Page 34 of Pas de Don't
Marcus stepped behind her, her lavender and sweat scent enveloping him again. Wisps of her dark hair escaped her bun, and clung, damp and wavy, to her neck. In that moment he wanted nothing more in the world than to gently sweep them away with his fingers, to brush his lips across the skin there. Would she want that? Would it make her shiver? Moan? Reach behind her and pull him hard against her?
Jesus, fucking stop it, he chastised himself.Focus. Marcus cleared his throat, and Heather jumped at the sound. He gave his hands a little shake, then placed them low on her waist, right where she needed them. Even through her leotard, he felt the warmth of her skin, and the tautness of the muscles. Was she holding her breath again?
“I’ve got you,” he said, his voice more gravelly than he expected, and he felt her soften as she released a puff of air. She rose up on both pointe shoes, then extended one leg low in front of her.
“Ready?” she muttered back.
“Whenever you are,” he said, nodding.
She stretched her leg out farther, then pulled it in tight, the motion rotating her entire body into several dizzyingly fast pirouettes. His hands worked at her waist, keeping her steady and spinning, his fingers spread wide so he touched her in a dozen different places as she moved. It had been months since he’d danced witha partner, let alone a new one, but he could feel she was perfectly balanced over the box of her pointe shoe, spinning seamlessly. With every rotation, the lavender-scented air thickened around him, pressing the scent of Heather and the breeze of her motion against every inch of his bare skin. Time slowed, and if someone had asked him, he wouldn’t have been able to say if he’d been holding her for an hour or a minute.
“Just six,” Peter called suddenly, “it’s just six pirouettes here.”
Marcus heard Heather’s gasp, and he moved a hand quickly at her waist to stop her motion.
“Sorry,” he whispered, pressing his palms against her to make sure she was secure and balanced. He thought—no, he could havesworn—he felt a tiny, almost imperceptible shiver, and the thought made his heart race. He kept his hands where they were, not certain he’d ever find the will to remove them from her.
“Excellent, you two, that looked lovely,” Peter said, and Marcus gave him a half-hearted smile. Excellent, except for the bit where he forgot where he was, and who Heather was, and how totally off-limits she would always be. He dropped his hands from her like he’d been caught stealing and shoved them into his pockets.
“Justin, did you see how wide his fingers were spread on her torso?” Peter asked. “Why don’t you give that a go and see how it feels? Heather, can we try it one more time?”
Heather nodded, and Justin resumed his place behind her. Marcus hastily returned to his seat as Justin and Heather set up for the pirouette again, but he barely noticed how it went. His head was still full of her scent, and his fingers still tingled with the memory of her body stiffening and relaxing under his touch.
Chapter 10
“Very nice, Heather, very nice,” Peter called approvingly across the studio. “Thank you,” he gestured at the pianist, who stopped playing at once. Heather stopped too, holding her ribs and taking deep, steadying breaths. The solo at the end of first act ofGisellewasn’t technically difficult, but there was a lot of running around the stage, and it took a lot of work to make going mad look graceful.
“Make sure you really sweep that left arm nice and wide,” Peter said, putting his notepad down on the piano to demonstrate. “You want to make sure the entire audience feels her despair, not just those people who are lucky enough to sit close.” He flashed an affable smile at the reporter perched on a plastic chair at the front of the studio furiously scribbling in her own notepad. Peter had introduced her as Ivy Page, of theSydney Morning Sunarts section, the journalist who reported Heather’s arrival at the company.
Ivy had shaken Heather’s hand with a hasty and somewhat flustered-sounding “Wow, so great to meet you,” and then added quickly that she was a big fan, and, of course, a former ballet dancer.
If there was one thing Heather knew about journalists who covered ballet, it was that most of them had done ballet as children and saw journalism as a way to stay in the ballet world after they stopped dancing. They all loved ballet, but they weren’t always kind to ballet dancers: a few years ago, a prominent dance reviewer had written some snarky remarks about an NYB dancer’s weight, and then had doubled down on his comments even after the dancer publicly revealed she’d struggled for years with an eating disorder.
