I could feel the bass tone coming through the speakers even in my chest. Luke’s hands were so far down my back over the fabric of my dress that they might as well have been on my ass. We were in the middle of the dance floor at a club on the weekend. It was Mitch’s last night in town and he wanted to go out for a good time. It was the fourth night in a row that I’d seen Luke since I’d met him, and it was because of him that our options were limited. The guys who played for the Maple Leafs didn’t just simply go out anywhere. If they were going to a club, it wasn’t one on Queen Street West that took party photos.

We were at a low key club: older crowd, no photos, and small VIP section. Plus, it was a Sunday. It would be bad news if Luke’s picture from the night ever ended up in the newspaper or on the internet. His fangirls, and maybe even his ex-girlfriend, would have a field day tearing me apart.

Dancing was my entire life—it didn’t have to be ballet for me to have fun. I was comfortable dancing with a partner and having my personal space invaded. There was no space between Luke and me. With his hands almost on my ass, and my hands clutching at his biceps, we were grinding to the music. It was a theme night at the club and they were playing some older R&B dance songs. Both of us would have been under the age of 10 when the song was released.

Luke leaned down so his lips were near my ear when the song was about half over. He was laughing as he yelled, “This song is so dirty.”

And it was. The song was basically four minutes of a guy singing about an erection. The beat sure was good though.

“You’re so bad,” I yelled back.

“We have an audience,” Luke said, adjusting his hands and momentarily squeezing one of my hips.

While the two of us didn’t show moves much different than the other people on the dance floor, we weren’t playing fair either. Our intentions were different. I looked over to the VIP lounge—where we’d been sitting before we hit the floor, because Luke was sort of a big deal in Toronto—and saw my friend Sarah sitting beside the Versteegs. She was talking to Mitch, but Kris was watching Luke and me.

It still didn’t mean anything other than I’d gotten his attention. But hey, I’d gotten his attention! A lot more in the last couple of days than over the last couple of years. Luke must have done more than hone his hockey skills during his time playing major junior in Kelowna, because he was a bona fide schemer. He was even more game than I was. No one had a clue that it was all for show. Not Kris or my brother, not even Sarah. It was our secret and it was better that way. As far as everyone else knew, Luke and I were two people who met that were interested in each other.

“You look really good, by the way,” Luke spoke in my ear again. “If I wasn’t me, I’d envy me if I was watching you dance with me like this.”

He had a few too many ‘me’s in his sentence but he was honest. I liked that about him. It might be dishonest to give everyone else an illusion of what we were, but because we were partners in the whole thing, he was honest with me. Ever since a few nights ago when we sat beside each other on the couch, he told me exactly what he thought. It was great because I could get close to him without there being any sexual tension. We could find attractive qualities in each other without our signals getting mixed up.

When I looked up at him, there was a lopsided grin playing on his lips, dimples firmly creased in place. I threw my head back and laughed in response to what he said about looking good and envy. I had one professional hockey player helping me gain the attention of another one. The whole situation was ridiculous, really. It was stupid. And yet I wasn’t going to put an end to it.

As the DJ spun and transitioned into a new song, I freed myself from Luke’s grip and turned around so that my back was to his chest. I was still completely pressed up against him and he curled one of his arms around my waist. “Who’s bad now?” he asked.

I almost laughed again as I rested my head back against the crook of his neck. He was only a few inches off from being a foot taller than me and the top of my head aligned with his Adam’s apple when I was down to my bare feet. In my heels, I reached his upper jaw. I closed my eyes and smiled. I was relaxed there on the floor. I’d even go as far as saying that I felt safe. Not because of Luke, but because of the power dancing gave me. My whole reason for being was conveying expression through controlled body movement. Whether the music playing was suggestive over a hard beat or a symphony orchestra, I could get lost in it.

My eyes flew open when Luke’s hands left my body and there was open space behind me. I turned around and met the back of his neck. His didn’t have to lean down as he spoke to another girl, taller and much more raven-haired than me. She was dancing with—or trying to dance with—Luke. He wasn’t having it. He cautiously took hold of one of her elbows and one of her wrists, steadying her.

“Sorry,” I heard him say over the music. “I came to dance with my date.”

Wow. He really was like a puppy dog. A few days and loyalty was already one of his best qualities.

