“What kind of dance?” he asks.
“Ballet mostly, and jazz. I did a little bit of hip-hop too.”
“I have such a hard time seeing you do ballet.” He shakes his head.
“Really?” I laugh. “Why?”
“I don’t know … you have that wild, carefree, can’t hold me down vibe about you. Dance seems very rigid.”
“It’s the opposite,” I disagree. “Yeah, it has rules, but everything does. But learning to be in tune with your body and flow with the music, there’s nothing else like it.”
He nods. “That makes sense.”
“How old are you?” I ask him.
He chuckles. “I’m twenty. What about you?”
“I turned eighteen on the fourteenth.”
“Happy belated birthday then.” He grins in my direction.nbsp;
“Thanks.”
My hair whips around my shoulders as he speeds down the highway, heading south. I still can’t believe I’m in a car with Jasper, headed who knows where, and I’m excited.nbsp;
I’m excited to be doing something I never normally would do.
I’m taking a leap of faith and seeing if it pays off.
“How old were you when you started dancing?”
“Around four—and before you ask, no, my parents didn’t push me into it. I was always dancing. Spinning, twirling, I couldn’t sit still. My mom enrolled me in dance and it was a natural fit.”
“That’s cool.”
“What’s your favorite color?” I ask him and wince. “I’m sorry, that’s a lame question.”
He chuckles. “No, no. I think a person’s favorite color is very telling about them. Mine’s yellow, I do like orange too. What’s yours?”
“Purple,” I answer immediately. “But that funny kind of purple you only see as the sun is going down.”
He laughs heartily. “That is … very specific.”
I shrug. “Without specifics life would be one giant what if.”
“That’s true,” he agrees. He taps his fingers against the steering wheel, a song by The Fray plays through the speakers from a playlist on his phone. “If you could go anywhere in the world, money wasn’t an issue, where would you go?”
“The Kawachi Fuji Gardens in Japan.”
“The what-a-what?” he says, taken aback. “No offense, but I was expecting Paris or London. Maybe Rome.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see those places one day too, but you asked where I wanted to go most and that’s where.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s this magical garden with these flowers making arches in all these bright colors, it doesn’t look like it belongs on this planet. It’s magical,” I gush. “Here, I’ll show you.”
I grab my phone and do a quick image search. Pulling up a graphic, I show him.