Page 21 of For a Goode Time Call…
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s…I—I’m not used to it. It’s not…me. I don’t know.” She looked away from me, twisted her body so her leg was out of reach.
“Cass.” I touched her shoulder. “Look at me.”
She remained turned away a moment longer, and then slowly turned to face me, lifting her eyes to mine. “What.” Almost petulant, but full of conflicted pain and confusion.
I took her hand in mine. My palm to the back of her hand. Placed her hand over her scar. “Touch it. It’s you.”
“I don’t want it to be me!” she bit out.
“But it is.”
She shot to her feet and moved a few steps away, arms crossed in front of her to hug herself. “You’re not my fucking therapist.”
I stood, moved up behind her. Not touching, but close enough I knew she felt me there. “No, I ain’t.”
“So why do you care if I accept my stupid scar?”
“Why shouldn’t I care?” I hesitated. “You’re my friend. I care.”
She turned, looked up at me. “Friend?” She narrowed her eyes. “I felt you staring at me. Do you look at all your friends like that?”
“Friend is a broad term.” I kept my eyes on hers. “Could be more to it.”
A lift of her chin. “Ahhh. Now we come to it.”
“Me takin’ care of you when you got sick? That was me being a friend. Wasn’t nothin’ more to it. You can’t stand there and act like there was.” I held her gaze. “I’ve seen you lookin’ at me too, Cassie. You wanna play that, we can play that.”
She deflated a little. “I know.” Looked up at me. “Friends is good.” A sigh. “I’ve never seen anyone like you before. Never met anyone like you.” She said all this with a carefully neutral expression on her features.
“Ain’t too many folks like me.”
“No, there aren’t.” She blinked at me, a barely there hint of a smile on her lips. “And I’ve been all over the place.”
“Like?”
She shrugged. “I was lead dancer for a professional European troupe. We toured the world. I’ve danced in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Prague, Vienna, Cologne, Madrid, Lisbon, and Paris—obviously, since I lived there. I toured Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Kyoto, Rio, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, and the usual places here in the States—Chicago, New York, San Francisco, LA, Detroit, Atlanta. That’s off the top of my head, the big cities. Lots of smaller performances, smaller venues in between.”
“Wow. You been all over the world, huh?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I have.”
“What’s it like out there?”
She laughed. “Big. Very, very big. Bigger than you can even imagine. And so, so wildly different, one place to another. It’s hard to comprehend what a totally different culture is like until you see it first hand.”
Silence. Oddly companionable.
She stood up again, paced away, limping gently. Stood with arms crossed, hugging herself once more. I remained where I was, sitting, waiting.
“I’m a mess right now, Ink.” Her voice was quiet, soft. “I don’t know which way is up, if you want the god’s honest truth. Who I am, what I am, what I want, where I’m going. I don’t know anything right now.”
I kept my silence. She needed space to let it out, not advice, not sympathy, but the silence of a true listener, and not merely the space in which I waited for my turn to speak.
She went to the window and looked out at the dark street. Her shoulders hunched. She looked so small, so fragile, so delicate—I wanted to gather her in my arms and hold her and shield her from the world. Instead, I tried to reduce my presence, the visceral magnitude that is me. I let her fill the space.
“I had everything I wanted.” Shaky voice, slow tremulous inhale. “I worked for it, worked my ass off. Danced until my feet bled. Danced until my legs literally gave out and I could barely crawl to bed. Ate clean. Didn’t party. Went to the gym. Worked on technique. I’d spend literally hours perfecting a single turn, a single leap. My days could be spent practicing a single thirty-second sequence in a routine—over and over and over and over again, until I didn’t just have it perfect, but could not physically forget it because I’d done it so fucking many times. You just cannot imagine the dedication, work, and sacrifice it requires to get where I was. Forget talent, sure, I have talent.Had, at least. But talent doesn’t mean shit unless you work your ass off to be perfect.”
