17. Learning to Waltz
learning to waltz
LEXI
Nicolai tugged on my hand, drawing me away from the crowd.
Long silk opera gloves covered my arms well past my elbows. I shoved one drooping glove back up my biceps as he led me toward the dark terrace overlooking the shimmering swimming pool, lit from below like a giant aquamarine set into the ground.
Clementine’s delicate little clutch with the decorative knot on the clasp swung from a necklace-weight chain around my wrist. I’d tucked Nicolai’s credit card and a few documents and my driver’s license from my wallet in there.
Only a few other couples were out there in the night, most of them standing close together with their hands clasped and arms wrapped around each other, not dancing but swaying to the music.
“Seriously, you think you’re going to teach me how to waltz?” I fretted.
“In Europe, they teach us ballroom starting in grade school, when we are eight years old or so, at least on the continent. A friend of mine who attended Le Rosey for high school was from Edinburgh. He said that in Scotland, they taught them Highland country dances in physical education instead of to waltz.”
“Now that sounds like fun. I can only assume anything the Scots do is a riot.”
“Americans don’t learn to dance, though. Interesting.”
“They taught us American folk dances like the Virginia Reel, which was mostly boys swinging the girls around by our elbows until we went flying off into the corners of the gym. Zero out of ten stars. Do not recommend.”
“I promise not to fling you into the corners of the terrace.” Nicolai lifted my left arm and rested it on his shoulder, the thick, rounded muscle of his shoulder, even through the layers of his black-tailed tuxedo jacket, a white vest under that, and then a dress shirt, and then an undershirt, and then him.
I tried not to think about his warm flesh, only fractions of an inch from my palm.
Wow, I was just seriously a horndog. Like, some switch had been flipped on in the last few days, and so then I was just a cat in heat who wanted to climb Nicolai Romanov and lick his ear with my fishhook-sharp tongue.
If I were, you know, a cat. They have rough tongues.
“And then this hand here,” Nicolai said, lifting my right hand out and holding it up at shoulder level. “I’m going to apply pressure here, to lead. Push my hand back. There should be tension. I need resistance.”
Oh, he wasn’t going to get any resistance from me if he—
He pushed on my hand, and I pushed back, holding the tension.
“Good.” He slid his arm not so much around my waist, but a little higher, near my shoulder blade.
“It’s just a box step. Just step-together-side.” He looked up, thinking. “You start with your right foot, and so it’s back-side-together, forward-side-together. Keep a little tension here.” He shook our joined raised hands. “Because that’s how I’m going to signal you when we move.”
We chanted my steps, “Back-side-together, forward-side-together,” as we moved in a square.
I stared at my feet, and my pale gold sandals and pink-manicured toes peeped from under the hem of my white dress with every step.
Even though we’d been theoretically moving in a square, we drifted far over to one side of the deck, farther and farther away from the floodlights of the roof over the main part of the terrace and out of eyeshot of the crowd inside the ballroom.
“If I didn’t know better, I would think that you might be trying to get me alone in the dark,” I teased Nicolai.
“Maybe I am.” I could hear his smile, even though his face was shadowed in the night.
I laughed at him. “No, you’re not. I saw that the virginity clause is still in the contract. Victoria was actually clutching her heart while she explained it to me and advised me to run for the hills.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Still might. There’s no penalty for me breaking it off, other than losing something I never had.”
Nicolai frowned, even as we continued the simple box-step waltz. “I never thought of it that way. I should’ve written a penalty into the contract, back-side-together.”
“Too late now.”
We moved aside as we danced. A hazy wash from the terrace’s lights drifted across Nico’s tuxedo. I stared at the single white enamel button, showing between the frill of his white bow tie and where the white vest crossed over his chest.
“Now we turn as we do the box step, back-side-together,” he said.
His hand pressed mine, and I concentrated on making my legs go the right way even though the world was turning around us. “Oh! This looks like a real waltz now!”
“I told you it was easy. Some things are easy.”
I glanced up at him. “We aren’t.”
Nicolai guided me toward the shadows with pressure on my hand. “I think we could’ve been easy, if circumstances had been different.”
“It’s too bad that we didn’t really meet in an art museum in Italy.”
“Not an art museum,” he said, guiding me. “The Juliet Capulet’s House, as in Romeo and Juliet, is a museum in Verona. Definitely, Juliet’s House is where we met, not just a generic art museum.”
