Chapter 8 #2
The crowd went wild. Not Glen, though. “Oh, dang it. There’s no way I’m dancing with this hip.”
“Can someone go up there for you?” asked Phoenix, whose squeamish expression suggested they weren’t exactly wild about volunteering.
Simone swallowed hard. She wanted to dance for Glen, she really did, but this would be different than singing karaoke in a tiny dive bar.
There were at least two hundred people in the audience here.
Okay, Simone. You got this. Imagine Seth is up there with you, doing his ridiculous Seth dance moves.
With a deep breath, she opened her mouth to volunteer, but someone else beat her to it.
“I’ll go.”
It was Ryan.
She blinked at him in disbelief. When she tried to imagine him dancing onstage at drag bingo, her brain spat back a 404 error. Page not found.
Vajeena George gestured to the stairs leading up to the stage. “Will our two fabulous winners please come on up and join me?”
Ryan was off without another word. He couldn’t have looked more out of place as he climbed onstage in a Carhartt hoodie and jeans, but he walked right over to the drag queen and whispered something in her ear, pointing between himself and Glen. Vajeena George nodded and gave a thumbs-up.
“Now let’s meet our competitors, one of whom is kindly dancing on behalf of an injured winner. Everyone, please send healing vibes to Glen!”
Then she turned to Tiny Tank Top, who was bouncing on the balls of his feet and shaking out his arms like a boxer before a fight.
“Tell us your name, and a fun fact about you!”
“I’m Hank, and my fun fact is that I have a tattoo of a tiger on my abs.”
The audience roared.
“You’ll have to show me that later,” Vajeena George replied with a theatrical wink. She turned to Ryan. “And what about you, our stand-in dancer? Tell us your name and a fun fact.”
“I’m Ryan,” he said, sounding oh-so-very moody and Ryan, “and my fun fact is that contrary to popular belief, I am actually fun sometimes.” With that, he peered out into the audience until his eyes found Simone’s.
I’ll believe it when I see it, she’d told him earlier.
Evidently, he was determined to prove himself to her, even if it meant humiliating himself in front of an audience. She cracked a smile. How could she not?
“Well, you’d better show us just how fun you can be!” the drag queen proclaimed. “Okay, now, you’ll both have one minute to dance your hearts out—Hank, you’ll be on that side, and Ryan, you’ll be over there—and at the end, we’ll all vote for an ultimate champion. Sound good?”
Hank and Ryan both nodded. From far away, Simone could see that Ryan’s jaw was clenched hard.
“Let’s play that music!”
On the drag queen’s command, an R her brain might implode if she witnessed whatever kind of dancing he was about to attempt.
She looked at Hank instead, who apparently had no emotional attachment to his tiny tank top.
He grabbed it in the center of his chest, flexed his enormous biceps, and ripped it off his body in one fell swoop, showing off the tiger tattoo that did, in fact, take up a sizable chunk of his torso.
People crowded the front of the stage, screaming for Hank.
Phoenix twisted around in their chair, turning to Simone and Glen. “Okay, but can we talk about how Ryan has moves?”
Simone dragged her eyes off Hank, forcing them to the other side of the stage, where—oh. Oh wow.
Ryan was thrusting his hips with a natural rhythm.
The natural rhythm of a person who was very, very good at sex.
Biting her bottom lip, she looked away again.
Back to Hank, who was miming riding a pony, with one hand on the imaginary reins and the other swinging a piece of his shirt above his head like a lasso.
Even though Hank had the ostentatious overconfidence of someone who was very, very bad at sex, watching him did nothing to quell the buildup of heat she’d experienced from watching Ryan.
Maybe it was just hot in the bar. It was, wasn’t it? She reached for the glass of ice water she’d been sipping and took a giant swig.
“Fifteen seconds left!” Vajeena George announced. People were still going wild for Hank.
Phoenix gasped. “LOOK AT RYAN.”
Simone looked back. Somehow, Ryan had launched himself into a handstand, leather work boots in the air, and now was gracefully lowering his body onto the floor.
Simone’s breath caught in her throat. Now he was horizontal, thrusting his hips into the stage like he was giving it the best lay of its life.
Scratch what she’d thought to herself on the ridge today; this was what Ryan’s body was made to do.
Logically, she should have known he could move like that.
