The Risk. Caitlin Crews

bra and tiny running shorts she wore. “This body is my instrument. I’ve honed it, beaten it into submission and gloried in it. But what I choose to do with it, who I choose to do it with, and what I want in return is entirely my business. I don’t think that makes me a whore.”

      “Please stop saying that word so loudly,” I said. Through my teeth.

      Annabelle smiled. “My understanding is that the club wants dancers who are open to using this opportunity as more than just a simple performance. Dancers who will push the envelope and give themselves over to the fantasy.”

      I wanted to dismiss the whole notion of M Club out of hand. I wanted to laugh, much as Annabelle had, all lust and delight. I wanted to start running again, stop talking and chalk this up to one more of Annabelle’s predictable flights of fancy.

      But my heart was kicking inside my chest as if we’d sped up instead of stopping. Between my legs, I was slippery. Too hot and trembling again, as if on the verge of another intense orgasm like last night’s.

      I didn’t know what was happening to me.

      I didn’t want to know.

      “You need to call the number I already have. You will have to update them about our little cast change. Tell them who you are, answer all their questions, and they will ask you to share your deepest, darkest fantasies with them.” Annabelle smirked at me. “I think we both know what that is.”

      “I don’t know what makes you think you have the slightest idea what I fantasize about. For all you know, I’d like nothing more than to zip-tie a room full of domineering men, then make them crawl around and serve me.”

      “Yes, yes,” she murmured. “Anyone who’s ever suffered through rehearsals with François has entertained a thousand fantasies of tying up men just like him and torturing them within an inch of their lives.” François was the Knickerbocker’s most temperamental male soloist and a diva beyond compare. “But that’s not quite the same thing, is it? That’s a revenge fantasy. It’s not what haunts you. It’s not what makes you moan in your sleep. Rhythmically. Waking up with a gasp—”

      I could feel my face turning red again. Bright and obvious, even outside on a sunny spring morning.

      “You must be thinking of yourself,” I countered. “Or either one of those twins you had over last night.”

      “I exhausted the twins long before I heard you, Darcy. But tell yourself any fiction you like.” Annabelle reached up and adjusted her ponytail. “I don’t need an answer until next week. You’re welcome to say no and condemn yourself to your usual life of mediocre sex and a thousand fantasies that you will soon enough be too old and too decrepit to enjoy.”

      “I don’t have mediocre sex—how dare you—and I have no intention of becoming decrepit.”

      “It’s one night, Darcy. In Paris.” Annabelle sighed as if she, too, played out some fantasies in her head instead of hurling herself headfirst into every last one of them. “You dance suggestively for strange men and women whose names you will not know. You show them as much of your naked body as you like, but only on your terms. Then, afterward, if you are so moved, you let the man who most captures your fancy draw you into a private room. You let him purchase you for the rest of the night and then do with you, to you, absolutely everything and anything he desires.”

      Her gaze was hot. Demanding. I told myself that was why I couldn’t breathe.

      “Just think about it,” Annabelle said.

      It took me much too long to remember I was in New York in the bright light of day, not under a dark Parisian night sky with a relentless stranger... I repressed a shiver.

      “I’ll be thinking about the ballet we need to perform,” I told her loftily. “Not your latest sexcapade.”

      But I thought of nothing else.

      And one of the reasons I loved Annabelle as much as I did was that when I went to her one largely sleepless week later and couldn’t quite meet her eyes as I muttered that yes, in fact, I could go to Paris in her stead, she only smiled.

      I’d undergone the written interview. The intrusive background check. I’d signed away every right I could think of and several I had not.

      I had met with a woman who had never offered me her name in a brownstone just steps from Fifth Avenue. She was obviously meant to be intimidating, but I’d been contending with famed dragon ladies like the Knickerbocker’s formidable ballet mistress most of my life. I’d smiled politely as we sat together in a room bursting with understated elegance and just enough wealth to seem accessible instead of off-putting. I’d answered what had seemed to me like an excruciating set of personal questions.

      What were my fantasies? Why? What would happen if I discovered that the reality was something far different than what I’d dreamed?

      “Well, ordinarily, I would demand everything stop. Then leave.” I’d blinked at the woman. “Is that allowed?”

      “Of course it is allowed,” the woman replied, with that faint accent I couldn’t quite place. She was regal, silver-haired, and with the sort of bearing that it was tempting to ascribe to rampant plastic surgery and a life of ease but was far more likely, I was certain, to be a simple combination of genetics and rigorous discipline.

      She reminded me of my first ballet teacher all those years ago in Greenwich. Madame Archambault had been unflappable and much, much kinder than she’d looked. She had once danced with Balanchine. She had brought out the best in all her students, and she’d made a dancer out of me. Maybe that was why I told this stranger, who knew everything about me though I knew nothing about her, my most secret, most tightly held fantasy.

      The one Annabelle had guessed but which I’d never admitted out loud.

      “It is not a fantasy for everyone,” the woman said when I had finished, feeling dirty and ruined and torn apart by my own black-and-white morality, just as Annabelle had long accused me. “It is easy to get lost.”

      My heart was a lump in my throat. “That’s why I’ve never done it.”

      “I think what you seek is surrender,” she said, smiling slightly. “For a woman who has always kept her body so tightly controlled, it would be something, would it not, to be under the control of another?”

      “You could argue that I’ve been under the control of this or that instructor, director or choreographer for most of my life.”

      The woman shrugged and she did that, too, with an innate elegance that made me wonder if she’d ever danced herself. “Ballet is your art. Your ambition. You submit to the tyrants of your daily life in service to your ego, your determination. It will be something else entirely, I think, to truly surrender your will to another’s.”

      “Or pretend to.” My voice had cracked on that, and it was a measure of how far I’d already fallen that I didn’t flush with embarrassment or try to clear my throat as if it was a trapped sneeze instead of emotion. “Isn’t that what we’re talking about? A game of pretend?”

      “If you like.” The woman’s gaze was steady. And she saw entirely too much. “Let us be clear what we’re talking about here, shall we?”

      “I love clarity,” I managed to say, though my lips were numb.

      “You wish to sell yourself to a man. A stranger.”

      And there it was, stark and unmistakable. I told myself it was an ugly thing, this strange fantasy that had flirted with me for as long as I could remember.

      But it didn’t feel ugly. Not here. Not in the face of this woman’s matter-of-factness.

      Here, and inside me, it felt beautiful. Pure. Relationships were always muddied by so many external factors. Feelings, histories. Schedules. Resentments. But this fantasy was all about simplicity.

      My body. His. Sex and lust, need and surrender, and a deep, intimate