for me. But because I wanted him to kiss me more than I’d ever wanted anything. More than breath.
And when he took my mouth, it wasn’t as if he owned it. Or me. It was as if kissing me was the answer to a question neither one of us wanted to ask. An answer that thudded in me like stone.
But I didn’t pull away.
His kiss was sweet and hot at once. It was searing. And yet it filled me up like a sob.
He pulled back, his mouth close to mine, and I knew.
That nothing would be the same. Least of all me.
“My name is Sebastian,” he said, because it turned out there was always a way to make it worse. To make it hurt. “Sebastian Dumont. I want more, little dancer, but if you won’t give it to me, all I can do is make sure that every single moment we have together, tonight, counts.”
And that was exactly what he did.
Again and again and again.
Darcy
BACK HOME, I told myself that everything was exactly the same.
New York was as noisy and exhilarating, anonymous and comfortable as I’d left it. I had the same life, the same responsibilities, the same routine. Morning class and endless, intense rehearsals as we geared up for the new season.
I was the same person who had left for a weekend in Paris.
I was fine.
“You’re welcome,” Annabelle had purred when I walked into our apartment after my long flight home. “I told you that you needed this and I was right. Think how much fun we’re going to have here now that you—”
“I’m not doing it again.” I dropped my bag on the floor and wanted to frown at her. Sternly. But I made myself smile instead, because I didn’t want her to know that I was…rocked. I wanted her to think I was like her and completely at my ease. “I wanted to do it once. And I did, so I’m done.”
Then, no matter how much she begged, I didn’t tell her a single thing about Sebastian. I told her about the performance. I commiserated with the fact she’d stayed here to understudy when, of course, Claudia hadn’t had so much as a stray sniffle and likely wouldn’t. I talked about the thrill of the burlesque, the unwieldy costume, and how different it had all been. I told her every detail I could recall about the club she’d been dying to see for years—at least, all the ones I could share under the conditions of the NDA.
But I kept Sebastian to myself.
Sebastian, who had been absolutely true to his word. Sebastian, who had kissed me and fucked me, made me cry his name, made me sob, and made me laugh. Over and over again.
We hadn’t gotten any sleep. After that meal and my refusal to extend our arrangement, he had applied himself to the task as if bent on leaving his mark on every square inch of my skin.
And he did.
But the fantasy was over. I’d walked out of that club into a sullen, wet Parisian morning—and the rest of my life—and I hadn’t looked back. I’d forced myself to stay awake and reasonably alert, and had marched through a few museums before whiling away a couple of hours at a café. I’d checked my bank balance and had just about fainted.
Then, finally, I’d gone to the airport a far richer woman than I’d been when I arrived, and slept all the way home on the plane.
I’d left the fantasy where it belonged. In a club I couldn’t access, across an ocean from me. I told myself that in time all that sensation would fade. My memories of it would become less vivid. That intense longing in me would dissipate.
I could comfort myself with the money I’d earned, and I did.
But one week passed, then another, and I kept waiting for my body to feel like…mine again.
Because, try as I might, I felt…different. And I knew it was me, because life in the corps was as it always had been and always would be. We danced. We obsessed over a wrist here, an ankle there. We practiced our steps, mastered our timing. As the weather grew colder, Annabelle and I spent less time running in Central Park and more time on elliptical machines. Sometimes we swam. It didn’t matter what I did, I didn’t feel right. I looked fine. As close to perfect as I could get, as required.
But I didn’t feel like me anymore.
I could feel that night in Paris in the way I danced. In every step and every tired muscle in my body. And maybe, I thought as yet another week passed and I still couldn’t quite inhabit my own body the way I used to so easily, it wasn’t Sebastian at all. He had touched something in me I hadn’t known was there, that was true. I didn’t try to deny that even to myself.
But I was beginning to wonder if the burlesque had changed my dancing for good.
Or not the dancing, not really. I could perform at the same capacity and did, because if I didn’t I’d get cut. I was fine. But my drive had shifted.
Before I’d gone to Paris, my life had revolved around a certain grim acceptance that this was the way it was and nothing could change it. I would dance until I was cut from the corps. I would never ascend to a higher level as a soloist—always a bridesmaid and never a bride, my friend Winston used to say—and I would call that a career. I would be grateful for it, and someday I feared I would miss these days.
If I had any future plans, they were dim and insubstantial. There were those who parlayed their time in the company into teaching for the Knickerbocker. But that, too, was a political quagmire, and I already knew that I would have to be far better than I was—far better, yet still not good enough to bloom into a prima ballerina role—to shift over to company staff, much less become a ballet master in my own right. I’d once seen a TV show about a former ballerina who went off to some picturesque village somewhere and opened her own ballet school, and when I imagined anything at all after these years of the corps, I imagined that.
Late at night, while Annabelle and her lovers made their typical ruckus, I didn’t lie in bed with my hands between my legs any longer, getting myself off on my fantasies. Sebastian had far outstripped any fantasy I might have had. And I didn’t really see the point of pretending my fingers were him when I knew better. Instead, I lay awake and tried to imagine myself as one of my early ballet teachers. I tried to imagine myself patiently molding little girls without crushing their dreams. Or attempting to see the beauty in their waddling, ghastly attempts at ballet’s contradictory willowy crispness. Trying all the while to pretend I wasn’t desolate for the life I’d been forced to leave behind.
But no matter how I tried to imagine it, I couldn’t quite see myself in that role.
The next time I took the train north from the city, using my day off for one of my command performance dinners with my parents, I tried to imagine that this was my commute home. That I’d come down into the city to see Annabelle, perhaps, and was now returning to my small little suburban life. Back to the Darcy James Ballet School, where ambitious mamas would bully their little girls into tutus, bully me into pretending they could dance, and
