Chapter 15
By the next morning the rain had cleared, and when Carly met Nick in the lobby of his hotel, the sky was a bright, blazing blue, promising a cloudless, pitilessly hot Sydney day. It would be cooler up in the mountains, he promised, but right now it was midmorning and there was a lot of traffic on the roads. Today, though, Carly found that she didn’t mind being stuck in Leanne’s hot little Honda Accord with Nick, especially now that she didn’t have to keep her eyes off his fingers as they fiddled and danced on the steering wheel at a long red light.
His words from yesterday morning echoed in her head as the car inched along a busy street, just as they had as she’d been falling asleep last night.
I want whatever you have. Whatever you can give me.
She’d dated plenty of men in the last decade. While Heather had been settling down with her ex Jack, Carly had been on the dating apps, swiping and hoping and always ending up disappointed by the men she met there. Always watching them be disappointed by her. For them, it wasn’t enough that she was smart and funny and had managed to get and hold onto a spot in one of the best ballet companies in the world. She couldn’t give them everything they wanted from her—for some men, the only thing they really wanted from her. And they sure as hell couldn’t give her what she needed. It had taken a long time to realize that she deserved more, and muscle memory was powerful. She couldn’t shake off a decade of feeling like an unfuckable disappointment overnight.
When she’d heard Nick all but beg for whatever she was willing to give him, when he made it sound like a precious gift and not like a runner-up prize, she’d realized that she’d been waiting years to hear it. Without ever knowing that it was what she needed. Without ever understanding how healing it would be—or how hot.
“How was the lamington?” Nick asked, interrupting her thoughts.
“Sublime,” she smiled. They’d grabbed coffees and baked goods to go, and Nick had urged her to try another Australian delicacy, a cube of sponge cake covered in chocolate and flaky coconut, with a layer of berry jam in the middle. Carly had demolished it a few minutes after they’d gotten into the car, and she had half wanted to ask him to turn around so she could buy another one.
“Good,” he said, tapping on the steering wheel as the cars crawled. “If we ever make it up to the mountains, we can get lunch up there. And tomorrow we should hit one of the beaches on the other side of the Bridge.”
“Yes, I need to see as many of Sydney’s four hundred perfect beaches as possible.”
“It’s only 398,” he said, and she rolled her eyes. Pedant. “I think we should go to Bronte. It’s an underrated gem. Everyone knows Bondi and Coogee, but Bronte’s between them, and it’s got an even better pool than Freshwater. In my humble opinion.”
She snorted. “When has your opinion ever been humble?”
“Fine. It’s not humble, it’s just right. Bronte was one of my favorites as a kid. It’s a straight shot on the bus from the ANB dorms, and it was a nice way to escape the craziness of a hundred teenage ballet students all living on top of each other.”
“Sounds like the NYB school. One huge dorm full of hormones, hairspray, and the most competitive and tightly wound humans you’ll ever meet. Who are all exhausted and sore and starving half the time.”
“Exactly. So I’d go there and just be by myself. Or Marcus and I would go across the bridge to Balmoral Beach, which was a favorite for another reason.” He smiled to himself.
“What was the reason?” Carly asked, suspiciously.
“Ah, well, two reasons, really,” he allowed. “It’s a topless beach. At fifteen, we thought we’d struck gold.”
“You little pervs!”
“Yeah, that’s basically what Leanne said when she found out. We only went a few times before she busted us. Mostly when I wanted to get away from the dorms for a bit, I’d go to Marcus’s place.”
“Not home? Where is home?” She watched him as he flicked the blinker and joined a long line to get onto a highway.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean?” Carly thought it was a pretty simple question.
He didn’t answer. The lights changed and he just made it through and merged onto the highway. Carly eyed him closely. He still looked a little underslept, but even when he was tired he was annoyingly handsome, his deep blue eyes bright and shimmering in the hot sunlight and his long lashes casting tiny shadows on his cheeks.
“Hello?” she asked.
“Hang on a second, I’m concentrating. It’s been a while since I drove on a highway on the left-hand side.”
Carly narrowed her eyes and watched his face, but he kept his eyes on the road. If she didn’t know better, she would say he was stalling.
“You haven’t answered my question,” she reminded him a few minutes later. Traffic had eased up and the car was speeding along the highway, which was flanked by clusters of eucalyptus trees and big-box stores.
“What question?” he asked, checking his mirrors. She gave him a skeptical look. He was definitely stalling. And he should definitely know by now that she wouldn’t be put off that easily.
