The Dance Off

Picturing it wasn’t helping. “I just wish...” He wished what? That he could go back to the way things were when he was her everything, and she was his, and his life was laid out ahead of him like a long dark tunnel of more of the same? “I just wish I’d been there to see it.”

“I know.” He heard the wobble in her voice, before she took a great big sniff. “But then we had that dance, you and I. That perfect, lovely dance at Nadia’s. That was our dance, Ryder. Not in front of a million people I barely know. Not looking over our shoulders waiting for Dad to ruin everything. That night at Nadia’s studio—you gave me away.”

His thoughts slipped back to that conversation in his car a few weeks back when she’d “set him free”. And he knew then why it had felt like a false victory—it had never been about Sam setting him free; he was the one who needed to let her go. And that night in the dance studio, watching Sam and Nadia go head to head, he’d not only given her her first real taste of independence, he’d taken his first step into his own.

“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”

“Lucky for you,” said Sam, “the cabana boy wants to be a cinematographer so he took the video for us.”

“Lucky me.”

And then his sister was babbling about the lights and the casinos and that you could sit in the Keno bar all night, play a game an hour and get as many free Long Island iced teas as you wanted.

“You sound happy, Sam.”

Her breath shook. “So, so happy.”

“Love you, kiddo,” Ryder said before he bloody well joined her.

“Love you more.”

And then she was gone. Leaving Ryder alone in his big office, with the moonlight and etchings his only companions.

He looked out at the view over the city, glancing over the number of significant new buildings he’d had a hand in creating. His legacy. And he waited for...something. A feeling of satisfaction. Or pride. Even relief that for the first time in more than half his life he had only himself to consider.

But no matter how long he stood there, he didn’t feel a damn thing.

Because the honest truth was, the only decision hanging in the balance in his life wasn’t up to him. It was in the hands of a bunch of tights-wearing strangers on the other side of the planet. And there was not a damn thing he could do about it.

TEN

Long shadows sliced through the golden glow of the street below as Nadia left the studio in daylight for the first time on a Tuesday in over two months.

She knew Ryder wouldn’t be there leaning against his big black car. Dance lessons were over; Sam’s crazy, wonderful elopement a couple of days earlier had put paid to that. Yet the empty street tugged painfully at her stomach.

She jogged down the steps and headed towards her spartan rooms where everything was so temporary. So quiet. All those hours ahead of her in which to think.

She could have stayed and rehearsed, but she just didn’t have the urge. And with Sam and Ben away she couldn’t call on them to go out dancing to shake off the odd sense that she was in limbo. Waiting. As if the other shoe were out there, dangling above her and about to drop right on her head.

She turned up the collar of her light jacket, shoved her hands into the pockets and turned the corner, picking up the pace as a light drizzle filled the air, taking the edge off the heat as the longest, hottest summer of her life drew to a close.

But in spite of how far she walked, the tension still rode her, made her muscles tight, her stomach hard, her head jittery. Another day of not knowing what was around the corner for her—much less another ten—and she’d be off her nut.

And there was only one way she could think to ease the pressure that had been building inside her for days. Ryder. She walked faster instead. Because she couldn’t go there. Especially not after she’d taken that swan dive into fairyland the other night.

In retrospect she put the whole thing down to a mini emotional breakdown. Still roiling from the aloofness of her mum’s phone call, and then mixing in Sam’s supreme happiness and the big man’s total tenderness, as well as the realisation her time in Melbourne was coming to an end—it had all whirled into some great vortex of syrupy sentiment.

Which meant that Sam’s elopement could not have come at a better time. If they wanted a neat and tidy end to what had been morphing into a more complicated affair than either of them had signed up for, they’d been handed it on a platter.

Unfortunately her body didn’t agree. Turned out she couldn’t walk fast enough to get away from thoughts of his hot touch, his strong hands, his devastating mouth.