The sly smile on the girl’s face fell. She looked at me, standing behind Luke, and gave me the elevator eyes. The look she gave me read as why you and not me?—and she had every right. Both of us had dark makeup on. We were dressed similarly, in dresses that were low cut at the bust and hemmed to mid-thigh. I’d never shied away from showing off my legs because, with all the years of ballet in my arsenal, I believed they were my best quality. But this girl had legs for days and had the advantage over me in the cleavage department. I had a good body type for dance because I was petite: exactly 5’5” with small boobs. So why should I get to grind with the tall hockey player and not her?

Because Luke was a puppy.

She sighed and spun on her heel. I was glad for her that her friends were standing nearby and she was able to blend back into their group easily. As confident as I was that I could keep up with the best of them at a club, I wasn’t the type of girl to approach a stranger to dance. I mean I’d liked my brother’s best friend, who I’d barely even seen in my adult life, in silence for a long time. Obviously I had a fear of rejection.

Luke turned back to me once the girl was dancing comfortably with her girlfriends. We faced each other as he put his arm back around my waist.

“I didn’t know I was your date,” I told him.

He shrugged sheepishly. “You know what I meant.”

“You didn’t have to send her away,” I responded over the bass thump. “I know how to share.”

I didn’t mind being part of a Luke sandwich on the dance floor. Weren’t guys into that kind of thing? Just because we were giving off the impression that we were digging each other, it didn’t mean he couldn’t dance to the dirty music with another girl. It was just dancing.

“To be honest,” he stopped moving, “I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

I pulled back slightly and raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“I don’t dance.” Luke admitted, yelling in earshot, “You’re the ballerina. I’m just following your lead.”

My ears perked up at his confession. I guess that made sense. It wasn’t like he had to do much while we were in so close to each other. His grip had been tense and too tight—nothing like any of the pas de deux partners I’d had in a long time. I put my hands on his hips with a bit of pressure and he made a face.

“What are you doing?”

“Do you trust me?” I asked.

“You’re not supposed to answer a question with a question,” he answered.

I didn’t change my words. “Do you trust me?”

Luke nodded.

“Relax,” I purred as I made breathing room between us and applied more pressure, trying to move his hips.

He eyed me skeptically. I showed him what to do, swinging my own hips from side to side. I guided his movement with my hands, trying to get him to mirror what I was doing. It wasn’t all bad once he loosened up. I put one of my hands on his wrist and tapped the beat he should be grooving to. Maybe not in the most fluid of fashion—he wasn’t a natural—but he caught on. When he trusted me and himself enough that he was dancing properly, I stopped the metronome on his arm and rested my hand on his shoulder.

It did remind me of ballet pas de deux. Pas de deux was, of course, about form and technique, but it was also about trust and connection. I had to trust that my partner was going to lift and catch me, and ease my spinning instead of breaking my momentum during pirouettes, when it was required. He had to trust that I would put myself in the right position for him to support me throughout. A big part of the reason I’d gotten a minor solo role in the National’s upcoming production of Giselle was because my current partner, Étienne, and I danced so well together.

We were paired with each other in the final spring production of the previous season just before he was promoted to second soloist. We became friends over a couple of lunches when one of our directors wanted to test a potential partnership, and we proved to have chemistry. Our director called it a meeting of the minds. At the start of the new season, I was the very last girl to audition for the Peasant pas de deux. Initially, I hadn’t even been under consideration. Étienne had already been cast because of his promotion. When he danced the audition piece with a couple of the female soloists it looked great—soloists didn’t get to be so without being amazing dancers—but it didn’t have the same feeling as when we danced it together. Étienne sold the panel of artistic directors on me just by dancing with me.

Obviously Luke wasn’t anywhere near as good a dancer as Étienne was—not even in the same galaxy—but for our purpose at the club, his partnering skills weren’t half bad. He didn’t have two left feet. We took a break from the floor once the song that I taught him to move his hips to ended. I made my way back to our friends in the VIP lounge that Luke’s good name had gotten us wristbands for while he stopped at the bar to get us drinks. Apparently it was the kind of club where physically standing at the bar was more convenient than talking to a server, even for Luke Schenn.

I took a seat between Sarah and Mitch even though there were open spots on either side of Kris. Luke’s advice, I reminded myself, would be the foundation for my game’s success. It was true: be acknowledged by not acknowledging.

“You have a lot of explaining to do later,” Sarah hissed at my side. “I need details of why you were practically dry humping this Luke kid before you showed him how to dance.”

I grinned at her with a nod. I didn’t intend to tell her what was really going on with Luke and me. Not yet, at least. But she didn’t have to know that.

