The Risk. Caitlin Crews

certainly never shone like that, wicked and insinuating.

      Annabelle might not be a prima ballerina any more than I was, but she always captured attention. Though that was not always a good thing in company class, where those of us in the corps were working on uniformity, not interpretation.

      “I don’t understand why you think your kink has to be my kink,” I told her, perhaps a bit loftily. It was an old argument. “As I think we’ve established in the past decade, you like things that I definitely do not.”

      “How do you know if you won’t try?” she asked, as she always did. Her gaze was wicked, as usual, but steady on mine in the mirror. “And believe me, Darcy, you will never find more controlled circumstances than these.”

      “Annabelle.” I was afraid that the sudden roughness in my voice would give away the startling truth that this conversation felt emotional to me. Which I was terribly afraid meant that, as usual, my fearless, impetuous friend had poked her finger directly onto the sort of button I preferred to keep to myself. As if she knew exactly what fantasies I toyed with in the dark. Alone. “I have no interest whatsoever in selling myself.”

      She sniffed, then grinned cheekily when our friend Bernard, another member of the corps, looked over his shoulder at us with his eyebrows raised.

      “You sold your body to the ballet ten years ago,” she told me, with the brutal practicality that made me love her no matter how little I understood her. “Selling a fuck or two is far less wear and tear on your body, pays more, and unlike a lifetime in the corps, will make you come your face off.”

      But all my face did that day was turn red, which got me a sharp rebuke from Miss Fortunato when we were called out into the floor to begin the class.

      All through my rehearsals that day and the show I danced that evening, I pretended that I’d put Annabelle’s nonsense out of my mind the way I normally did, whether she was claiming she’d seduced the chiropractor or pretending she might at any moment become a stripper, instead.

      But that night, I dreamed. Of a private dance in a dark room, and the hot, demanding stare of the man I danced for. I imagined peeling off my clothes and embracing the true vulnerability of my performance, around and around until I landed between his legs. I dreamed I knelt there before him, alive with need.

      I could feel his hand like a brand against my jaw, lifting my face to his, and what I saw there made my body tremble.

      Because he saw me as his. A possession. An object.

      Something he could use for his pleasure, however he wished.

      My whole body clenched. My thighs pressed tightly together. And a wild, intense orgasm woke me from a sound sleep and left me panting there in the dark.

      In my bed. Alone.

      “There are some fantasies that should never become reality,” I told Annabelle a few mornings later.

      We’d set out on the run we sometimes did in the mornings before company class, if we weren’t in the mood to swim or hit the elliptical. That left our break times free for the more pointed bodywork or extra rehearsals we might need as the day wore on. That morning we’d followed our usual loop, running up a few blocks from our nondescript street on the Upper East Side, along Fifth Avenue, then into Central Park.

      Annabelle and I lived in a studio apartment in the low 70s we’d long ago converted into a makeshift two-bedroom—which was to say we’d put a few bookcases and a screen here and there to create a little psychological space. It meant that no matter how often I might hear Annabelle crying out her pleasure or making her lovers sob her name I didn’t actually have to witness any of it unless I wanted to.

      “Why?” she asked me then. “Making fantasies reality is the point of life, as far as I can tell.”

      Neither one of us liked running that much, though we dedicated ourselves to it the same way we did everything else: with intense focus and determination because of course we needed the cardio. We always needed the cardio. We were still in our twenties, but our metabolisms were already shifting and we were certainly no longer the seventeen-year-olds we’d been when we’d started. A few miles every morning helped, and went by quicker with a friend and some conversation. But soon I was much too aware nothing would help. Time came for us all, whether we wanted to face it or not.

      There were no elderly ballerinas in the Knickerbocker.

      “Why?” I repeated. “Let me think. First of all, safety.”

      “You’re a grown woman, Darcy,” Annabelle said with a laugh. “I feel certain that you can make yourself safe, if you want. Or not so safe, if that’s hotter.”

      “Just because you sell yourself without blinking, it doesn’t mean that kind of thing comes easily to others. It’s a social taboo for a reason.”

      “I consider myself a world-class performer. Why shouldn’t a lover pay just as they would if they were coming to see me dance at the theater?” She laughed again when I made a face. “I always forget that you have this traditional streak. This is what happens when you grow up sheltered in Greenwich, Connecticut, the toast of all those desperately preppy boarding schools.”

      “I was not the toast of Miss Porter’s.”

      “Miss Porter’s,” Annabelle repeated, pronouncing the name of my high school alma mater as if she was belting it from the center stage. While also mocking it. “I’m just saying that I had fewer moral quandaries at good old Roosevelt High.”

      “To hear you tell it, your tiny little high school in Indiana was ground zero for debauchery.”

      “It’s Indiana. What’s there to do except get a little twisted and dirty?” Annabelle blew out a breath as we sped up to pass a group of nannies. “Your trouble is, you think that if you actually got what you wanted, it would ruin you.”

      “I do not.”

      I did. I really, truly did.

      “Here’s the deal, Darcy,” Annabelle said, coming to a stop when we’d only done the first of our three miles. She rested her hands on her hips, and I knew she was serious when a good-looking man ran past and looked at her admiringly and she didn’t look back at him. “I’ve spent years trying to get inside this. Any branch, anywhere.”

      “Then you shouldn’t give up your opportunity to do it this time.”

      “I’m understudying Claudia,” Annabelle said, naming one of our soloists. She shrugged. “I can’t be flying off to Paris during our season break, indulging myself, and possibly miss an opportunity that both you and I know is unlikely to come again. Not that it will come this time, either. You know Claudia. She won’t miss a show. She’d dance through the plague.”

      I did know Claudia, younger than us and far more ambitious. I also knew Annabelle. And I’d been hearing her talk about the pleasures to be had in this exquisite M Club of hers for at least two years. There was no applying for membership. There was no showing up or waiting in a line. The club was by invitation only, membership was rumored to be extended only to the wealthiest individuals alive, and clearly, the only possible way that someone like Annabelle or me was getting inside was as the help.

      Or in this case, as the talent.

      “If they’re so fancy, why wouldn’t they hire real burlesque dancers?” I didn’t even smirk when I said it. Because, between Annabelle’s first mention of it and now, I had accidentally spent a little too much time researching the art form. “There are world-renowned burlesque dancers who I’m sure would leap at the chance—”

      “For exactly that reason. World-renowned, professional burlesque dancers would likely perform burlesque, then go about their business. M Club is looking for dancers who might do a little bit more than that.”

      “You mean dancers who want to be whores.”

      Annabelle tipped back her head and laughed at that loudly.