“Happy now? Drive.” She leaned back in the seat and glowered out the window. He turned the radio back on and drove them towards the main drag and then towards the Spit Bridge.
“Ah, shit,” he said under his breath, as they drove down the hill towards the bridge. Traffic was backed up on their side of the road, and the other side was empty. “It’s about to open.”
“What’s about to open?” she asked, frowning. It was the first time she’d spoken in fifteen minutes.
“The bridge. It opens a few times a day to let boats through, and cars have to stop and wait. It only takes a few minutes, but we must have just caught it.”
“So I get to spend extra time with you. Delightful.”
Nick looked over at her as he stopped the car and turned off the engine. She looked paler than she had yesterday, and her eyes were puffy and pink lined.
“You look tired,” he said.
“Gee, thanks,” she replied sarcastically. “No need for euphemisms, Nick. You can just tell me I look like shit next time.”
“You look like shit this time,” he said, matter-of-factly. She scowled across the console, but she didn’t fire back at him. She looked like she barely had the energy to play this game. “What, no snappy comeback? You’re not going to make up a new medical condition for me?”
Carly said nothing. She turned and stared straight ahead at the unmoving cars, and he watched her profile for a long moment as she tucked her bottom lip under one of her teeth and worried it. He was about to resign himself to sitting here for another fifteen minutes in prickling silence when she spoke.
“What’s retirement like?” She said it tentatively, quietly. Without snark or heat, like she was genuinely curious.
It’s shit, Nick thought.I don’t know who I am anymore. Or where I belong. Or what’s going to happen next.
“It’s fine,” he said, doing his best to sound confident. “I was lucky that I got to choose to retire, rather than having it thrust on me by injury or something. And the French are generous about their pensions for dancers, which helped the transition.” What hadn’t helped was withdrawing that pension early and blowing through most of it, leaving him with a dwindling bank account and no idea where his next paycheck was coming from.
“Do you miss dancing?” Carly asked, still looking straight ahead. He turned in his seat and copied her.
“All the time,” he said to the license plate of the car in front of him. “I miss the adrenaline rush of performing. And the feeling of working on something for hours in the studio and worrying right up until the moment you do it on stage that it’s not gonna work, but then your body just does it, and it’s perfect, and all the work was worth it.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her nodding.
“I love that feeling,” she said quietly. “Like your body knew the whole time what it was doing, and you just had to let it.”
Exactly, he thought. Like he could trust his own limbs, his own ligaments, to do what he needed them to do. He didn’t trust his body now, didn’t trust that he could take what he saw and translate it onto film. He used to be able to see a shape in his mind and make his body mimic it. Now, that connection felt broken.
“I miss the music, too. There aren’t a lot of jobs where you can hear a world-class orchestra play five nights a week for free.”
Carly scoffed. “Free, except for all the broken bones and messed up muscles, and the lack of a social life outside of work, and the hundred-dollar shoes.”
“Okay, it’s not totally free. But is there anything better than a full orchestra playingSwan Lakefive metres away from you?”
“Ugh, I hateSwan Lake.”
“What?”
“I hate,” she repeated, enunciating every consonant, “Swan Lake.”
“I heard you. Why?”
“Boy meets girl, boy promises to love girl forever, boy gets distracted by random enchanted hot chick and decides to marry her instead? And we’re supposed to think this is some great love story? It’s basically Hinge but with feathers.”
Nick frowned. “Well, he does die at the end.”
“They both die! And she dies first! You ever notice how all the women in ballet end up dead? Giselle, Juliet, Odette, La Sylphide, they all die at the end.”
“Not true, Giselle dies at the end of act one.”
Carly groaned and rolled her eyes dramatically. “God, you’re a pedant. I knew you wouldn’t get it.”
