The Ballerina's Secret

“No problem,” he’d said.

And he’d meant it. Julian had known Chance long enough to lose any romantic notions he might have had about the ballet world. In the ten years they’d been friends, Julian could count on one hand the number of times Chance hadn’t been a foul, sweaty mess. Ballet wasn’t art. It was work. Messy, fanatic work.

Besides, Julian had no interest in a roomful of underfed women who considered him invisible. He had no interest in being here at all, frankly.

He should have saved his money. He should have planned or invested. Something. Anything. He’d had a good run. A stellar run, actually. How could he have possibly known it wouldn’t last?

He wasn’t even a piano player, for crying out loud. He’d told Chance as much. What was it that Chance had said in response? We don’t need Mozart. We need a body. You’re good enough.

Good enough.

Oh, how the mighty had fallen.

He sighed, crossed his arms and waited for Madame Daria to finish her big speech. She’d actually asked him to call her that. Madame. Like they were in nineteenth-century France or something. Not happening.

She droned on about the new choreographer, some Russian hotshot. Julian glanced at his watch. He’d been on the job for less than an hour, and already he was bored out of his mind. This whole thing had been a mistake. If he managed to get through the day without falling asleep and knocking his head on the piano keys, it would be a miracle.

Five more hours. That’s all.

He could last five hours. Then when it was over, he’d quit. Chance would understand. Probably. If he didn’t, too damn bad.

Julian sighed. Then he looked up and found one of the dancers staring at him. The only one who’d managed to capture his attention in the entire hour and a half he’d been banging away on the Steinway. The dancer who’d made the mistake.

The girl from the train.

Truth be told, he’d noticed her even before she’d wobbled out of her turn. Before he’d even recognized her. He couldn’t help it. Until his hands had touched the keys, she’d been just another whisper-thin girl in a wraparound leotard and tights.

But then he’d begun to play, and she’d transformed right before his eyes. One note. That’s all it had taken. Her eyes had grown wide, and she’d flung herself into the dance. If Julian hadn’t known better, he would have thought she’d never heard music before. Maybe because there was something different about the way she moved. Desperate. Like she was running from a demon.

Madame had been right, though. The girl had been dancing off beat, which should have annoyed him. It didn’t. Much to his irritation, he found her intriguing. Probably because Julian was no stranger to demons himself.

The ballerina’s gaze lingered on his lips. Or more probably, his scar.

Of course.

Every muscle in Julian’s body tensed as his fascination with her morphed into something closer to disdain. Not that he was surprised. Or even disappointed. He was grateful, actually. He’d learned a long time ago not to mix business with pleasure.

Of course he had no intention of sticking to this gig, but still. Knowing Chance, he’d probably already bedded the ballerina since he seemed to make it his mission to sleep his way through every ballet school and company in Manhattan. Which made his advice all the more ridiculous.

Don’t ogle the dancers.

Right.

Julian wasn’t ogling. He absolutely wasn’t. If anything, the pretty ballerina was ogling him.

Her gaze drifted upward, and their eyes locked. When she realized she’d been caught staring at his scar, her cheeks went pinker than her ballet shoes.

Julian lifted a brow. Go ahead, sweetheart. Look your fill.

She looked away, her deepening flush the only evidence of their nonverbal exchange.

Julian sank onto the piano bench and flipped through the sheet music Madame had thrust at him upon his arrival. The score for the audition was Debussy. He was to open with Rêverie, which he rather liked. It was a vast improvement over the repetitive chords he’d had to play for the morning barre exercises. Debussy’s Rêverie had also been the inspiration for the melody of “My Reverie,” a favorite of Julian’s. He owned recordings of both Sarah Vaughan’s and Ella Fitzgerald’s renditions. On vinyl.

He let his hands hover over the keys and played the melody silently, in his head, if only to keep from seeking out the interesting ballerina at the back of the room again. Even so, he found himself watching her more often than he cared to admit. It came as a relief when Daria rapped her hand on the piano and ordered him to play. Not asked, ordered.

Julian banged out the opening melody over and over again, in half time, as the dancers learned their parts. After the first fifteen rounds, he could have played the score in his sleep, so he let his gaze wander to the action in the center of the room, while his hands moved by rote. The Russian demonstrated the steps, and the dancers mimicked him. Sometimes he grabbed a foot or an arm and physically moved it where he wanted it to go. He did this a lot, actually. There was only one dancer he never touched. Her.

Julian wondered if this was good or bad. Then he wondered why he cared.

On and on, he played, until the sunshine streaming through the windows grew dim and blue shadows stretched across the studio floor. The dancers peeled away leg warmers and layers of clothing, and the air in the room felt heavy and damp. The combination they’d been working on began to take shape. Chance and a few others had long since gone home, but the remaining ballerinas with numbers pinned to their black leotards moved in perfect sync, arms slanted at elegant angles, heads tilted just so.

Except her. Number twenty-eight.

Tessa.

He’d learned her name after all the corrections Daria had barked at her over the course of the day. She wasn’t off beat anymore, but she couldn’t seem to rein herself in. That was the difference. She danced bigger than everyone else. Bigger than was acceptable, if the dour expression on Daria’s face was any indication. But when the Russian watched her, he smiled.

Again, why Julian noticed any of this was a mystery. At any rate, he wasn’t ogling. He was simply observing. What was he supposed to do all day? Stare at the black-and-white keys?

He reached the end of the piece, and Daria clapped her hands. “That will be all for today. Tomorrow morning we’ll have barre exercises and run through the combination a final time. Then we’ll begin the selection process. Good work, everyone.” She glanced up and down the row of dancers and nodded, never once letting her gaze rest on Tessa. “You’re dismissed.”

Julian rearranged the sheet music for whoever took his place tomorrow and situated it on the rack of the Steinway. His hands ached. His back ached. He cursed under his breath, remembering a time when he could play his trumpet for hours, days, weeks at a time without so much as a sore pinky finger. Quite the opposite, in fact. He’d felt loose then. Liquid. Smooth. Like Coltrane.

And now here he was. Broken down after a few hours on a piano bench.

At least he felt something, though. He’d been numb for a while. A long while. He wasn’t altogether sure which was worse—the numbness or this new dull ache.

“Mr. Shine.” He looked up and found Daria staring down at him, hands planted on her slim hips. Behind her, he could see Tessa sitting alone beneath the barre, untying the ribbons of her pointe shoes. She’d loosened her hair from its ballerina bun, and it fell about her shoulders in lush copper waves. The ache in his hands intensified, and he had the sudden urge to find out what that beautiful hair would feel like sliding through his fingers.

He cleared his throat and damned the reawakening of his senses. “Daria.”

She stared daggers at him. “It’s Madame.”

He smiled and said nothing. He was only half paying attention, anyway. Tessa had removed her shoes, revealing her gracefully arched feet. They were flushed. Cherry red. She looked as though she’d been walking barefoot through a field of poppies.

“You were satisfactory today,” Daria said primly.

Satisfactory.

Julian suppressed an eyeroll. Other than his short audition the day before, today marked the first time he’d played any sort of music in two years. Two years, one month and sixteen days, to be exact. Not that he was counting. The days somehow counted themselves, no matter how hard he tried to stop keeping track.

Two years. He supposed satisfactory wasn’t the worst assessment in the world. What had he expected?

He didn’t even know, other than he’d thought it would be somewhere besides a ballet studio, where the only people who knew his name were Chance and a taskmistress who barely cleared five feet tall. A taskmistress who clearly expected him to show up again tomorrow.

“I’ll expect you at nine o’clock in the morning,” she said. “Sharp.”

Thanks, but no, thanks.