3. Luisa
— ? —
Luisa
Eight years earlier, I thought a man was going to kill me on a cobblestone street in Nantucket.
The summer I was twenty-four, I worked the island, teaching dance to bored rich kids and tourists who wanted to learn the waltz before a wedding.
It was good money, enough to cover my half of an overpriced studio apartment, and I loved the work even when the clients were insufferable.
Teaching someone to move their body is pure work. Honest work.
I stayed late that night. Private lesson with a woman who was getting remarried and wanted to surprise her new husband with a tango. By the time I locked up the studio, the streets were dark and mostly empty, just the distant thump of bass from a bar somewhere and the smell of salt in the air.
I walked fast. I always walked fast at night, keys between my fingers, phone in my pocket, that low-level alertness every woman learns before she’s old enough to name it.
The footsteps started when I was two blocks from home.
Heavy and fast, getting closer.
I glanced back. A man, huge, tall, built like he spent his life moving weight, was following me.
Closing the distance with long strides. His face was in shadow.
His hands were up, like he was trying to get my attention, but I didn’t care what he wanted.
I knew what a man that size could do to me on a dark street.
I turned the corner and waited.
He came around after me, still moving fast, and I stepped into him and dropped him.
It was neither pretty nor choreographed. I hooked his ankle and shoved his chest and used his momentum against him, and he went down hard on the cobblestones, flat on his back, staring up at me with the most bewildered expression I’d ever seen on a human face.
“What the hell-”
“Stay down.” My voice didn’t shake. Good. “I have pepper spray and I will use it.”
“I-” He blinked. His glasses were askew. He was holding an object out in his right hand, small, familiar. My wallet. My wallet with the dancing-monkey print, the one I’d bought at a street fair in Cambridge. “You dropped this. Three blocks ago. I was trying to-”
He trailed off. Looked down at himself, sprawled on the ground. Looked up at me, still in my fighting stance, still ready to run.
And then he started laughing.
There was no anger in it, no threat or mockery, none of the things I’d braced myself for. It was pure, delighted surprise, the laugh of a man who’d just been knocked off script and found it wonderful.
“Oh my God,” he said, still on the ground, still grinning like an idiot. “That was incredible. How did you do that?”
I stared at him.
He was younger than I’d realized, mid-twenties, maybe, with dark wavy hair and light eyes I couldn’t quite make out in the dim light.
His glasses had slipped down his nose. He was wearing a button-down shirt that probably cost more than my rent, and he was lying on dirty cobblestones like he didn’t care at all, looking at me like I’d just performed a magic trick.
“Your wallet,” he said, holding it up. “You dropped it. I tried to call out but you were walking really fast, so I started jogging, and then you turned the corner and-” He gestured at himself, still prone. “Here we are.”
“You were chasing me.”
“I was returning your property! I wasn’t going to just leave it on the street. There’s money in there. And-” He squinted at the wallet. “Is that a dancing monkey?”
“Give me that.” I snatched it from his hand. My heart was still pounding, adrenaline still singing in my veins. “You can’t just run after a woman at night. Are you insane?”
“In retrospect, I see the flaw in my approach.” He made no move to get up. Just lay there, looking at me with that ridiculous grin. “Seriously, though. How did you do that? I’ve got a foot and a lot of muscle on you. You shouldn’t have been able to-”
“I shifted your center of gravity. You were off-balance from jogging and I used your momentum against you. It’s physics.”
His eyes went wide. Literally wide, like a kid who’d just been told Santa was real.
“Physics,” he breathed. “Can you show me again?”
“What?”
“I want to learn how to do that. I mean, not to strangers on the street, obviously, I understand now why that’s problematic-” He pushed himself up on his elbows.
“I’m Wade, by the way. Wade Buckley. I’m on the island for the summer.
My family has a house here. I’m working on my thesis, naval engineering, hull dynamics specifically, but that’s not important right now.
What’s important is that you just put me on the ground like it was nothing and I really, really want to know how. ”
I should have walked away, taken my wallet and gone home and never thought about the strange man on the cobblestones again.
Instead, I said, “You want me to teach you how to fall?”
“I want you to teach me everything.”
He couldn’t dance.
I found this out three days later, when he showed up at my studio with a coffee and an apology and a question: did I give private lessons?
