Page 16 of Pas de Don't
“No.” She smiled, and he felt his heart quicken. “That sounds great. What have you got planned?”
She’d caught him off guard. “Uh, nothing yet. But you should probably know about the best beaches, right? We’ll do a beach tomorrow.”
Tired as she was, when Heather lay down on the fluffy white comforter, she couldn’t sleep. She slipped her feet under the knit throw rug draped across the bottom of the bed and tried to let her mind go blank, but it was no use. Her body was buzzing, and despite her fatigue, she felt restless and fidgety. A result of the long flightand the jet lag, obviously. Certainly nothing to do with an unpaid tour guide with eyes the color of Sydney Harbour.
She sat up and sighed, scanning the small bedroom with its shining red-brown floorboards and floaty white curtains, then heaved herself up and to the bathroom to splash some water on her face. Watching herself in the mirror, she realized that even in her short time outside, she’d managed to get a mild sunburn. The tip of her nose was rosy, and her forehead looked a little pink, too. This Australian sun was no joke, even in winter. She added sunscreen to her mental list of things she should’ve packed. She would certainly need it if Marcus was taking her to a beach tomorrow.
Unbidden, the sound of Marcus’s surprised bark of a laugh popped in her mind. Had Jack ever laughed at one of her jokes like that? If he had, she couldn’t remember it.
It didn’t matter. Marcus was showing her around because Peter had asked him to. He was being friendly because he was a friendly person, and again, because Peter had asked him to. He had seemed deflated at the idea that she might not want to go to the beach with him tomorrow because...well, she couldn’t put that one on Peter.
She poked at her forehead and her chin, watching the skin turn white, then flood pink again. She had what Jack’s mother Christine called “a stage face,” meaning, Christine had explained, that her large eyes and sharp chin looked good from a distance, but not up close. She had said this in a very matter-of-fact kind of way at Thanksgiving dinner in the high-ceilinged Upper East Side apartment where Jack had grown up, a few years after Jack and Heather had started dating.
“It’s like the costumes,” Christine had said, cutting her turkey and then leveling a cold, toothy smile across the wide table at Heather. “If they look good on stage, they look ghastly in the dressing room.” The woman even cut her food gracefully, Heather remembered thinking in awe, before she realized Christine had just insulted her.
“I mean that as a compliment,” Christine had reassured her after a pause in which Heather had sat, speechless, wondering how onearth she was meant to respond. “It will be a boost to your career, I suspect.” Christine’s eyes sat wide and innocent beneath her oddly immobile forehead. She smiled tightly again, and her cheeks didn’t budge. “Then again,” she added, “so will dating Jack.”
Heather remembered the effort it had taken to give a small polite nod while she waited for Jack to say something, to tell his mother she was out of line. He hadn’t said a word.
She had never looked in the mirror again without thinking about that casual barb. She inspected her reflection for another moment, gave herself one more poke, then turned off the bathroom light.
Nobody wants a stage face.Especially not cute, bark-laughing Australians with perfect butts.
Chapter 5
The next morning, Heather entered the correct locker room on the first try. She smiled slightly as she filled up her water bottle at the fountain, remembering the look of surprise on Marcus’s face as he’d found her standing in the doorway yesterday. For a split second, she allowed herself to picture what she’d seen justbeforehe’d turned around—that butt, those sinewy thighs dusted with pale brown hair, that inviting muscular dimple at the base of his spine—but then she cleared her throat and, reluctantly, cleared the image from her mind.
Her bottle filled, she changed into a leotard and pulled a pair of tights over it. After sliding a few extra pins into her bun, just to be safe, she headed to Studio B. Even half an hour before class, there were already a dozen dancers here, some doing sit-ups with headphones in, others on the floor stretching or standing at the barre doing calf raises. One woman was on the ground, supporting herself on her forearms as she worked her quads with a narrow foam roller, wincing.
Heather returned to the same spot she’d taken at the barre yesterday and was about to start her usual warm-up routine—jumping jacks, crunches, then a series of stretches, always in that order—when someone called her name. She looked to see Alice walking toward her, in a baggy ANB sweatshirt and leggings, her long hair in a low ponytail.
“Hi again,” Alice said. “Are you feeling better this morning?”
“Much,” Heather said, starting her jumping jacks.
Alice joined in, and for a moment Heather thought she might be making fun of her, but Alice’s face held no trace of mockery.
“How many?” Alice asked, a little breathlessly.
“Forty, then thirty crunches,” Heather said, the voice distorted by her jumping.
“Yes ma’am. Are you settling in okay?”
“Yeah, though I’m a little daunted by the idea of taking a full class with Peter today. He’s intense.” Jumping jacks done, Heather lay on the floor with her knees up and started crunching.
“Oh, he won’t teach today,” Alice said, imitating her. “He only teaches once a week, and anyway, Thursday is company day.”
“What do you mean?”
“The company members take turns teaching Thursday class,” Alice said. “And lucky for you, today is my day.”
“Oh, so you’re a principal?”
“No, I’m in the corps,” Alice said, managing to combine a shrug with a crunch.
“Oh, wow,” Heather said vaguely, but then she remembered something she’d read in the press coverage she’d found: Most companies occasionally let principal dancers teach morning class, but Peter believed in giving all company members, even those in the corps, a chance to practice leadership. Especially the women, he’d told the paper, since most ballet companies were still run by men.
“So everyone in the company really teaches?” she asked Alice. She counted out her three final crunches, then climbed to her feet to stretch.
