CHAPTER 30 Nadia #2
I work through a sequence I've known since I was fourteen, one of the first combinations my second teacher gave me that I never forgot because it has a specific quality — it's harder than it looks and when you do it right you feel it in the place where physical and something else meet.
Tonight it takes me.
I lose track of him for a while. Not entirely — he's in the room, I know he's in the room, but I stop tracking him the way I usually track everything in a space and I just — move.
Through the combination, into the next thing, the thing that follows from it naturally, the vocabulary of it speaking itself.
When I stop he's not at the door anymore.
He's in the center of the room, about fifteen feet away, watching me with the expression I've seen from him before but not quite like this — not the structural cataloguing, not the assessment. Something else.
"Say it," I tell him.
"You're beautiful," he says. Simple. Direct. In the register of a fact stated rather than a compliment offered.
I look at him.
"Not just right now," he says. "Always. But right now — right now you look like yourself. The whole version."
The studio is very quiet.
The work lights make everything warm and lateral and the floor is good under my feet in the slippers he chose with Petya's help and the city is doing its thing outside and we are in a room that nobody knows we're in except two men at forty feet and a man named Conor and a building that belongs to someone who owed a favor.
I cross the studio toward him.
Fifteen feet becomes ten becomes five and then I am in front of him, close enough to see the way he is looking at me. Something with heat in it. Something that has been building since the kitchen, since the pasta, since the brown paper package, since last week when he checked the floors.
I stop just short of touching him.
"Nadia," he says.
"You planned this."
"I planned dinner," he says. "The rest of it is." He stops. The corner of his mouth does the thing. "Incremental."
"Incremental."
"I wanted to see you dance. I didn't plan past that. I didn't." He breathes. "I didn't think about what it would do to me. Seeing you."
The work lights are warm on his face. The mirrors behind me are reflecting us. Me in my practice clothes. Him still in his coat.
I put my hand on his chest, over his coat, over his heart, which is beating in a way that tells me something about what seeing me dance did to him.
His hand comes up. Covers mine. Presses it there.
"Take this off," I say. The coat.
He does. Shrugs out of it, lets it fall behind him onto the studio floor. Underneath is the shirt from earlier, white, the collar open, the sleeves already rolled to his forearms from when he cooked. I can see the edge of the scar on his left arm, the one he got before I knew him.
My fingers find the buttons of his shirt. I do them slowly. His breath changes. Just slightly. Just enough for me to notice.
"We have time," I say.
"I know," he says.
"Then let me."
"I know," he says again. But there is something in his voice. Roughness.
I unbutton to his sternum. Then I flatten my palm against his chest, against skin and hair and the heat of him. His hand covers mine again but does not move it. His heart is beating hard against my palm.
"The mirrors," he says. His voice is low.
I turn my head. In the dusty glass, I can see us. My back to the mirror, his tall frame, my hand on his chest. The angle shows the barre, the floor, the quality of the light.
"Watch," I say.
His breath catches.
I unbutton the rest of his shirt slowly, one button at a time, and I watch him watching me in the mirror.
The way his jaw tightens. The way his hands hang at his sides like he is choosing not to use them yet, like he is letting me set the pace, like this is something he is giving me even though I can see how much it costs him.
I push the shirt off his shoulders. It falls.
His body in the work light. The scar on his arm. The one low on his ribs that I asked about once and he told me about without the operational register, just the fact of it.
I run my hands up his torso. Slow. Over his ribs, over the plane of his stomach, over his chest. His hands are still at his sides but his breathing is not.
"Nadia." Third time. Different register. The register of someone who has reached the edge of waiting.
I reach up. I put my hands on either side of his face. I kiss him.
This is the first time we have touched like this tonight.
My mouth on his, his mouth opening, the taste of him.
Wine and something else, the taste that is just him.
His hands finally move. They come to my waist, not gentle exactly, not rough either.
The grip of someone who has been holding back and has decided not to hold back.
He walks me backward.
I feel the barre hit the small of my back.