“I teach dance,” I said, taking the coffee because I wasn’t an idiot. “Not self-defense.”
“I know. I looked you up. You’re Luisa Erickson, you’ve been teaching here for two summers, and your Yelp reviews are extremely positive.
” He said this like he was presenting research findings.
“I need to learn to dance. For an event. There’s a family thing at the end of summer and there will be dancing, and I-”
“Can’t dance?”
“I can do math in my head that would make most people cry. I can tell you the exact pressure threshold at which a submarine hull will collapse. I can rebuild a boat engine blindfolded.” He paused. “I cannot make my body move to music in a way that doesn’t frighten small children.”
I laughed. I didn’t mean to, but I did.
His whole face changed when I laughed. Softened. Lit up.
“Private lessons are expensive,” I warned.
“I don’t care about the money. I care about not humiliating myself in front of a ballroom full of people.”
So I taught him.
I taught him the waltz first, because it was simple, and because he needed to learn how to lead without bulldozing his partner.
He was terrible, stiff, off-beat, so focused on his feet that he forgot he had a torso, but he worked at it with the same obsessive focus he brought to his thesis.
He took notes. Actual notes, in a leather notebook, diagramming foot positions like he was plotting coordinates.
“You’re overthinking it,” I told him, for the fifth time in an hour. “Stop trying to calculate. Feel the music.”
“I don’t know how to feel music. Music is just organized sound waves. There’s nothing to feel.”
“Then feel me.” I took his hand and put it on my waist. Felt the small jolt that went through him, the way his breath caught. “I’m going to move, and you’re going to follow. Don’t think. Just feel where I’m going.”
He swallowed. His hand was warm through my leotard.
We danced.
It was graceless, sweaty work. But somewhere in the second chorus, it clicked, I felt it happen, felt his body stop fighting the rhythm and start moving with it, and when the song ended, he was looking at me like I’d handed him the keys to the universe.
“That,” he said. “I want to feel that again.”
The summer unspooled.
He came to lessons three times a week, then four, then every day.
We worked on the waltz, then the foxtrot, then the tango because he asked and because I wanted an excuse to be that close to him.
He showed up with coffee and questions and that earnest, slightly desperate energy of a man who’d never failed at anything academic and couldn’t stand being bad at anything physical.
And slowly, impossibly, he got better.
“This is just applied physics,” he told me one evening, dipping me for the first time without dropping me. “The rotation, the counterbalance, the momentum transfer. It’s all physics. I don’t know why no one explained it to me that way before.”
“Because most people don’t need a physics lecture to learn the waltz.”
“Most people are wasting their potential.”
There was a party at some rich person’s house near the end of July. I don’t remember whose. I remember the fairy lights strung through the garden, the live band playing standards, the way Wade found me in the crowd and held out his hand.
“Dance with me.”
“We’re not at a lesson.”
“I know.” His eyes were very blue in the low light. “Dance with me anyway.”
So I did.
The band played a slow, old standard, and Wade led me through a waltz he’d learned three weeks ago, and for the first time since I’d met him, he didn’t think about his feet at all.
He just moved. His hand on my back, his eyes on my face, guiding me through the steps like he’d been doing it his whole life.
When the song ended, he didn’t let go.
“Luisa.”
“What?”
He didn’t answer. Just looked at me with that expression I was starting to recognize, the one that said his brain was working through a problem, cataloging data, reaching a conclusion.
Then he kissed me.
It was clumsy in the best way. His glasses bumped my nose and he apologized, and I laughed against his mouth and pulled him back in, and somewhere behind us a woman said “Get a room” and we did.
There was a boathouse at the edge of his family’s property. Old, wood-planked, smelling like salt and rope and summer. A loft with a mattress and a window overlooking the harbor.
“I’ve wanted this,” he said, backing me up the narrow ladder. “I’ve wanted this for weeks. Since the cobblestones. Since you knocked me flat and stood over me like an avenging angel-”
“I thought you were a mugger.”
“I know. It was the hottest moment of my life.”
I laughed, and he caught the sound with his mouth, and then we were on the mattress and his hands were everywhere, my waist, my hips, fumbling with the zipper on my dress like it had personally offended him.
“I’m not-” He pulled back, glasses askew, breathing hard. “I’ve done this before, but I’m not… I want to be good at this. For you. I need you to tell me what you want.”