“Where’s home?”
He sighed and looked over at her, his face a picture of amused disbelief. “You’re relentless, you know that?”
“I do,” she grinned. “And you’re bad at dodging questions, you know that?”
He sighed again. She was starting to like the sound, even if it was the sound of exasperation.
“I’m not dodging the question, it’s just not a very interesting answer. I grew up in a little town west of here, Springwood. It’s about half way up the mountains. We’ll drive through it today.”
“Springwood,” she repeated, rolling the name over her tongue. “Sounds pretty.”
“It is. Quiet, and surrounded by bushland.”
“How old were you when you left?”
“Fourteen. My ballet teacher, Miss Rosemary, had an old colleague who ran a summer intensive just for boys here in Sydney. She submitted an application for me without telling me or my parents, and I got in. Which isn’t as impressive as it sounds—they took just about anyone who applied, and there weren’t that many boys doing serious ballet back then. I think it’s changed now.”
“Right, now ballet is overrun with boys,” Carly replied sarcastically.
“That first year I think there were only twenty of us,” he went on, ignoring her retort. “From all over New South Wales, including a few other boys from the country. Talk about a building full of hormones. We were all gangly and pimply and we all had huge chips on our shoulders, especially the country boys, because we put up with so much shit at school for dancing. Everyone assumed we were gay, and they didn’t take kindly to gay kids in those days. I think that program was a real eye-opener for a lot of us. Made us feel a bit less freakish. I’d never met another boy who did ballet until that summer. By the second day, I knew I wanted to go back every year, just to get away and to feel like I was normal for a few weeks.”
“Did you? Go back?”
“I didn’t have to. At the end of the summer they brought in some people from the ANB school, and they handed out a few full-time scholarships. I got one. So I went home to Springwood, packed up my things, came back to Sydney, and stayed all year. Only went home for Christmas and Easter breaks after that.”
“Did your parents mind letting you go?”
He leaned back in his seat and glanced over at her, as though he was deciding how much more to tell her. Frankly, she was surprised she’d gotten this much out of him, relentless or not. After yesterday, though, a wall seemed to have come down.
“It’s complicated,” he said after a moment, and she made a buzzer sound.
“Errrhhhh, try again.”
He gave her a rueful smile, as if she’d responded just as he’d expected. But when he spoke, there was no levity in his voice. “Honestly, I think they were relieved. I’d been pretty miserable at school, and I think Miss Rosemary explained to them that there was only so far I could go at a little local dance studio. And I was so eager to go, I didn’t give much thought to what it would mean in the long term.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean?” Stalling again. She stared back at him, waiting, with a stony expression that she hoped said nice try, but do better.
“I mean I haven’t lived with my parents since I was a kid. I barely went home, and they had my little sister to look after, so they didn’t visit very often.”
“Ah, so you’re a big brother,” Carly couldn’t help but smile. Imperious, always right, exasperated, protective even when he was exasperated. Of course he was a big brother.
“Yeah. Nina. She’s four years younger than me, so I haven’t lived with her since she was ten. After school, I went straight to Europe, and I’ve been there ever since. They’re still in Springwood, in the same house. I come home when I can, but there’s so much of my life they weren’t there for and that they don’t understand. And that makes things … complicated.”
“When are you seeing them?”
Nick paused. “I’m not sure. I might—” he checked his mirrors again and changed lanes, preparing to exit the highway.
“You might what?” she asked.
“I might not see them. I haven’t told them I’m home.”
“Yet,” she said.
“What?”
“You haven’t told them you’re home yet. You’re going to tell them, right? You came all this way.”
“I came all this way for Marcus,” he said stiffly, and she widened her eyes.
“You’re not going to go home and see them?”
There was another pause. “It’s—”
“Complicated, right,” Carly finished. “So you’ve said.”
He cut her a sharp look across the car as he took the exit, pulling them onto a two-lane road, but he didn’t contradict her. There was something he wasn’t telling her—yet—that much was obvious. Still, she decided not to press any further and busied herself with looking out the window at the new landscape. The road crossed over a narrow winding river that was dotted with speedboats and even a few crew teams, and then it began to climb.
“What about you? Where’s home for you?” Nick asked a few minutes later. Carly’s ears had just popped.
“Depends on who you ask,” she replied, leaning forward to fiddle with the air-conditioning.