The wood, solid, the right height, exactly as he said it would be.
His hands are on my hips, pressing me against it, and his mouth is on my throat now, the heat of his breath against my skin, and I make a sound.
Not the performed version. The actual sound of what his mouth does to my throat.
"Again," he says against my skin. "Make that sound again."
I make it again. Louder. His hands tighten on my hips.
He pulls back just enough to look at me. My back against the barre, my chest rising and falling, my face in the state of someone who is not performing desire but experiencing it.
"I have thought about this," he says. "In the mirror. Against the barre. I thought."
"Show me."
He does not need to be told twice.
His hands go to the hem of my top, the fitted thing I wear for practice. He pulls it up slowly, his knuckles dragging against my skin, and I lift my arms and he takes it off me and drops it with his shirt on the floor.
The air on my bare skin. The work lights. His eyes.
"You're beautiful," he says again. The same fact, stated differently this time, with his hands on my ribcage, with my back against the barre.
"Your turn to watch," I say.
I reach behind me and I unsnap my bra. I let it fall off my shoulders.
His breathing changes again. His hands on my ribcage tighten.
"Nadia."
"In the mirror," I say.
He looks. At my back in the mirror, the line of my spine, the reflection of my bare shoulders and the barre cutting across my waist. Then he looks back at me.
His hands come up. He cups me, both hands, slow, his palms warm against my nipples, which are already hard from the air and the want and his mouth on my throat.
I gasp. The gasp echoes slightly in the studio, the old walls reflecting it back, and his hands tighten and I watch his face watching his hands and I think I understand something about him I did not before.
That the looking is part of it for him. That seeing what he does to me is essential.
That the mirrors in this room are not incidental.
"More," I say.
He bends his head. His mouth finds my breast, the heat and wet of his tongue against my nipple, the pull of his lips, the way my back arches against the barre.
I make a sound that is not a word. He makes a sound in answer, not words either, just the responsive noise of a man with his mouth on my body, his hands on my hips, and the echo of both sounds moves through the studio like something alive.
His mouth moves to my other breast. The asymmetry of attention. The first one still wet from his tongue, the air cool on it, the second one now receiving the heat. I arch further against the barre, my hands finding his shoulders, my fingers digging into the muscle.
"Liam," I say. His name in my voice. Not the operational register. The other version. The one I did not know I had until him.
He lifts his head. His eyes are dark. Not just the colour. The quality.
"I want to go slower," he says. "I want."
"I know," I say. "But I also want."
"I know."
His hands move from my hips. He crouches. Goes down to his knees on the studio floor, the wooden boards under him, and this position, him kneeling in front of me, my back against the barre, does something to my breathing that I cannot control.
He looks up at me. Not subservience. The deliberate choice to put himself here, to look at me from here, to give me this angle.
"May I," he says. His hands at the waistband of my practice pants.
"You may."
He pulls them down slowly. Over my hips, over my thighs. I step out of them. Out of my underwear too, which he takes at the same time, and then I am standing in nothing but the ballet slippers he chose.
The slippers. I have not forgotten them. The way they feel on my feet. The way they ground me to this floor.
He is looking at me now. All of me. His eyes move up my body, my feet in the slippers, my legs, the muscle built by years of training, the place between my thighs, my stomach, my chest, my face. With the thoroughness of someone memorising something.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I know."
"Is it."
"It's want," I say. "It's not fear."
Something changes in his face when I say that. Something releases.
He puts his hands on my thighs. Not moving up yet. Just there. The warmth of his palms against my skin. His thumbs on the inside of my thighs, not pushing, not parting, just resting.
"I have thought about this," he says again. "In the week since I found this room. I thought about you against the barre. I thought."
"Show me," I say for the second time.
He parts my thighs.
His mouth finds me.
The heat and wet of his tongue. I make a sound I have never made before, a sound that comes from somewhere I did not know existed, and it echoes in the studio and I watch us in the mirror.
His dark head between my thighs. My white body against the wooden barre.
My hands in his hair. The reflection of it. The fact of it.