When I looked at Mitch on my other side, he tipped his glass to me. “I had no idea you could dance like that. You looked great out there.”

Well apparently the audience Luke and I had wasn’t just Kris alone.

Mitch nudged my shoulder and then spoke in a lower octave. “I wasn’t asleep, by the way.”

“What?” I leaned in toward him. I wasn’t sure what he meant and the loud music was messing with the words I was hearing.

“I wasn’t asleep.”

My eyebrows knitted in confusion. “What?”

“I know all about your deal with Luke,” he clarified, yelling in my ear, “I know what you’re doing.”

It didn’t take long for me to know what he meant. He had his eyes closed the whole time on that night Luke figured me out. Mitch had been fake sleeping. I felt the heat rushing to my cheeks and my chest tightened. Oh God. He knew. He knew that I liked his brother and what I was doing because of it. I racked my brain quickly for an appropriate response, an explanation, something. It never came.

“Are you mad?” I asked instead.

Mitch shook his head. “Why would I be mad? Honestly, I just think that it’s either the best idea ever or the worst.”

“Why?”

“I think you and Kr—you and him,” Mitch corrected himself, stopping the blunder of saying his brother’s name out loud. Kris was otherwise occupied with some ‘honeys’ that had sat down with him, and the music was loud, so he probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway. “I think you’d be good for him. But he’s kind of a jerk sometimes. Be careful.”

Be careful. The words resonated in my head.

Just as Luke was arriving from the bar, drinks in hand, I gave Mitch a half hug. “You’re not going to tell your brother, are you?”

Luke handed me the gin and tonic I’d asked for and Mitch ended the hug, shaking his head at both of us. “I can keep a secret.”

Sarah and I talked between ourselves for a bit while the boys talked to each other and to Kris’ new acquaintances. I glanced at Mitch nervously a few times, but he never looked back at me and they did seem engaged in whatever they were conversing about. I didn’t know if Mitch was going to keep his word and keep my secret. What if he felt the urge to interfere? What if he told his brother the truth once he was already in K-zoo, where there was no way I could strangle him? I knew Mitch but I didn’t really know him. There was no way to tell if he was just going to disappear quietly into the night in western Michigan.

During the summer intensive program before Grade 11, Sarah and I had been roommates at the academy. We became pretty good friends during that time and I considered her one of my closest friends by the end of Grade 12. We chose different paths after graduation, but remained in Toronto, so we still saw each other a couple of times a month. While I began my apprenticeship with the company a few years back, Sarah took on the dance teaching program. Recently, she’d been teaching introductory levels of ballet at a small dance school in North York.

She always updated me on the adorable antics of her students. Most of them were under the age of ten, wide-eyed and eager to learn. Sometimes I thought her life was much more fun than mine and it was more practical, too. She didn’t have to worry about injuries or pointe work. She was a mentor to kids. I hoped that my own career could span at least another decade and teaching would be something I could get into after.

When the topic of our conversation switched to me, I shrugged and told Sarah not much was new since the last time we hung out. It was still in the early goings of ballet season. I didn’t do much but go to class and rehearsal five days a week. The performance nights of Giselle were still a little more than a month away. On the weekends, I did pilates or swam laps to keep up my core strength and endurance. Luke was the only addition to my routine, if he even counted after a couple of days. I told Sarah it was the first time so far that having a brother (who was on a date and therefore absent from the club, by the way) who was friends with an NHLer had ever worked well in my favor.

Soon we reported back to the dance floor. All of us. It began with just us girls. Sarah and I were more than capable of holding our own. It wasn’t anything like her namesake in the beginning of that awful teen flick Save the Last Dance. Just because we were classically trained in ballet, it didn’t mean we’d never been exposed to other forms of dance.

The guys joined us after one song. Luke strolled over and faced Sarah and me so that we formed a triangle. We picked up where we left off. He danced the same way I’d shown him earlier even though the tempo of the song was different. Sarah looked at me, then shook her head with a smirk. I felt a tap on my arm. Well actually, it was more like a few fingers at once. I turned my head and Kris was standing behind me.

“Hey,” he yelled as I turned around.

“Hey,” I yelled back.

He leaned in closer. “Dance with me.”

Hopefully my eyes didn’t bug out of my head. He was taking my hand, taking my hand, as I looked around us. Mitch was dancing with one of the girls that Kris had been talking to in the lounge. Sarah was taking care of Luke, laughing at him and adjusting his body movements. I knew she’d do a better job at improving his dance skills than me since she was an actual teacher. The floor was much more packed than it had been 20 minutes earlier, so hopefully the girl with the shiny black hair that Luke had turned down wasn’t watching and mad that he’d lied to her about only dancing with me.

