Page 117 of The Dangerous Dance

He moves faster. The urgency of a man past the edge of his own control, and I watch him in the mirror. The way his rhythm loses its precision and becomes something rawer, something he is not managing anymore.

"Nadia."

"Yes. Yes, come."

He does.

He buries himself deep and his hands grip my hips and his face presses into the back of my neck and he makes a sound, not words, just sound, just the noise of a man coming inside a woman he wants, his cock pulsing inside me, the heat of him filling me.

We stay like that.

His forehead on my neck. His hands on my hips. His breathing rough and uneven against my spine. My hands on the barre, holding on. The after. Not separate yet. Still joined.

The studio is quiet except for our breathing.

The work lights are warm on our skin. The floor is good under my feet in the slippers he chose. The mirrors show us. Tangled. Undone.

He kisses the back of my neck. Soft.

"Are you all right," he says.

I laugh. Just a small one. "Yes."

"I didn't hurt."

"No." I turn my head. I find his mouth. I kiss him. "You didn't hurt me."

He pulls out slowly, carefully, the tenderness of him now after the roughness of him before. I feel the loss of him, and then his arms are around me, turning me, pulling me against his chest.

I press my face into his neck. He smells like sweat and the faint trace of his cologne from earlier, and underneath all of it, just him.

He holds me.

The rain starts while we're still in the studio.

I hear it first — the specific percussion of it on the old brick exterior, building from tentative to committed in the way of winter rain that has decided to mean it. He hears it a moment after I do and we look at each other in the lateral warmth of the work lights and the quality of the moment is the quality of something that knows it's about to end and doesn't need to be extended because it was exactly what it was.

"Ready," he says.

"The coat," I say.

He finds it. He holds it for me, which is a gesture I receive in the specific way I've been learning to receive his gestures — not as performance, as habit.

I button it.

He turns off the work lights.

We go out the side door into the rain, which has gone from tentative to enthusiastic in the time we were inside, and the street is wet and dark and reflecting the yellow of the streetlights and the two men at forty feet emerge from a doorway with the expressions of people who are professionally committed to not commenting on the fact that their principal and his —

Whatever I am.

Are emerging from an unlocked side door in Carroll Gardens at midnight in the rain.

We walk back.

Not quickly. There is no operational reason to walk slowly in the cold rain — the sensible thing is to cover the three blocks at the speed three blocks in cold rain deserve.

We walk slowly anyway.