“I’m asking you.” She stuck her tongue out at him, and in response he gave her a remarkably accurate impression of her nice try face.
“New York City is home. Born and raised, and I’ll probably die there, too. I live downtown, in Chinatown, in a crappy little apartment that I love and that my parents hate.”
He raised his eyebrows curiously. “And where do your parents think you should live?”
“Uptown with them. Broadway at Seventy-Eighth Street.” In the six-bedroom apartment where she’d grown up, knowing but not understanding just how abnormal their lives were. It wasn’t until she got to the NYB school and became friends with Heather that she realized most eleven-year-olds in New York City didn’t have a credit card to take cabs wherever they went or a housekeeper who kept their kitchen pantries stocked with gourmet snacks and bottled water from the Swiss Alps. Or that most families didn’t have a house on Nantucket and a ski-in chalet in Vail. Or that most parents couldn’t offer their grown children an apartment within an apartment, a little home inside their home with her own kitchen, bathroom, and private entrance.
Nick was looking at her appraisingly, probably trying to follow her train of thought. She didn’t know how well he knew New York City, or whether “the Apthorp” would mean anything to him.
“Your parents are … comfortable?” he asked.
Carly snorted. “No, they’re rich. The whole family is, including me, I guess. And comfortable. Actually, they’ve never been uncomfortable in their lives. Well, until I came along. I make them pretty damn uncomfortable.”
“Why?”
“Too loud, too stubborn. They put me in ballet hoping it would make me quieter and more ladylike.”
“And it worked like a charm,” Nick chuckled.
“I am ladylike as fuck, thank you very much.”
“That’s definitely the first word that comes to mind when I think about you,” he agreed sarcastically.
“I’m ladylike enough on stage, okay? Offstage, I like to do things my way. And they don’t appreciate that.”
“What does your way look like?”
She shrugged. “I like to fend for myself. It’s not that I’m ungrateful. It’s more that I know how lucky I am, and I think we only get so much luck in this life. I was born into mine, and now I want to do what I can with it. But I want to do it for myself, and I want to do it my way.” She lifted her chin stubbornly, daring him to argue with her, but he didn’t. Which was a good thing, because she’d had some version of this argument with her parents enough times to know how to win. Or at least wear someone down.
“Sounds reasonable enough to me. I’m guessing your parents don’t feel the same way.”
“They don’t. If you ask them, they’ll say that yes, they were born into money, but they’ve worked hard. They don’t understand that their work has carried them further than everyone else’s because of where they started. They don’t seem to understand that hard work alone can’t get a person to where they are. Or that even if they didn’t work hard, they’d still be fine. Better than fine, because they’d still be wealthy. They don’t get that. And they don’t get me at all. So we have that in common, I guess,” she added, with a half smile.
He was looking at her with the same kind of intensity she’d seen the first day he was photographing her, as though he was seeing her but also seeing past her. Trying to compose the picture around her. He turned back to the road but was silent for so long that she started to wonder if she’d said something to offend him. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.
“Does the company know about your parents?” he asked finally. Like he had put the picture together perfectly. Of course he had.
“It does. They used to give generously to the school and the capital fund and all the other worthy causes when I was still a student. After I graduated I asked them to redirect their giving to some other cause. It took some convincing, and I’m sure the company’s development team wasn’t happy about it, but NYB has plenty of rich donors, and I really wanted to—”
“Fend for yourself,” he finished.
“Right,” she said. “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing all this time? Isn’t that what everyone else does? It’s what Heather’s done most of her life. I want to be like everyone else.”
He chuckled and shook his head, and she widened her eyes. “What? You think I’m naive? A poor little rich girl?”
“No, no,” he replied. “Well, a little bit, but no. It’s just, please don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re nothing like everyone else. I don’t think you could be like everyone else if you tried.”
She leaned over and put her elbow on the center console, closing the distance between them until she could see his pulse fluttering in his throat. He inhaled deeply, then looked down at her briefly, a smile in his blue-gray eyes.
“You know what Heather once said to me?” she said in a quiet, serious tone. “That the easiest way to get me to do something was to tell me that someone, somewhere, had decided that I couldn’t.”
“That sounds about right,” he grinned.
“So tell me again that I can’t.”
There was a brief pause, and for a moment Carly worried that he wouldn’t play along with her flirtatious bit.
“And watch you be like everyone else just to prove me wrong?” he eventually asked, his voice deeper and more serious than she’d anticipated. “Never.”