PROLOGUE: JOHN
TWO YEARS AGO
The music of Tchaikovsky has always quickened my pulse, but for the rest of my life, hearing this gorgeous waltz will direct all the blood in my body straight to the least intelligent part of me. It will remind me of grace, movement, passion, and one impossibly flexible, feminine, saucy creature. It will remind me of what is possible in life.
Even now—seventy feet away from her—surrounded by strangers in this theatre, I am brought back to life in a way that onlyshecan enliven me.
Olivia.
Oh. Live. Ee.Yeah.
Ohhhhhh-livia.
Would-be innocent love of my youth.
Somewhat oblivious, mostly menacing tormentor of my raging teenage hormones.
Secret star of my filthiest forbidden fantasies as a young man.
I am a genius in so many ways, but it’s stupid that this is the first time I’ve attended a professional ballet performance. I went to one of Olivia’s dance recitals when she was twelve,but that was girls in leotards and a lady playing the piano in a warm studio. This is grand and breathtaking on every level. The audience is entirely captivated by the orchestra, the projected moonlight on the dark scrim, and the members of the Pittsburgh Ballet who are gliding and fluttering across the stage before us in perfect formation. It’s stunning in the most gentle way imaginable.
Like my best friend’s little sister.
Most people are here for the overall experience and the prima ballerina, but my eyes always find Olivia. She is in the corps de ballet. An “apprentice,” it says in the program, but surely I’m not the only one who can see that she is the most beautiful and riveting dancer of the entire company.
Her long reddish-brown hair, which she petulantly informed me years ago is called “auburn, you dummy,” is styled up and slicked back under a pretty headband of feathers like all the others. Her white costume is the same as the rest of the dancers in the company. But the way she moves—no one else on earth moves like that. The way her back arches when she’s standing on pointe, the way she extends her arms and gracefully lifts her leg up…sohigh…
These swans are serious and she is in complete control of her body, but I see her struggling to control her expression of joy. I see the way she raises her chin, elongating that beautiful neck, glancing downward through those impossibly long lashes. I see the delight in movement beneath the precision and the totally unique spirit as she moves in unison with the others.
Even in the dim stage lighting, her delicate features bewitch me.
Even in that elegant tutu, her subtle curves threaten my judiciousness.
She is poetry in motion, and I’m a brain that happens to be attached to a body.
While I have always used more of my brain than most people do, I can see now that there is so much more I could be doing with my remarkably fit body.For years, Olivia has been the young woman who invades my brain, reminding me that I have a body. A body that wants hers. Every line of logic has led me to the conclusion that we do not belong together. And yet…every memory of her fragrance, of the words from her lips leads me back to the part of me that is wordless, free of thoughts. In that place I know that I will only ever feel whole if I’m with her.
She doesn’t know I’m here. Her brother definitely doesn’t know I’m here. I didn’t know I would be here until six hours ago, but it’s one of the best spontaneous decisions I’ve ever made.
Now I understand why she decided to devote her life to this.
Now I understand that she’s brilliant.
Now I know that I will do whatever I can to help her achieve her goals.
I’m having a full-body shiver of acknowledgment and joy, like the moment I realized I actually understood Einstein’s mathematical equation for the theory of general relativity. After years of grasping the concept, learning algebra, calculus, multivariable calculus, linear algebra, differential geometry, tensor calculus—I finally comprehended the actual mathematics of the field equation. Just like that elegant equation that describes how matter and energy tell spacetime how to curve, this realization connects me to a moment in the future when she’s mine, to the moment in the past when I first admitted to myself that I was attracted to her. Everything about my life that matters is suddenly illuminated—the history and expansion of my universe. How and why things have evolved the way they have. Olivia is curved spacetime, and without knowing it, she is telling me how to move.
This is a moment I’ll remember my whole life, like when I had the idea for my start-up.
One day, I’ll look back on this moment when I realized that I’m going to marry my best friend’s little sister.
We haven’t seen each other in nearly four years. She probably still thinks of me as an annoying nerd. She probably thinks I dislike her. She might not think of me at all. But one day. The gravitational pull goes both ways. Mine will only grow stronger.
I wait for most of the audience to clear out of the building before taking the lavender bouquet to the interior door with a sign that saysTo Backstage. My assistant had to arrange a rush order from a high-end florist in town and have it delivered to my hotel earlier. This wasafterthe concierge at the hotel had thoroughly disappointed me by ordering a bouquet of lavender-coloredflowers. Apparently, lavender herbs aren’t in season here in the winter, which is extremely inconvenient. But it had to be lavender. I could not present Olivia Montgomery with anything less than her favorite flower.
There is a polite young man with an iPad who’s asking people for their names and checking a list. I’m not on a list. Why didn’t anyone think to put me on a list? He’ll have to talk to someone on his headset to ask her if it’s okay to send me back. I’ll have to wait around and make small talk with strangers. Strangers who know nothing about technology or math or engineering of any kind. Strangers who will probably want to talk about ballet or the weather. I don’t know enough about ballet yet, and I refuse to talk about the weather to anyone who doesn’t understand at least the basics of thermodynamics, atmospheric physics, and fluid dynamics. It may not be worth it.
There’s a leather jacket–clad guy in front of me who has long-ish sandy-blond hair. He smells like pot, synthetic musk, and artsy-fartsy bullshit. He’s talking to his agent on his cell phone, and I can see that he wears an engraved silver ring on his pinky finger. I dislike him immensely. He is holding a generic bouquet of red roses that he probably picked up at a gas station.