As for Heather’s own interactions with the press, they’d loved the idea of her and Jack, the golden boy and the scholarship kid. She’d loved it too, at least at the start. The interviews would go well enough—Jack would charm the reporter and sing Heather’s praises—but when she saw his words in print, they always left her feeling unsettled.
“She’s working hard to become the artist I know she’ll be one day,” he’d once been quoted for a cover story about them forBarremagazine. Heather had glowed at the praise when he said it. But when she’d seen the words on the page, they didn’t have the same effect. They made her feel small and condescended to. And when she’d mentioned it to him, he’d gotten defensive.
Can’t you see I was complimenting you, Heather? What’s wrong with you?
Heather had eyed Ivy cautiously as the reporter had arrived and slipped off her heels at the studio door to preserve the flooring, flashing Peter a bright smile. Now, Ivy sat at the front of the studio in her dark-blue jeans, black blazer, and leopard-print T-shirt, her light-brown bob tucked behind her ears and her glossy black plastic glasses catching the sunlight.
Ivy took what looked like very thorough notes as they rehearsed the act one finale, in which Giselle discovered that the man she thought she was going to marry wasn’t who he said he was—and he was engaged to someone else. The act closed with Giselle dying of madness and a broken heart, while her mother sobbed over herdead body. Albrecht, whose lie had just been revealed in front of the whole village, looked on in horror, then fled the scene.
Later in the ballet, he would beg for her forgiveness, and she would give it to him, even though it wouldn’t bring her back to life. She’d be doomed to spend the rest of eternity as a forest spirit, and he’d get to go back to his castle and marry his noble fiancée.
“Just one more time, I think, Heather,” Peter said after she caught her breath and sipped some water. In the back of the studio, Katarina Antonov, an ANB principal dancer who would dance Giselle on the nights Heather didn’t, padded around in sweatpants and thick socks, marking the choreography to jog her muscle memory; she’d have her own rehearsal with Peter once Ivy left.
Heather took her place downstage, and the pianist started the tremulous and unsettling Mad Scene music. On stage, Heather would pull her hair out of its bun to signal to the audience that Giselle was coming undone in her grief. Thankfully she didn’t have to do it in rehearsal. After a few minutes, as the music reached its crescendo, she threw herself on the ground on her back, her head lolled to the side and her legs crossed at the ankles, toes pointed. Even in death, Giselle had to have nice feet.
“Lovely, lovely,” Peter called as Heather rolled up to standing, brushed off her leotard, and checked the security of her bun. Peter gave a few taps of applause, and Ivy joined in, beaming. Heather bobbed a little curtsy, and Ivy slipped her notebook back in her handbag and stood.
“That was wonderful, thank you so much for letting me watch,” she said to Heather. Heather gave her a polite, wary smile, and thought about the nickname she’d heard Justin use for her. “Poison Ivy,” he’d called her yesterday, when Heather had mentioned she’d be sitting in on rehearsals. That didn’t bode well at all. Or perhaps she and Justin just had some bad history.
It had been a long, hard week of rehearsal, but Heather was starting to feel like it was paying off. She and Justin were way more in sync than before, and Peter had decided one rehearsal with Marcushad been enough to get them on the right track. Thank goodness for that. She’d been a mess after that one session, her muscles wound tight and her mind full of the sure but gentle way his hands moved over her torso, and the heat that radiated from his body into hers. Even after she’d rushed home, thrown her leotard in the hamper, and taken a long shower, she could smell him on her skin, the same enticing musk she’d inhaled in the fitting room.
I’ve got you, he’d whispered, and even now, days later, the memory of his low, reassuring words made goosebumps erupt across her shoulders.
She definitely did not need Marcus showing up to any more rehearsals.
