“Dancing means that much?”
“I wouldn’t know who I was without it.”
The waiter returned, condensation dripping down the brown glass of their beer bottles. When Nadia took the drink from his hand she realised she’d torn the red serviette to pieces.
“Man, I envy your passion.” Sam stared at the red mess, before bringing the drink to her mouth. “And enough said. As for the other, apart from the fact that you’ve just broken my heart a little bit, now we’ll have a couch to crash on if we ever get to Vegas, right?”
“For as long as you want.”
With that, Sam let out a big sigh then closed her eyes to the rare bout of dry sunshine. Relieved at having told Sam her plans, Nadia tried to do the same. But now that she’d told Sam, now she’d brought that world into this, it somehow made it real. Like in the stars real. And anticipation flowed through her veins like liquid ice till the tips of her fingers tingled as they did when she worked the ropes too long.
As this time she understood the gravity of the opportunity.
Her year away from professional dance had helped her grow up, and it had started the moment she’d knocked on her mother’s Toorak door, scoring nothing but a raised eyebrow.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise; it was exactly her family’s particular brand of solace. Twist an ankle? Suck it up. Bomb an audition? Get over it. And it certainly shouldn’t have hurt so much. Rejection was as much a part of being a dancer as warming up. Still, it had felt like a punch right to her centre, and things had started becoming very clear.
What she wanted more than anything was to dance.
What she needed was to do so as far from her mother as humanly possible.
Necessity and desire burned within her and the reality check had just added fuel to the fire. Within the next six weeks she’d have the chance to have it all.
One wrong step and it could all go up in smoke.
* * *
Ryder pushed open the door to the dance studio, letting himself in.
After the day he’d had he was glad to be anywhere but on site. Accustomed to the politics of such a substantial and significant project, that day the trivialities had grated to the point he’d felt one problem away from abandoning the whole damn thing.
By contrast the studio was blissfully quiet. The lights dim. Slivers of cool moonlight shone through the bare windows painting patches of white on the scuffed wooden floor. He cast only a perfunctory glance at the beautiful beams above, as he was in pursuit of a different kind of therapy altogether.
It had been three days since that afternoon of delight in Nadia’s battered little apartment. Three long days since he’d left her at her door with a long kiss, her face soft with release. Then he’d gone home. Gone to work. And pretended it had been a perfectly normal encounter.
Unfortunately, pretending hadn’t made it so.
Normal for him meant no promises, no surprises, taking extreme care to leave no wreckage in his wake. Nadia turned him upside down and inside out until, even while he had no idea what he’d be walking into, or which version of the woman he’d encounter, he’d looked forward to Tuesday night more than anything else that week.
He dumped his gear on the moth-eaten old chair, and looked around. So where the hell was she? The eerie silence built inside him as he walked the wall of windows, anticipation and unrest mixing until his senses keened with every creak of an old floorboard, every shift of dust motes on the sultry air.
“Howdy,” Nadia’s voice twanged behind him.
Ryder spun on his heels to find her standing by the big old curtains; tiny curls that had escaped from her hair band framing her face, dark eyes a smudge, lush lips hooked into a smile. Her face and neck were dewy from exercise, the rest of her encased in a long-sleeved, cross-over-type top, a short black skirt, fishnet tights, and spiked high heels.
“Nadia,” he managed.
Her eyes flickered reproachfully over his suit. “How was work, Ace?”
“Incessant.” He’d spent the day battling union s and clients and staff and contractors and suppliers rather than doing any of the hands-on designing that his job was meant to be about. At least he’d thought so once upon a time. “Yours?”
“Hard, actually.” She rolled her shoulders and stretched out a hamstring to bring that home. “Care to see what I’ve been up to?”
The unsettling inside out and upside down feeling came swarming back, yet he found himself saying, “You bet.”
Without another word she whipped back the curtains at the corner of the room revealing...
“Holy mother of...” Ryder said, his feet propelling him forward as his eyes darted from runs of black ropes dripping from the beams above, over wafting swathes of red silk doing the same, to a sparkling silver hula hoop dangling six feet off the floor.