Total pages in book: 166
Estimated words: 157273 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 157273 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
A handful of minutes later, the curtain went up, the music started, and I watched Everett take the stage as Hilarion, then Daniel as Albrecht, both exuding the perfection expected at our level.
Adrenaline flooded my system the second I made my entrance to the applause of the audience, quickly conquering any protest my ankle thought about making. The lights and music consumed every thought, stealing the pain, the worry, even the lead weight of Mom’s gaze, until I wasn’t just dancing Giselle, I was Giselle.
Twenty minutes in, adrenaline waned, pain shimmering up the back of my leg every time I rose en pointe, and I noticed Eva slip for a heartbeat in the corps when she glanced up at the family box. It was the most minuscule of mistakes, but no doubt our mother would berate her for the rest of the night for it. I gave her a reassuring smile when my back was turned to the audience, but it didn’t lessen the pink flooding her cheeks beneath layers of stage makeup.
The music shifted into my variation, and I breathed deeply, lifting my arm in gesture to the only mother who mattered in this moment—the one onstage—and then to my would-be lover, Albrecht.
And then I danced.
I rose into the first arabesque en pointe, and pain exploded in my right ankle. Shit. My smile never slipped as I gritted my teeth.
The hurt was momentary, but that arabesque had been flawless, and that was all that mattered. As I moved across the floor, the ache lessened until I repeated the arabesque. Then it flared like a flame doused in lighter fluid. Again and again it rose and ebbed, higher and more painful as the variation continued, each movement testing the limits of my smile, my pain tolerance.
Anne was right. I had an understudy. But I wasn’t just dancing for myself. Tonight, I danced for Lina. I danced for Mom.
Just tonight, I promised my Achilles. I could rest tomorrow, turn the role over to my understudy for the next performance if it would get me through tonight. I couldn’t falter, not in front of her.
After a series of turns, my smile slipped into a grimace, and Eva’s eyes widened slightly from where she sat with the other peasant girls. I ripped my gaze from hers and turned my attention back to the audience, moving into a series of hops on my left foot diagonally across the stage, giving my right ankle enough of a reprieve for the pain to recede to a grating, nauseating, but manageable level.
I just had to make it through the piqué turns.
The music shifted, and I headed into the series of eighteen turns that would circumnavigate the stage.
Anything is doable for five minutes. His voice slipped through my mind, uninvited.
This was only fifteen seconds. I could do it.
Faces blurred as I spun en pointe, and I whipped my head to my chosen spotting points to keep balance, as flames of pain licked up my leg, burning through me in an agony so acute that I bit into my lip . . . and kept going. I reached stage left on turn eleven, glancing to the empty chair in the back row, the only place in the theater that anchored me.
Twelve. My arms faltered and my breath caught as I spotted the man occupying that seat. Impossible. Only one name could retrieve those tickets, and he hadn’t done so in ten years.
Thirteen. My head whipped around with the turn. The seat was vacant. Pain must have addled my brain.
Fourteen. Or was that a glimpse of sandy-brown hair, wind mussed and sun kissed?
Fifteen. The fire rose from my ankle, up through my chest at the memory of sea green eyes and the dimple in his left cheek when he smiled. Was he here?
Sixteen. That chair was empty. It had been for a decade, and it would be for as long as I made the Company hold it so, just like the cavernous pit in my chest where my heart had been, since the night the glass shattered, steel crumpled, and my ankle—Focus!
Seventeen. I became pain itself. My ankle screamed as I moved into the last two turns, straining the tendon beyond its limits.
In the silence between the last staccato beats from the orchestra, I heard it, like the snap of fingers underwater.
I fell to my right knee, the last position of the variation, and extended my arm to my onstage mother.
I did it, Lina. I did it.
Rousing applause sounded from the audience as I tried to stand, but gravity yanked me forward. My palms smacked into the polished surface of the stage, and I heard Eva gasp somewhere to my right.
It took a heartbeat, then another, to understand.
My foot.
It wasn’t responding, almost like it belonged on someone else’s body.
A nuclear blast of bone-rattling anguish washed through me, pushing into my veins like acid, burning away my very being, until it erupted from my mouth in a scream that silenced everyone in the theater.