As she walked, she’d snapped photos and sent them to Carly, who’d responded hours later with heart emojis—and a gentle reminder that she’d requested photos of beautiful men, not beautiful homes.
Heather had bit her lip, wondering if she should tell Carly about the beautiful man she’d kissed in the fitting room on Friday afternoon. But she decided against it and pushed thoughts of Marcus’s mouth, and the cheeky dimple right next to it, out of her mind.
Let’s just pretend it never happened, he’d said, and she’d agreed. She’d been trying all weekend. Really, she had. She’d been trying not to think about the way his hands tightened around her waist,the hunger he communicated through his fingertips as he pulled her toward him. She had been failing, miserably.
On Sunday, she’d walked farther afield and found a beautiful secret garden tucked away on the hillside above the water. She’d spent an awestruck hour there, wandering among the native trees and beautiful sculptures. From a bench in the garden, she enjoyed yet more views of the sparkling sapphire water, with hardly any other people in sight. It reminded her of the few rare spots in Central Park where, if you lay down on the grass, you could pretend the skyscrapers and the clogged city streets weren’t right beyond the trees, that you weren’t surrounded by millions of other people.
She’d also sat down with the company manual she’d found in a kitchen drawer and read it cover to cover. In addition to the reforms she’d read about in the press, she found policies about skin-tone tights and shoes—dancers may wear tights and shoes matching their skin tone and women will be provided with tights in the colour of their choosing—and about hair—hair length, colour, and texture may be of the dancer’s choosing, and dancers are not required to obtain permission from management before altering their hairstyles.
And there, on page twenty-seven, in black and white:Romantic or sexual fraternisation between dancers is strictly prohibited and will result in immediate dismissal from the company.
Pas de Don’t.
Heather had seized a pen and underlined the passage, trying to remind herself of what was at stake. It wasn’t just a thrilling, muscle-melting kiss in a fitting room. It was her career on the line.
By the time she’d fallen into bed on Sunday night, she was pleasantly fatigued by the sun and the walking, and she’d woken up this morning feeling rested and ready to start rehearsing. Then she’d remembered. She’d have to see Marcus again today. She wouldn’t be able to avoid him; now that he was cleared to dance, he’d be back in company class. She’d thought about him in the garden, and as she shopped for groceries, and as she sewed ribbons onto her pointe shoes for the week. And now she was trying not to thinkabout him, again, as she sat in a deep lunge on the floor of Studio B, stretching out her hip flexors before class.
“Good morning, Miss America,” Alice said cheerfully as she entered the studio and saw Heather.
“Hi, Alice,” Heather replied, with what she hoped looked like a normal, friendly smile and not an I-was-just-thinking-about-your-best-friend’s-mouth smile. “How was your weekend?”
“Not bad.” Alice tossed her dance bag under one of the barres in the middle of the studio and joined Heather on the floor. She wore her baggy black ANB sweatshirt over her leotard and tights, and her hair was up in a high, loose bun.
“Me and my brother braved Ikea, for a new couch.” Alice spoke like a lot of Australians did, Heather noticed, with what sounded like a question mark at the end of most sentences.Me and my brother braved Ikea? For a new couch?
“Do you live together?” Heather asked. “Does he dance, too?”
Alice shook her head. “No, he works in IT. He did ballet for a little while, when we were kids, but the teasing was just too much. It was bad enough being one of the few Asian kids at school, but being a Chinese boy who did ballet? A nightmare.”
Heather shook her head in dismay. She’d heard stories like that before, of boys who loved ballet but were driven out of it by bullying. There had only been a few boys at her little Yonkers dance school to begin with, and by the time she left for the NYB school in the city, they’d all dropped out.
“So, anyway,” Alice was saying, “he dropped ballet and took up footy instead.”
“Footy...is that what Australians call soccer?” Heather asked.
“Nah, we call soccer soccer. Footy is Aussie rules football, and then there’s also Rugby union and Rugby league.”
“Wait,” Heather said, switching legs before looking at Alice, confused. “There are three kinds of football here?”
“Four. Union and league are two different codes. And Will was annoyingly good at all of them. What about you?” Alice asked,reaching into her bag and pulling out a container of hairpins, “how was your first weekend in Sydney?”
“Pretty good,” Heather said as she rolled onto her back and pulled one knee up to her chest. “I think I’m getting my bearings now, although I almost missed my stop this morning.”Because you stopped counting the bus stops and started thinking about Marcus.“Marcus was very helpful.”
“Ha, I bet he was,” Alice said through clenched teeth. Heather’s stomach lurched. Did Alice know what had happened? She looked over and was relieved to see Alice had bun pins between her teeth and was pulling them out one by one to stick them in her hair.
“Speaking of which,” Alice said, with a glance at the studio door. “Here’s the helpful man himself.”
Heather willed herself not to sit up too quickly, despite the bolt of excitement that shot through her body. She sat up slowly, deliberately, trying to look nonchalant, as if Marcus’s arrival was neither here nor there to her. But she couldn’t stop her eyes from flying to the studio door, where Marcus had just walked in with his cane and his boot, his brown hair disheveled from the wind. Was it possible he’d become more attractive since Friday? Or had she just failed to commit his sharp jawline and muscled forearms to memory?
Marcus glanced around the studio, looking a little nervous, then his eyes fell on Alice and Heather. For a fleeting moment, he and Heather made eye contact. His eyebrows gave the slightest flick upward, and he gave her a friendly smile.Friends, and nothing more.
“Oi!” Alice called happily. “Welcome back!” She beckoned him over, and he deposited his cane against the studio wall and joined them. He sat next to Alice and gave her a quick one-armed hug.
“Good to be back,” he said to her. “It’s about bloody time.” Even from five feet away, Heather caught his scent, that same faint musk she’d noticed in the fitting room, and she hastily busied herself with her pointe shoes, rummaging in her bag for her gel toe pouches.
Marcus unwrapped his foot from the boot and pulled on a pair of canvas slippers. From the corner of her eye, Heather watchedhis calf muscles flex under his olive skin as he worked his feet into the shoes. He snapped the crisscrossed elastics against the tops of his feet with what looked like immense satisfaction, then rolled his sweatpants back down and got carefully to his feet.
Heather stole a look at Alice, who was in downward dog, pedaling out her own calves, then glanced up at Marcus hopefully.
