Me, Erik thought, as triumphant as if he’d pulled it off. She did it for me. That was mine.
Daisy and Will’s Siciliano was beyond description. Erik had watched it so many times this week, memorizing whole sections of the dance despite not knowing the names of steps. He thought he knew it. Now he watched Daisy and Will take it to yet another place, and he followed them there, mesmerized and connected. Through the medium of Will he could feel Daisy’s body, its weight and warmth and closeness. Her arms here, her leg there, her waist in his hands, her back arching against his chest. He had it. He understood now. He felt the meld of music and movement and grasped how it became something greater, an expression beyond counts and beats and the vocabulary of steps.
Watching Daisy, his throat was tight, his heart swollen in his chest. Will took her back in his arms, laid his cheek at the base of her throat. Erik’s own cheek grew warmer. Daisy’s hand languidly came up to Will’s head and Erik felt it caress his hair. He was being touched by her. He felt his entire being condensing down to one truth: I’m falling in love with her.
He was grateful for the dark of the booth and the simplicity of the lighting cues for the Siciliano, which left him free and alone to savor this moment, hold it in his hands and press it into his memory. I am falling in love. This was the first time he had felt so powerfully and instinctively connected to a girl without yet possessing any intimate physical knowledge of her. This was the profound realization that sex was the fruit of an emotional bond, not the dirt in which it grew. How limited his experience was in this realm of human affinity. He was a baby. As much a virgin as Daisy. At least she was waiting to make love.
He wanted to make love with her, to partner her and create something together, to find their own dance.
And he wanted it badly enough to wait for it.
So rapt was his attention he missed his cue at the end of the pas de deux. David reached over him to slide the levers, bringing the lights down. Erik snapped back to the present, his face burning. “My bad,” he mumbled.
David gazed at him, smiling, his expression neither reproachful nor teasing. “Love will do that to a guy,” he whispered.
Erik nodded, not looking away. He felt caught between declaring his love, and apologizing for it. Such a strong urge to say to David, “I’m sorry.” But for what? Not for loving Daisy, he wouldn’t back down.
David looked away then, still smiling. Chin on his hand, staring at the stage. It was dimmed down to the lowest beams on the boom stands, illuminating the hushed interval between pieces. “Fishy, fishy in the brook,” he said under his breath, “many things, but not a crook.”
Sax
A bag of Swedish Fish was no problem, but Friday night, Erik had to go to three different convenience stores and a gas station before he could find a bouquet of daisies. He separated two from the bunch and taped them to the candy, leaned paper and pen against the wall backstage and wrote a note:
The library had a Swedish-English dictionary.
Sax = scissors.
He almost wrote “good luck,” then remembered it was bad luck to say it in the theater.
He stopped Aisha Johnson, one of the contemporary girls. “You wouldn’t say ‘break a leg’ to a dancer,” he said. “How do you wish good luck before a show?”
Aisha raised her eyebrows and held out an expectant palm.
“Goddammit,” he muttered, reaching for his wallet and the dollar he now owed.
“I’m teasing,” she laughed. “No, no, I don’t want your money. You say ‘merde.’”
“Merde.”