Brandy Colbert - Pointe

He is gentle with me, so much gentler than I thought anyone could ever be. His lips travel across my neck, my shoulder, my navel, and when he stops to ask me if I’m okay, I take his face in my hands and I kiss him. Hard, so he won’t see the tears in my eyes. No one has ever asked me that.

It’s uncomfortable at times, but it’s never unbearable. I keep waiting for his rhythm to change, for him to treat me like the rag doll I sometimes felt like with Chris. But Hosea is sweet—the whole time. He interrupts his kisses to ask if this feels good or that feels better, to make sure I don’t want to stop at any point. He is extraordinary and right now, tonight, he is mine.

Afterward, I go to the bathroom and I sit on the toilet and I cry. Shoulder-racking sobs that I bury in my hands and hide under the rush of the faucet. I can’t let him hear me but I can’t lie there with him, hold it in while he is so kind. Stroking my hair and kissing my neck and saying how happy I make him. I press a pink hand towel to my mouth and I choke down sobs, because tonight can’t last forever and he’s not mine.

Not really.

THE LAST TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE TRIAL SNEAK UP ON ME SO fast that I gasp when I look at the calendar and see I have twelve days left.

Because of winter break, it’s the first time I’ve been in the studio with Hosea since we slept together, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been so conscious of someone in the room. Every shift on the piano bench, every turn of the sheet music, every twitch of his wrist makes me think of being with him.

Ruthie can tell something is up. She keeps eyeing me during class, which doesn’t help, because my timing is already off. I can’t focus when I keep wondering if Hosea sees me now and thinks of what my feet really look like under these shoes. I tried to keep them out of view that night, but he looked at them as we were getting dressed.

My feet should be displayed on a warning poster in a podiatrist’s office. They’re hideous. I can’t remember the last time the skin on them wasn’t thick and dry, hardened by calluses and blisters. My toenails are obscenely short because if I let them grow out even a bit, I will pay for it. Not to mention the scars from where the skin has cut open and bled and healed itself. If I end up in a professional company, I will give up the chance of ever having semi-normal feet.

I asked him not to look at them, but he wrapped his hand around my ankle, pulled my foot onto his lap. He slid his palm over the top of my foot, brushed his thumb along the slope of my arch. I let out a breath without making a sound. His long, beautiful fingers were touching my deformed feet when all I’d ever wanted was to hide them. He curved his fingers around my toes, pressed lightly on a callus as he said they show I’m committed to my craft. Then he leaned in and kissed me and as I kissed him back, I wished so much for time to stop. Just a few extra minutes where everything was good and special and ours.

After class, I time how long I’m in the dressing room perfectly because Hosea is just walking through the lobby as I enter from the hallway. The only person standing around is the girl at the front desk, and she’s older, not interested in what we’re doing. So I hurry to catch up to him, put my hand on his arm.

He looks surprised to see me, even though we just spent an hour and a half in the same room. Though he’s been as close to me as only one other person. Ever. Closer, even, if you count our emotional connection. Something I never had with Chris, not if I’m honest with myself. How can you have a true connection with someone if everything they ever told you was a lie?

“Hi,” he says. And he smiles, but I don’t miss the hesitation behind it because—right. We’re at the studio. In public. I glance back at the girl behind the front desk. She’s not even looking at us, but we still have to be careful. Even a city as big as Chicago is a small world; people know each other and things could get back to Ellie easier than we think.

So I take my hand off his arm and I keep space between us as we walk out to the street. Around the corner, where the only people who can see us are ducking in and out of the adjacent drugstore. It snowed a couple of days over winter break and most of it has melted in the city, but not all of it. Little snowbanks still sit against some of the buildings, blackened from cigarette butts and garbage and dirt from the city streets.

“Hi,” he says again, and he kisses me swiftly on the lips now that we’re kind of in the clear. “How are you?”

“Tired. But good.” I shrug. “How are you?”

If good means sweating through my sheets and waking up with night terrors, wondering how I’ll know what to say in my testimony. If it means staring at Donovan’s house way too long and too often, wondering if he’ll talk to me if I go back and try again. If it means only eating enough to stave off suspicion and pinching my side until pain rips through me each time I even think about food, then yes. I’m good.

“I’m good, too,” he says, nodding. “Fine.”

This all seems so oddly formal. He’s seen me naked. Run his hands all over me, kissed me until I was weak against him. But now he looks at me expectantly, like I should have something specific to say if I want to approach him.

“Are you, um . . . Are you going to winter formal?”

It’s the first thing that pops to mind. I hadn’t been thinking about it. Not really. But it’s next Friday, and people are making plans and I want to know his.

“I don’t want to. I mean, I wouldn’t, but Ellie—she really wants to go since it’s our last year.” He sighs. “So I told her I would.”

“Oh.” God. Of course he’s going with her. “Right.”

“Look, I hate these things,” he says. My eyes fixate on the piece of hair hanging in his face, next to his ear. The same ear that I’ve kissed. “I wish I didn’t have to go . . . I wish I could be with you instead.”

“You could,” I say. With so much hopefulness it makes me sick.

He pushes his boot against a pile of hard, grimy snow. “You know I can’t cancel on her now. She . . .” He doesn’t finish his sentence and when I don’t say anything, he says, “I should get going.”

Sort of distractedly.

Sort of in a way that squeezes my heart.

And it must be all over my face, because there’s a rueful note to his tone as he says, “I have to meet Ellie. I’d give you a ride to your car, but—”

“I don’t need a ride.” I dig my gloves from my pockets so I’ll have something to do besides think about how I just sounded too proud.

“Theo.”

I’m not fooling either one of us, so I stop fiddling with my gloves and look at him.

“This doesn’t change anything, okay?” His gray eyes are tender as they meet my gaze. “I want to see you as much as possible, but she can’t know about us.”

Right. I told him I could handle this. I promised I could share. So when he says, “We’re still cool?” I nod and let him hug me and I squeeze my eyes closed very, very tight as my nose presses into his chest.

And it’s a good thing I manage to keep it together as I walk back around the building after we’ve said our goodbyes, because I forgot my dance bag. I’ll have to go back in the studio and I can’t let anyone there see me cry. I’ve always prided myself on not crying so they won’t see me as weak. Especially Marisa. And it’s hard to keep it in sometimes, but I’m not about to break my fourteen-year streak now.

I run into Ruthie at the door. My dance bag is saddled over her right arm, on top of her own, and her face lights up when she sees me. “Oh, good. I was just about to call you. I wasn’t sure if you’d already left . . .”