Page 114 of The Dangerous Dance

"Liam," I say. His name in my voice. Not the operational register. The other version. The one I did not know I had until him.

He lifts his head. His eyes are dark. Not just the colour. The quality.

"I want to go slower," he says. "I want."

"I know," I say. "But I also want."

"I know."

His hands move from my hips. He crouches. Goes down to his knees on the studio floor, the wooden boards under him, and this position, him kneeling in front of me, my back against the barre, does something to my breathing that I cannot control.

He looks up at me. Not subservience. The deliberate choice to put himself here, to look at me from here, to give me this angle.

"May I," he says. His hands at the waistband of my practice pants.

"You may."

He pulls them down slowly. Over my hips, over my thighs. I step out of them. Out of my underwear too, which he takes at the same time, and then I am standing in nothing but the ballet slippers he chose.

The slippers. I have not forgotten them. The way they feel on my feet. The way they ground me to this floor.

He is looking at me now. All of me. His eyes move up my body, my feet in the slippers, my legs, the muscle built by years of training, the place between my thighs, my stomach, my chest, my face. With the thoroughness of someone memorising something.

"You're shaking," he says.

"I know."

"Is it."

"It's want," I say. "It's not fear."

Something changes in his face when I say that. Something releases.

He puts his hands on my thighs. Not moving up yet. Just there. The warmth of his palms against my skin. His thumbs on the inside of my thighs, not pushing, not parting, just resting.

"I have thought about this," he says again. "In the week since I found this room. I thought about you against the barre. I thought."

"Show me," I say for the second time.

He parts my thighs.

His mouth finds me.

The heat and wet of his tongue. I make a sound I have never made before, a sound that comes from somewhere I did not know existed, and it echoes in the studio and I watch us in the mirror. His dark head between my thighs. My white body against the wooden barre. My hands in his hair. The reflection of it. The fact of it.

He is not rushing. He is, my mind supplies the word before I can stop it, choreographing. The way his tongue moves, finding what makes me gasp and then staying there, the pressure, the rhythm. My hips move against his mouth and he lets them. He adjusts, he follows, he does not try to control the movement, he meets me where I am.

My leg shifts. Instinct. The trained instinct, the body doing what the body knows, and my thigh comes up, my foot finding the barre next to my hip, opening myself further to him, and he makes a sound against me, a sound that says something about what this position does to him, and his hands grip my thighs harder.

"Yes," I say. "There. There."

He does not change what he is doing. He keeps doing it. The consistency of a man who knows exactly what he is doing to me and is choosing to do exactly that until I.

I come against his mouth.

Not the hurried version. Not the performed version. The actual one. The one that builds from somewhere deep and takes my breath and my coherence and my knees and everything else, and I am gripping the barre with both hands to stay upright and his hands are holding my thighs apart and his mouth is still on me, working me through it.

"God," I say. Just that. Nothing else.