Dare Collection October 2019. Margot Radcliffe

In rehearsals. Even at Annabelle.

      People liked to claim artists were temperamental. In my experience, temperamental was an act. An indulgence. When it was time to work, the professionals got down to business and left the dramatic carrying-on to the amateurs. There were no divas in the corps. There was no room for any theatrics but the ones we were being paid to perform.

      And yet there was too much inside me these days. Too much wildness and recklessness. As if I was seconds away from snapping back every time the ballet master corrected me, which would not be good.

      As the train charged through the night, I faced the inescapable fact that I was different now, whether I wanted that to be true or not. I’d lost something in Paris a month ago, even as I’d gained the sheer joy of actually living out my wildest, most insane, most delicious fantasy. I’d lost the single-minded focus and drive that had fueled my life and my discipline for all these years, and I couldn’t seem to get it back.

      There had always been a pleasure in surrendering to the tough little march of my days. I loved what I did, especially when I let go of my ambition and lost myself in the sheer, fierce joy of dancing. But there was so much pain that went with it. You had to be some kind of masochist to build your life around it. I’d accepted that a long time ago, and I’d surrendered.

      Because every once in a while, the suffering disappeared, and there was only the breath inside me and flying. Without wings, light and free.

      And as the train pulled into Grand Central Station, it hit me. I wasn’t sure that having made myself an object devoted entirely to pleasure for one long night in Paris, and having loved it as much as I had, that I could give myself back to the pain again. Not even for the gift of flight.

      That tore me wide open, like an earthquake.

      Maybe it was the aftershocks from that that made me get on the subway instead of walking home the way I had planned. I didn’t question what I was doing. I headed to Chelsea and found myself walking quickly toward a theater tucked away on a side street. I bought a ticket at the box office in front, then ducked into the back.

      The show had already started, but I didn’t mind. I felt vulnerable and exposed already, even there in the darkness of the audience, and I was glad there were no house lights on to expose me.

      Because this was the contemporary dance company my friend Winston had joined two years ago, and at which he had become a principal. And Winston himself was there on stage, barefoot and beautiful as he danced to the kind of throbbing music that would give our Tchaikovsky-loving audiences the vapors.

      He looked happier than he ever had in the corps.

      More than that, he looked…free.

      That was the word that pounded through me, in time to the hypnotic beat. Free.

      There wasn’t a hint of ballet on that stage. And I loved it.

      When the curtain lowered, I was shaken. Tears poured down my face, but not because I was sad. I wasn’t. I was electrified. I had seen sheer joy on that stage. Art and beauty. And I knew that if I hadn’t gone to Paris, if I hadn’t given myself over to that one night of burlesque and fantasy, I would have failed to see what was happening here. I would have judged it through the lens of the Knickerbocker and found it sadly lacking.

      Because if you didn’t know what you were missing, you couldn’t see it. You would never see it. You could flap your wings all you liked, make all the right noises about flight, but you stayed in the same cage.

      But I knew better, now. I’d stepped outside the cage, and maybe it had been silly to imagine I could ever go back. That I could ever pretend I didn’t know the difference when I was back behind the bars.

      When I made my way backstage, Winston took one look at my face and let out a deep, joyful belly laugh.

      “I know that look,” he said, catching me in a hug. “Welcome to the dark side, Darcy. Anytime you want a place out here dancing for the fun of it, you let me know.”

      “The corps is life,” I replied lightly, as if it was all a joke.

      “That’s the marines, sweetie.” Winston rolled his eyes. “And don’t listen to those grim old sadists at the Knickerbocker. It’s not the same thing.”

      Maybe it was as simple as having options and choices instead of the same well-documented decline that made me feel so drunk all the way home. It was a cold night, but I walked anyway, because I wanted my feet on the ground. I wanted to feel the world the best way I knew how: by moving through it and in it, breath in my lungs and my toes against the earth.

      Nothing had changed, and yet everything was different.

      I had changed, and that made everything different.

      I thought of bright blue eyes, cruel lips, and his hands in fists in my hair.

      Right on cue, I melted. I went breathless and slippery, here in a different city a world away, with no hope of ever repeating that one glorious night. I thought of him, and I melted the way I expected I always would.

      And then everything changed again.

      Because when I turned the corner and started down the street to my building, the door to a sleek, low black car opened right in front of me.

      And then he was there.

      Sebastian. My Sebastian.

      Not a fantasy this time, lost somewhere in Paris with angel wings and the magic of the burlesque.

      Big and real and right here, in my real life.

       CHAPTER NINE

      Sebastian

      IT HAD BEEN a shite few weeks.

      At first, I told myself everything was normal and I was fine. Because everything was normal and I bloody well should have been fine.

      I’d left the club that following morning and I hadn’t charged about the streets of Paris like a madman, looking for a woman who wanted neither me nor my money. I hadn’t begged or pleaded with her before she left, or given in to any of the equally appalling urges I was horrified to discover clambered there inside me. She had left, then I had called for my car, and I had resumed my life with nary a ripple.

      That was the point of the club, after all.

      But no matter how hard I worked to stop thinking about that night—and that woman—I couldn’t quite make it stick.

      I thought about my little dancer in meetings. During negotiations. When I woke in the morning and all throughout the day, when I should have been thinking about other things—from macro concerns like the corporation I preferred not to run into the ground due to my inattention and more micro concerns, like John Delaney’s islands that my brother, Ash, was doing his level best to steal out from under me. I castigated myself for these lapses in the strongest possible terms.

      And then, every night, I dreamed about her in vivid color—sound and scent and the silken feel of her skin against mine—and woke to begin the mad cycle anew.

      I hardly knew who the hell I was.

      Maybe I didn’t have to fear becoming like my father, which had always been my gravest concern—especially after my great failure, which he’d openly sneered at. It had been easy enough for me to keep everything and everyone at arm’s length after the disaster with Ash, because my father had been a huge fan of pretending that he was capable of relationships. Fidelity. Fatherhood. My solution was not to pretend.

      But maybe the true worry was how easy it was for me to become like my mother, instead. Obsessed forever with a person who had forgotten her long ago.

      Everything I had told Darcy was true. My mother had never tolerated my father’s infidelities well, but it