The Ballerina's Secret

Because, again, who needs social interaction?

Enough with the self-pity. Tomorrow was important enough that the company dancers at the Manhattan Ballet were probably all planning to get to bed early, too. Even Chance Gabel. Granted, the bed he planned on climbing into likely wasn’t his. But still.

Needle threaded, she anchored it into the cuff of her sweater while she untied the drawstring of the slender bag containing her new shoes. She pulled one out, along with a carefully spooled coil of pale pink ribbon. As she positioned the edge of the ribbon alongside the outer seam of the shoes, Mr. B pawed at her hand.

The shoe fell into her lap. Tessa looked up but didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

“What is it?” she mouthed.

The little dog cocked his head and swiveled his russet ears forward. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he was trying to alert her to a sound. Some unheard melody that was calling her name.

She glanced at the pregnant woman, who was sitting opposite her, and the pair of Wall Street types, who were standing near the door. No one seemed alarmed, which meant the fire alarm hadn’t gone off or anything.

Tessa ran a soothing hand over Mr. B’s narrow back. Maybe he was tired. She’d leave him at home tomorrow. She obviously wouldn’t be able to drag him along on her audition. The last thing she wanted was to draw more attention to her hearing loss.

But that was okay. She could handle a day in the city without him. She’d have to. It wasn’t as though she had a choice in the matter.

She’d be just fine on her own. In her quiet little world. Alone.

Wasn’t she always?

* * *

Before he even set foot in the subway station, Julian had been less than thrilled by his present circumstances—those circumstances being his growing need for a source of income, despite his fervent lack of interest in leaving his uptown apartment. He’d also just suffered the humiliation of his first job interview in a decade.

Not an interview, technically. Worse. An audition.

For a gig he didn’t even want.

The job started tomorrow, and he still didn’t know if he’d gotten it. But he would. Chance would see to it that he did, and then, as much as he dreaded the idea, Julian would have no choice but to give it a shot.

Not that he had anything against working. He preferred it, actually, to the nothingness that had slowly taken over his days. He’d just thought that when he finally reached the point where the money from his glory days ran dry, he’d do something else. Anything other than music.

Stumbling upon the trumpet player had nudged Julian’s irritation firmly into pissed territory. It was a territory he knew, like a favorite song. He spent a lot of time being pissed lately. A couple of years, in fact. But it was better than the alternative. Julian much preferred being thought of as a bitter, cranky prick than as an object of pity. And if no one ever thought of him at all anymore, all the better.

He cursed himself for letting the trumpet player get to him as he climbed on the 1 train. The guy was just an old man. A nobody.

A nobody who can still play the horn.

Right.

He sank into the last open seat in the subway car, which happened to be directly behind the woman who’d dropped a dollar in the old man’s bucket. No, not one dollar. Two. And unless Julian had been imagining things, she’d only pulled out the second dollar bill after she’d noticed his disapproval of the musician’s performance.

“He wasn’t that good, you know.” Julian aimed his comment at the back of her head.

Hers was a quite lovely head, actually. Piled with waves of strawberry blond hair, pinned up to expose the curve of her graceful neck. She was pretty. There was something poetic about the way she moved. Lyrical, almost. He’d noticed it straightaway on the train platform. And Julian wasn’t prone to noticing such things lately.

His gaze lingered for a moment on a silky, wayward curl winding its way down her back, and he suppressed the urge to twirl it around one of his fingers.

God, what was wrong with him? Had he been shut up in his penthouse for so long that he’d forgotten the rules of simple social interaction? Yeah. He supposed he had.

He cleared his throat and spoke to her again. “I mean, it was nice of you to tip the man. Very nice. All the same, his sense of rhythm was severely lacking.”

Why, oh, why was he explaining himself to a woman he didn’t even know? A woman who didn’t care to know him, apparently.

She didn’t budge. She just sat, staring down at something in her lap, while her dog fixed its gaze at Julian over her shoulder. Cute little dog. Copper and white, with plumed ears that seemed almost comically large in proportion to its dainty head. The dog blinked at Julian, cocked its head and swiveled its huge ears forward so they looked even bigger.

“Anyway.” Julian sighed. “Like I said, it was nice of you to help the guy out.”

He waited a beat, and when she didn’t respond—again—he turned back around. The two of them spent the rest of their journey back-to-back, mere inches apart.

In silence.

Chapter Two (#u4521553f-a801-56bb-9676-e3e5fdc19c0a)

The sound erupted at rehearsal the next day, and it was nothing like Tessa remembered.

She remembered soft, lilting melodies. The winsome whisper of violins. She remembered the patter of balletic feet and the rhythm of her own labored breath during allegro work at center. In, out. In, out. In, out.

She remembered what the swish of a velvet curtain sounded like on recital night, the deafening roar of a standing ovation and the way roses being tossed onto a stage floor sounded so much like heavy snowfall against a windowpane.

And she remembered music. Of course she did. Even now, she could still hum every theatrical flourish of the Swan Lake score from memory. Sometimes she thought she heard songs in her sleep—adagio dreams on good nights and jarring Stravinsky nightmares more often than she cared to admit.

Why shouldn’t her subconscious cling to the songs of her youth? Why wouldn’t her dreams be set to music? Since the moment she’d slipped on her first pair of ballet slippers, Tessa’s life had become a dance. It still was, long after she’d stopped hearing the music.

She could hear it now, though. She didn’t know how or why, but she could. Music like nothing that had touched her ears before. Jarring. Bigger than a symphony. Bigger than sound itself. She felt it, too, much like she always did, but without an ounce of the concentration it normally took. The notes rose up from the wooden planks of the rehearsal room floor, hummed through the soles of her pointe shoes and into her body like an electrical current. She felt alive with it, almost manic.

Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she’d pulled a Natalie Portman and gone full-on Black Swan nuts. God, she hoped not. She’d lost enough since the accident, without adding her sanity to the list.

What in the world was happening, though? Could she be cured? Was it possible for an injury like hers to reverse itself?

Possibly.

The doctors had told her this could happen. But so much time had passed that she’d given up on ever hearing again. She’d made peace with the silence.

The noise in her head was anything but peaceful. She couldn’t focus on what her body was doing. She could barely hear herself think.

Tessa felt a tap on her shoulder as she fell out of a turn. Her legs were moving far too quickly. She could see the other dancers out of the corner of her eye, each with a number pinned to the back of her leotard, just like Tessa. Unlike Tessa, they moved in perfect unison. It was mortifying. Tessa spent extra hours in the classroom at the Wilde School of Dance every night to guard against this very thing. She squeezed in extra practice whenever she could. Perfection would never be within her reach. Other girls might have higher arabesques or nicer feet, but Tessa was determined to keep time with the music as well as, or better than, all of them.

It was just so hard to concentrate with the sudden commotion in her head. She’d wished for her hearing to come back for thirteen long months, but she’d never imagined how overwhelming it would be. Or frightening. She wasn’t even sure it was real.

Why did it have to happen now, in the middle of her audition? Why was she losing her mind today of all days? She stumbled to a stop and found the company ballet mistress, Madame Daria, standing directly in front of her. Frowning.

“Number twenty-eight?” She stared at Tessa.

Tessa nodded. The number twenty-eight had indeed been assigned to her when she’d shown up bright and early for auditions. It was to be her number for the full three days of tryouts.

If she lasted that long.