“You mean they took a typical house for the era and area and branded it the Juliet’s House for marketing purposes, right? Romeo and Juliet are fictional characters that Shakespeare made up.”
“Well, it’s a house, but the Capulets were a highly successful merchant family in Verona. It very well could have been their house. It was originally built in the mid-1300s, so the house was well over two centuries old when Shakespeare wrote the play in 1596.”
I stopped waltzing. “Wait, Romeo and Juliet were real?”
“Other writers wrote about them as early as the 1400s. Two wealthy, well-connected families named the Montecchi and the Cappelletti definitely lived in Verona.”
“Montague and Capulet,” I said, starstruck.
“Dante mentioned both families in the early 1300s when he wrote the Purgatorio of the Divine Comedy, the sequel to The Inferno.”
“That’s crazy!”
“He didn’t know he was writing about Shakespeare’s famous lovers because Shakespeare didn’t write the play until 1596. So we visited the Capulet House and relived the romance.”
“But Romeo and Juliet wasn’t a romance.” I didn’t know if I was just in a mood to bicker or whether I was doing anything to delay going back inside the ballroom, where any question might mess things up for us.
“It was a tragedy about two teenagers having a three-day affair that left six people dead, including both Romeo and Juliet.”
“Indeed, some stories appear to be a romance, but they are not.” Nicolai frowned a little, troubled. “At least, if Shakespeare wrote them.”
“Luckily, Shakespeare isn’t writing our story,” I teased him.
In the soft side-light, I could see him blink and smile. “The jury’s still out on that one, I suppose.”
“But, how we met—” I didn’t want to get it wrong. We were going back inside the cotillion soon. If someone asked, I couldn’t stumble when I answered.
“The Capulet House is in the middle of Verona, on one of the main streets in the old town. There’s an arch, and you enter the courtyard. I had ditched my security, as one does.”
“As one does,” I echoed.
“It was early morning. The museum wasn’t actually open yet, but the docents will allow you in early if you add a little gift to the ticket price.
I paid one off and wandered into the nearly empty courtyard, looking around.
The stone walls were cold, sucking in what little warmth there was in the early morning. ”
That was a lot of detail. “You’re really good at making things up.”
“That part might have the ring of truth. But in our story, you were standing on the Juliet balcony, but you didn’t have to bribe the museum guides. You were so beautiful and excited to see the house that they let you in early to experience it on your own, before the milling crowds made it noisy.”
“Oh, right. I’m so pretty that they let me in without paying. That’s unlikely.”
“Docents love it when people are genuinely interested in their museum. I spoke with one gentleman for three hours at the Castelvecchio Museum about the damage the Nazis had inflicted on the castle on their way out and its restoration after the war. I’ve emailed him with questions a few times since, and I get essays back, I assure you.
So, yes, the docents would definitely have let a pretty, enthusiastic young woman inside to experience Juliet’s House before opening hours. ”
“Okay, so we were in the Capulet House,” I said.
“It’s built from a creamy terra cotta stone, a typical medieval tower house. Wooden staircases spiral through the floors. Most of the rooms are furnished with typical furnishings or with movie set props from particularly important versions.”
“Oh, that’s cool.”
“The balcony is on the, in American terms, second floor, so it was not too far above the ground. No one was around but us. Our eyes met, and I looked into the deepness of your eyes and was entranced.”
That was awfully fanciful with only two glasses of champagne in me. Nicolai had had one flute of champagne and a glass of red with supper, but that was all. “Now look at who’s spinning fairytales.”
“Oh, but it was just me standing in the courtyard, and you acted out the rest of Juliet’s soliloquy for me, reaching over the stone wall in the quiet, cool morning to ask why I, of all the men in the world, why I had to be the heir of your family’s enemy and the villain of your story.”
“O Romeo, O Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo,” I recited.
“It was beautiful.” He looked down at me. “It still is.”
“That sounds just like something an overly dramatic theater major would do,” I admitted. I was secondhand embarrassed at myself, even though I hadn’t actually done that.
“But I was enchanted. I called back, even though it wasn’t exactly the next line, ‘O, speak again, bright angel, for thou art as glorious as this night.’ Not quite the quote, but I was close.”
My mouth was hanging open, and I laughed, delighted. “That is one of Romeo’s lines, though. That’s really good.”