Chapter 1 #2
"New landscape." He shows me his current work: the town square at dawn, the bandshell pale in early light. "Before the people come. When it's just itself."
"It's beautiful."
"Beautiful and empty are not the same thing." He doesn't look at me when he says it, but his words are loaded with meaning.
We walk back through the cottage. The living room walls hold his paintings of me, years of them.
Daughter at window, staring at something beyond the frame, her face half in shadow, hand pressed against glass.
Daughter in kitchen chair, hands folded, expression unreadable, the morning light making her look translucent.
Daughter with hair covering her face, only the line of her jaw visible, shoulders curved inward like she's protecting something.
I pass them without looking. They've been there so long they're just furniture now.
The girl in those paintings is someone I used to know.
Papa touches my shoulder at the front door. "The garden can wait, you know. If you want to do something else next weekend."
He kisses my forehead. Paint smell and coffee and the warmth of the only parent I have left.
My bedroom door closes with a click. I turn the lock, the one I installed myself seven years ago. Pull the blackout curtains across the single window. The room becomes a cave, separate from the rest of the cottage, separate from Pristine.
On my bedside table, Maman watches from her silver frame.
The photograph is from before I was born: dark hair loose, caught mid-laugh at something beyond the camera's edge.
Her hand blurs slightly, reaching for whoever made her laugh like that.
Twenty-five years old, a year younger than I am now.
Frozen in perpetual joy I can't remember her having.
I pull the elastic from my hair. It falls past my shoulders, heavy with the day's humidity, finally free from the teacher's bun. The wrap skirt drops to the floor. Underneath, the leotard I've worn all day. Black, simple, nothing special except that it's mine.
My phone lights up in my hand. I navigate to the folder marked Receipts. The name I gave it so no one would look if they saw it. Inside, a single audio file. Three minutes and fifty-two seconds of music that changed everything and nothing.
I press play.
The music fills the room, not loud, just present. My body knows every note, every pause, every breath of it. Years of muscle memory take over.
I begin on the floor, spine curved, one leg extended. The movement ripples up through my core, deliberate, controlled. My back arches. My hands find the floor behind me, push up into a bridge, legs following in a slow split that uses every inch of flexibility I've maintained.
I rise to standing. The choreography moves through the small space, using the bed as a stage, the wall as a partner.
My leg extends above my head, holds, rotates slowly.
Drop into a lunge so deep my chest touches my knee.
Roll through my spine to standing. Every movement precise but undeniably sexual, the kind of dancing that made the conservatory board clutch their pearls and revoke my scholarship.
My muscles burn with the stretch, grateful for the pain that isn't careful or pretty. This choreography demands everything: split leaps that threaten the low ceiling, floor work that leaves bruises on my hipbones. I dance like I'm trying to break something. Maybe myself.
This is what they couldn't stand. Not that I was sexual, but that I wasn't apologetic about it. That my nineteen-year-old body had moved with the confidence of someone who knew what she wanted and wasn't ashamed.
The music builds. I leap, land silently. Years of training mean even my abandon is controlled. I use the floor again, rolling through movements that are part modern dance, part something older. Something that comes from the body itself, not from any teacher or technique.
The final sequence brings one leg into the air, back arched, one hand reaching for something that isn't there. The last note hangs in the air. I hold the position for three more breaths, then release.
Silence.
The music ends and I'm just a woman standing in a dark room, breathing hard, muscles trembling from the effort of being fully alive for three minutes and fifty-two seconds.
My body cools quickly in the air conditioning. The woman in the mirror would have questions I can't answer. Better not to see her at all. I keep my back to the glass, denying myself even that small vanity.
I close the phone, and the receipts folder disappears behind rows of ordinary apps. Pull an oversized sleep shirt from the dresser. Soft cotton, worn thin from years of washing. It falls to mid-thigh, covering the body that was just so electric, so alive.
The leotard goes in the laundry basket, damp with sweat. Tomorrow's wrap skirt hangs on the closet door, ready for another day of teaching, another day of being exactly who Pristine needs me to be. The hair tie waits on the dresser for tomorrow's bun.
I climb into bed. The sheets are cool against my overheated skin, but my body still hums from the dance.
Every muscle remembers the stretch, the arch, the reach.
My thighs ache in that specific way that comes from holding positions that demand everything.
Between my legs, a different ache, the one the choreography always awakens but never satisfies.
My hand drifts down my stomach, fingertips barely grazing the thin cotton. The touch sends sparks through already sensitive nerves. I could. Here in the dark where no one would know. Where I could stop pretending I don't want, don't need, don't burn.
My fingers hesitate at the hem of the sleep shirt. The weight of seven years of careful control presses down. Good girls don't. Nice ballet teachers don't. The woman Pristine needs me to be definitely doesn't.
But the woman who just danced would. She does. She has before, in this same bed, with the door locked and the world shut out.
My hand pulls back.
I press my thighs together, trying to ease the ache. It only makes it worse. My nipples are hard against the soft cotton, visible even in the dark. My body keeps insisting on everything I pretend, during daylight hours, not to be.
Tomorrow I'll wake up and put on the wrap skirt. Pull my hair into the teacher's bun. Smile at the mothers. Deflect Jarrod's invitations. Be exactly who they need me to be.
But right now, with my body still electric from dancing, with this hunger coiled tight in my belly, right now I'm someone else entirely. Someone dangerous. Someone who wants.
Someone who might not pull her hand back next time.