She moves toward the bar as the dwarves spread their legs so they’re in the same position, but with some space between their heels. “And plié, two, three, four,” she starts again as they all bend their knees in this position.
I’m still working on getting my feet right when she comes to me at the bar. She lays a hand on my stomach and the other on my back. “Tight abs,” she says pressing her hand gently into my stomach. “Straight back.”
The dwarves are going through the same knee bend routine as we did in the first position, so I follow along to the music.
“Good,” she says. “Now arms softer.”
I shake the tension out of my shoulders and soften my arms. She grasps one gently and curves my elbow and wrist a little more. “There. Like that.”
Then she smiles as she moves around the bar to correct the dwarf on the other side.
So maybe she’s not that bad after all.
“And relevé . . . and third,” she says after a few more knee bends, and all the dwarves shift their feet again, placing the heel of one near the toe of the other, legs still turned out. Again, I try to copy them as they go through their knee bends but this one is harder. I feel off balance.
Marie is back, a hand on my butt and the other on my stomach again. “Turn your legs out and as you plié, keep your knees over your toes,” she says. “Your center of gravity needs to be over your base of support.”
“What?”
“Keep your butt over your heels,” she says with a smile.
I do and it’s easier.
As we move, as stupid as I feel, a troll among pixies, I start to become aware of my body in a way I’ve never been before. And as everything clicks back together, I realize that at some point—maybe as far back as Lorenzo—I intentionally disconnected from my body. For years, it’s been easier to pretend like what happens to it doesn’t matter. It’s nothing more than a vehicle. If it gets dented, so what? Just slap a fresh coat of paint on and keep going. But now, as I feel myself fully in my body for the first time in years, the sensations are almost overwhelming. My skin prickles, the nerve endings uber-sensitized by just the movement of the air around me. I glance over at Alessandro, in the boxing ring with a buff black kid, and I can hear and see things I shouldn’t be able to from here.
“Move your feet, Alex,” Alessandro says. And even from thirty feet away, I see the sweat trickling down his neck, the vein pulsing in his temple, the ripple of his biceps under a glossy sheen of sweat. I can almost taste his breath. I hear the grunt as the boy swings and I see the muscles shift under Alessandro’s skin as he moves to block the punch. His hand comes up like lightning and the boy stumbles back as Alessandro’s glove connects with the underside of his chin.
I gasp and grab for the dance bar as the memory flash knocks me off balance. Alessandro’s fist connecting with a boy’s face. Blood. The black boy morphs into Eric, his shocked face bloody as Alessandro’s fist slams into it over and over.
I was fluttering somewhere above my body, way up near the ceiling of the rec room, watching it all happen. I saw my body, sprawled on the couch, my T-shirt pushed up over my bra. I saw Alessandro beating Eric bloody on the floor next to me. And then I heard the laugh. Lorenzo.
He pushed off the door frame, where he’d been watching the fight. “Oh, little bro,” he taunted, moving toward my body like a prowling tiger. “You gotta learn to share, like I did.” He brushed his fingers down my face, my neck, my chest. I saw it from where I was floating, but I didn’t feel it.
Alessandro leapt off Eric and was next to my body in a heartbeat, shoving Lorenzo. “Don’t touch her!” he spit, then sat on the edge of the couch, straightening my shirt and sitting me up. My body was Jell-O and the rest of me was still fluttering near the ceiling like a butterfly. He scooped me off the couch and stepped over Eric on his way up the stairs.
“I think she gave me the clap, bro, so watch yourself,” Lorenzo yelled after us.
Alessandro laid me in my bed and everything spun. “Did he hurt you? Are you okay?” he asked, looking me over.
I shoved him away and muttered something that wasn’t even words.
He pulled the sheets up around me and the world went fuzzy, then faded out.
But Eric never touched me after that. At least . . . not until I let him.
Suddenly, I can’t breathe. The half court spins and I need out. I need to find air. I stagger to the door I entered through and hear Marie call my name. I don’t stop until I’m out on the sidewalk. As I stagger back toward the subway, my head spins just like it did then, with whatever Eric gave me. I can’t shake the image . . . the feeling.
“Hilary!” Alessandro’s voice calls behind me, but I don’t stop moving. I can’t. I need to outrun whatever this is. A minute later, there’s a hand on my arm and a second after that, my jacket is draped over my shoulders.
“Hilary,” Alessandro says, but I don’t turn to look at him. He guides me to a bus stop bench and sits me on it. “Are you all right? What happened?”
For a long time, I can’t answer. He sits with me, catching his breath, and I stare into space, trying to push the image of Eric’s bloody face out of my head. Finally, I sag into his shoulder.
“Talk to me, Hilary.”
My chest expands as I finally find some oxygen. “There are things I don’t remember from before, but some of them are coming back.” I glance up at him. “Like the time you beat the shit out of Eric.”
He cringes a little. “Just one more thing I’ve had to pray forgiveness for.”
“What happened? I don’t remember everything.”
He rolls his eyes up and breathes deep. “How much to you remember?”
“Just that I think he must have given me something, because I couldn’t really move.”
He nods slowly. “He roofied you.”
“Did he . . .” I trail off and pinch my face against tears. I’m not going to cry. Not again.
“He didn’t rape you,” he answers, reading my mind, “but only because Lorenzo and I came back from the courthouse before he could take it that far.”
“So you hit him.”
“I came in and found him on top of you on the couch. You were staring at the ceiling and singing in this voice that wasn’t right, like your tongue was too thick for your mouth. I knew what he must have done, so I . . .” He trails off, shaking his head. “I should have stopped. I pulled him off of you and I should have left it at that, but I was . . . I was so angry.” He hangs his head. “I lost control.”
I lower my head into my hands. “Thank you.”
“I couldn’t let him hurt you the way Lorenzo had.”
I look up at him. “You were the only person who gave a shit about me through any of that. If it weren’t for you, God knows where I would have ended up.” I lean into his shoulder and he holds me tighter. The delicious scent of warm musk and sweat wraps around me and that’s when I realize he’s still in his tank and gym shorts. “You must be freezing,” I say, reaching for his arm and finally doing what I’ve been dying to. I trail a fingertip over his flawless olive skin, along the vein from bicep to forearm.
“Don’t worry about me. I have a high metabolism.”
I wrap my hand around his lean forearm and smile at him. “You’re a terrible liar and I know this because you’re shivering.”
He looks down into my eyes for a long minute, the smile fading from his lips. “I have no right to want to touch you, and yet I want that more than anything—to convince all of my senses you’re really here after all this time.”