Dance for Me (Fenbrook Academy #1) - New Adult Romance Read Free Page A

dressed up in dinner jackets and gowns, paying hundreds of dollars a ticket. I’d never actually watched it before.
    The dancer took a single step forward and then tipped and I actually rose up out of my chair, horrified, thinking she was going to fall flat on her face. But she hung there, balanced on tiptoe—no, not even tiptoe, her foot was actually straight, up on the end of its toes! How the...?
    She seemed to lie there in the air, as easily as a bird floats on a thermal, and then the idiot who’d edited the program together cut to another shot and I lost her.
    I sat there staring at the after-image of the dancer in my mind, one hand running through my hair, and something kicked into gear, deep in my brain. A tiny, tantalizing glimmer—a feeling that this was important. I always trusted that feeling. Inspiration can come from weird places, sometimes—I once solved a navigation problem after reading something about humpback whales.
    I wanted more. I hit YouTube and started watching clips from ballets around the world, devouring them like snack food. By 4 a.m. I realized I didn’t really understand what I was looking at, so I hit Wikipedia and learned about history and styles, which lead me on to composers and choreographers. I immersed myself in ballet, swimming in pas de chat and port de bras.
    6 a.m. I sat down and watched The Nutcracker end to end, then made coffee and watched Giselle . By lunchtime, I’d worked my way through La Sylphide and some of La Bayadère . My head was filling up with moves and shapes. I could feel my brain twisting and realigning, preparing to come at the problem from a new direction—it was working, even if I didn’t know where the hell this was all leading me. I needed to share it with someone so, as always, I called Neil.
    Neil’s like my big brother. He took me under his wing at MIT and we kept in touch after I dropped out and he graduated. I could hear traffic roaring past. He must be out on his bike, stopped by the side of the highway to take the call.
    “Mm-hmm?” said Neil.
    “Did you know they go through a pair of shoes in a performance?” I blurted out.
    “Who does what?”
    “Their hip flexors have to rotate out 90 degrees. Can you imagine that? Their legs have to turn sideways! ”
    “Have you been up all night again?” I heard a horn and what sounded like a semi truck blast past him. I could imagine Neil nonchalantly lounging on the saddle of his Harley, barely off the road. It was impossible to faze him, which was probably why we got on so well. I knew I could come over a little...intense.
    “Where can I see some ballet? Live, in person?”
    “Um...I don’t know...some place in the city? Like, don’t they have a building for it?”
    I was checking websites as I talked to him. “They’re all tonight. I need it now.”
    “It’s vital that you see some ballet right this second?” He didn’t sound all that surprised by this. He knew the way my brain worked. “I guess there are rehearsals, and auditions and things? Maybe you could get into one of those?”
    I was already typing. Deep in the bowels of a dance website, I found a listing for an audition starting in an hour. “I found one! Gotta go!”
     
    ***
     
    I had a cold shower to make sure I was fully awake, but I didn’t need it. Despite the all-nighter, I was more fired up than I’d been in months, desperate to follow this thing through. I knew that inspiration could be as transient as it was powerful. If I didn’t chase this thing down it was liable to slip away from me and I’d be back to kicking the waste paper basket.
    I had no idea what the hell you were meant to wear to a dance audition—especially one you were crashing—so I pulled on jeans and a shirt. For a second, as the shirt went on, I glimpsed the scars on my side, the sight of them hauling up the memories from the dark depths of my mind, screams rising in my ears.
    My hands clenched into fists. Focus. Finish the project. Move onto