He was Mr. Actual Hard Work, brimming with physical strength.
He was an all-star skier. But it was one thing to know this and another thing to see it.
To look at her nemesis up onstage and imagine what it might be like to fuck him and be fucked by him.
At last, the music cut out.
“Make some noise if you think Ryan should win!”
Glen and Phoenix screamed at the top of their lungs until their voices cracked. There was a polite smattering of applause from the rest of the room. Simone was too busy chugging the rest of her ice water to do anything in the way of cheering.
“Now make some noise if you think Hank should win!”
The response was booming—a sheer tsunami of sound that crashed through the bar.
“I think we have a winner, folks. Let’s give it up for Hank!” Vajeena George rushed over to give him a hug. “After you go whale watching, you’ll need a humpback tattoo to go with your tiger.”
Ryan shook hands with Hank and thanked Vajeena George. Then he jogged down the stairs and made his way back to the group. “Sorry I didn’t win,” he said to Glen.
Glen waved a hand in the air. “Are you kidding? I got to see you do that handstand move. That was just as good as winning.”
“He should have won though,” Phoenix chimed in. “Hank couldn’t dance; he just had a dumb tattoo and a cheap shirt. You were totally robbed, Ryan.”
Ryan smirked. “Appreciate the support.”
While Phoenix continued lamenting the injustice of it all to Glen, Ryan sidled over to Simone, his hands in the pocket of his hoodie. He was still smirking.
“Well?”
She hoped he couldn’t tell she was sweating. “Well what?”
“Do you believe it now?”
“Believe what?”
“That I can actually be fun.”
“Hmmm.” She stroked her chin. “I’d say you’re maybe five percent less gargoyle-y than I previously thought.”
“Only five percent?”
“You like your poutine with gravy on the side, Ryan.”
“Still, I think five percent is—”
“Don’t push it,” she snapped playfully, “or I’ll knock you down to three.”
Ryan held up his hands in mock surrender. “Consider it not pushed.”
“That’s more like it,” she said. God, why was she still sweating?
She needed more water, so she excused herself to go to the bar.
When she returned, Glen was explaining that he was taking the day off skiing tomorrow, but that he’d give Phoenix money to buy lunch for Ryan on the mountain: a thank-you gift for dancing on his behalf.
That meant Ryan was going to ski with them again tomorrow.
Simone took another big gulp of ice water.
GLEN GAZED ADORINGLY AT RYAN AS he raised his mulled wine in the air. “To our dancing queen!”
It was the following afternoon, and they were sitting around a bonfire at the après-ski.
The back terrace of the Whistler Village bar was crowded with skiers and snowboarders who were fresh off the mountain, their cheeks red and their hair mussed from their helmets.
Glen, who’d taken the day off to rest his hip, had come out to join them for a drink.
“TO OUR DANCING QUEEN!” cried the rest of the guide group, including Simone, who held up her own mulled wine. The bartender had ladled the drinks from a cauldron suspended over a fire, like something out of a wintry medieval village.
Ryan had wrinkled his nose at the questionable cleanliness of the cauldron’s interior, which Simone was simply trying not to think about as she raised the paper cup to her lips.
A plume of steam danced from the top, and she breathed in the aroma of warm spices, like gingerbread cookies fresh from the oven.
She took a sip. The ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and other spices were perfectly balanced out by the sweetness of the red wine and the stewed apples and oranges.
Simone watched the bob of Ryan’s Adam’s apple as he swallowed a sip of his IPA, which he’d poured neatly from the can into a plastic cup.
A few times since coming out, Simone had “tested” her attraction to men by looking at cute guys on the street or at the gym.
Given how intensely she’d repressed her attraction to women, she’d wondered if there was a world where she was a lesbian, and not actually interested in guys at all.
Now, as she gazed at the ruggedly handsome man in the chair next to hers, Simone confirmed to herself, once again, that she was genuinely into men, too.
But after another day of skiing with Ryan, in which he’d continued to emerge from his whirlpool of misery, Simone couldn’t deny that there was also something specifically about Ryan that drew her in.
Maybe it was the fact that he had the head of a North Face model and the body of an oak tree, or the fact that he shared her love of the outdoors.
Maybe it had something to do with how free she felt to express herself around him, not to mention how hard he’d been trying to be nice. Maybe it was all of the above.