She reached for him, and he sank into her embrace, needing to touch her, needing to feel her skin and hold her and—shit, to be held. Her arms went around his shoulders and her tears wet his neck.
“My heart feels so full,” she whispered. “Thank you for showing it to me.”
She hadn’t laughed, hadn’t made light of it or rejected it. She’d taken the time to review the book in its entirety, and when she was done, she’d held him.
Relief washed through him, leaving exhaustion in its wake.
“You get it?” he asked. Not the most articulate of questions, but she nodded and eased back.
“I do. It was like . . . watching you grow up, and evolve as a creator. You’ve got everything in there. I had no idea you could make these kinds of stories.”
He shrugged. “This stuff pops into my head. Sometimes it starts with a song, sometimes an emotion that sends me searching for the music. It bugs me until I put it in the book.”
Even then, the book still haunted him. Stories and characters and ideas that wanted to be brought into the world beyond the pages of a three-ring binder.