Kris held one of my hands up in his. His other arm hovered in the air near my side as we settled into a groove. Immediately, there was a notable difference between Kris’ dancing and Luke’s dancing. Kris had a sense of rhythm. There was also the fact that he didn’t tower over me too tall like Luke did. Kris was considered to be on the shorter side for hockey. But in real life terms, 5’10” wasn’t all that short. Since I was wearing three inch heels, my forehead aligned with his eye line.

The song that was playing was meant to be a club banger. It included a clap along part that nearly everyone on the dance floor participated in. Kris let go of my hand so we could participate, too. The crowd shifted as bodies moved to the song and Kris and I were surrounded by strangers instead of our friends. Who said low key clubs didn’t get packed? When the person standing behind me inadvertently elbowed me in the back, I nearly tripped. I fell against Kris and his arm that had been hovering by my side went to support me, his hand on my lower back.

“You okay?” he wondered.

I nodded but he didn’t back off. Instead he got a goofy grin on his face and started singing along to the song, his lips right near the hair that was covering my ear. I chuckled and rolled my eyes, even if he couldn’t see me do so. Of course he would know the words to a song that had peaked on the charts when he was going through puberty. We danced, almost pressed up against each other, and when I moved my fingers to the back of his neck I realized it was the closest we’d been to each other in years, maybe even ever.

There was no grand moment of epiphany. I didn’t look up into his icy blue eyes and lose myself there. But it was nice. I was 14 when I moved to Calgary, so I’d never been invited to the high school parties that Kris and Gavin went to. As fate would have it, it was the first time ever I was dancing with Kris, and he was singing—badly—in my ear. I wasn’t nervous or worried that I would betray myself. Actually, I felt at ease. I thought that I could get used to being that close to him.

The eyes I wound up looking into were Luke’s. He and Sarah were a few feet away from me when I met his gaze. He wiggled his eyebrows and gave me his tight-lipped, lopsided smile. I was beginning to think it was his trademark, like Harvey from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

It was the same smile he gave me when we were all spent from dancing, with a fair share of alcohol in our veins, waiting outside the club for cabs to take us home. That smile had an air of all-knowing, like he was telling me I could have everything I wanted and I already had everything I needed to get it, if I could just figure it out.

Luke and I were standing out of earshot of our friends, on the corner of the block beside one of those rounded bill posts where people put up show posters and internship opportunities. He asked, “Are you going to manage the ride home?”

Mitch was staying at Luke’s place again for his last night in town as his brother’s rented condo was still unsuitable for company. Kris had a bed but no furniture. Sarah had already left on the streetcar towards the subway to North York. Usually I would have done the same to get back to Etobicoke but I’d spent the night out with two well-paid hockey players. Luke’s point of concern about me managing the ride home had to do with the cabs we were waiting for. He and Mitch were getting in a cab together toward downtown and I’d be headed home in a cab with Kris. Alone.

“I think I’ll be okay,” I answered, feeling somewhere between hopeful and confident.

At this point in the night, the few cocktails I consumed earlier had made me very calm. I didn’t think Kris and I would be talking much on the way home. I planned on staring out the window at the passing city lights. I couldn’t say something stupid if we kept speaking to a minimum.

The Versteegs called for us loudly, even though we were no more than 20 feet away from them, when checkered cabs pulled up in front of the valet attendant. Luke and I strolled over. Kris was already in the backseat of the first cab, sitting on the side furthest from the curb. All of the windows were down to the humid September air and the door was left open for me.

“Come on,” I heard Kris say. He was watching us, waiting expectantly.

Just as I reached the edge of the yellow door, Luke caught my elbow. “Wait.”

When I spun around, he took half a step and put an arm around me, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He tucked blonde hair behind my ear with his free hand and left his fingers there as he leaned down to kiss me. I closed my eyes and pressed my palm into the back of his shoulder as it happened, puckering up and kissing him back. Luke’s breath was rye whisky. His lips were soft.

“Good night,” he said with that Harvey Kinkle smile again. He’d just made sure that without a doubt I was going to be fine during the ride home.

“Good night,” I whispered.

Notes

Happy Opening Day, all! I hope it was as fun for everyone as it was for me. As always, thanks for reading!

Extended Chapter Notes